About Us
Despite being long-standing, self-professed digital junkies as well as scholars of digital and media technologies, few years ago we both came to a point where we had to re-think the ways in which the digital was being naturalised and celebrated in our working and personal lives. We were not alone. We noticed a quickly growing number of news articles, editorials, magazines, blogs, business and organisational sites, and project websites, all opposing the overwhelming presence of digital technologies and communication platforms in various areas of our lives.
Dr. Adi Kuntsman
My research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of media and cultural studies, sociology, politics and digital cultures. In the last decade and a half I have studied and written about queer and migrant on-line communities, regional Internet cultures in the Middle East and Eastern and Central Europe, practices and aesthetics of cyberhate, conflict and memory in digital domains, digital emotions, and more recently, social media militarism and selfie citizenship. In all my work, I am both fascinated and troubled by the ways newly emerging communication technologies are incorporated into existing regimes of violence, control and domination, while at the same time transforming them through multiple, and at times unexpected, usages. Most recently, I turned to examine these issues in relation to digital refusal and the shrinking space of opting out of digital sociality and dataised governance.
Dr. Esperanza Miyake
I am an interdisciplinary scholar specialising in critical analyses of gender, race/queerness and technology both as mediated representations and as relating to embodied digital practices in everyday life. Looking at various international contexts, both my research and reseach-led teaching activities span across a broad range of areas in media and cultural studies (e.g. film, music, television, gaming, anime/manga, advertising, social networking, celebrity/fan studies). I have published on a wide range of subjects within media, popular, digital and cultural studies. Currently, my main research focuses on Japanese identity and digital-visual cultures. My collaborative research looks at the politics of digital refusal. I am passionate about teaching/learning and research as ways to engage critically with theory, practice, ourselves and our increasingly mobile, digitised and mediated world.
