New Ways, New Practices: Anthropology, Identities and the Digital World

Abstract (English)

Digital technologies both shape and are shaped by the contemporary world. The increasing relevance of the digital sphere and online technologies became particularly evident in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, corporate interests influence the dynamics of platforms and the social practices that emerge from them; on the other hand, the everyday use of these technologies fosters new forms of agency, contributes to the construction of complex identity networks, and reconfigures social relations.
This panel aims to explore the intersections between identity, memory, digital platforms, and their uses, with a focus on the multiple social, political, and subjective implications of emerging technologies. Recognizing a geopolitics of knowledge based on epistemic inequality between the Global North and South, we seek approaches that methodologically reflect on the methods for studying digital culture and aim to make a contribution from the Global South to this field of study.
We welcome ethnographic research, both completed and ongoing, that explores topics including but not limited to: a) Experiences in digital environments; b) Ethical and political implications of online networks; c) processes of identity construction and the performativity of gender and sexuality in digital spaces; d) consumption practices and market dynamics in digital contexts; e) social markers of difference in relation to access to and use of technologies; f) collective narratives of social movements or online communities; g) transformations of intimacy through digital relational technologies; h) digital activism; i) user agency in response to algorithmic barriers; j) mediated memory and narrative contestation in digital spaces; k) methodological approaches and challenges in conducting ethnographic fieldwork in online social contexts, including hybrid methodologies that combine offline and online data.
By bringing together research on these phenomena, this panel aims to contribute to anthropological debates on the transformation of social life in the digital age, and to offer critical reflections on participation, resistance, and meaning-making in digital environments.