Making Sense of the Digital Society

We live in an increasingly datafied society. Smartphones, social media platforms, applications used for contact tracing or digital vaccination certificates are becoming ever more dominant in our public and private spaces. These data practices and infrastructures mediate relationships and exchanges, generate data that the tech industry exploits for profit and enable real-time population monitoring and effective power structures.

Resistance is possible, even desirable, and already practised by many. How can we organise it individually and collectively in the datafied society? Stefania Milan will explore possibilities to achieve this, also by drawing from concrete examples from Western countries and the Global South. She also addresses the margins of the datafied society, where human rights are further jeopardised and inequality is augmented by biometric surveillance.

Stefania Milan is Professor of Critical Data Studies at University of Amsterdam, and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University. Her work explores the interplay between digital technology and data, political participation and governance, with focus on infrastructure and agency. Among others, Stefania Milan is the author of Social Movements and Their Technologies: Wiring Social Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013/2016) and co-editor of COVID-19 from the Margins. Pandemic Invisibilities, Policies and Resistance in the Datafied Society (Institute of Network Cultures, 2021). Currently, she is working on a book on data activism.