DIGITAL & SOCIAL MEDIA: CULTURE, IDENTITY, AND INCLUSION MINITRACK
Issues related to digital and social media are taking center stage today whether in politics or policy, or in private, not-for-profit or public forums, implicitly and explicitly with an array of complex challenges related to culture, identity and inclusion. As the world seeks to move past the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, digital inequalities persist and new technologies risk creating new types of divides.
Recognizing intersection of technology, culture, and identity, this minitrack presents innovative research across a wide range of methods and subjects. Exploring how social media technologies become interconnected with and embedded in existing socio-cultural contexts is essential to assess how these platforms affect key power dynamics in society. This minitrack sets the scene for analyzing better how digital and social media can foster – or hinder – diversity and inclusion in multiple settings, especially in a world coping with renewed calls for social justice, peace, and a post-pandemic period, increasingly indicating long-term impacts. Technology-facilitated social media thus present opportunities for new frontiers of research as they interact with cultures, identities, and diversity. In sum, this minitrack highlights multi-disciplinary and multi-method research centered on the three I’s of: internet; identity; and inclusion.
This minitrack welcomes research on the intersection of digital media, different inequalities, and justice, including but not limited to work that focuses on race, culture, identity, and disability, recognizing that these often intersect with one another. Emerging technologies themselves connect with existing platforms and provide opportunities for incipient research on, for example, augmented reality, social media, and inclusion or, for another example, artificial intelligence, mobile apps, social media, and exclusion.
We look forward to your submission,
Nanette Levinson, Derrick Cogburn, & Filippo Trevisan, Mini-track Chairs
Blog de Octavio Islas 