AoIR2024 Keynote and Plenary Panel
Keynote
When: 30 October 2024, 17:30 UTC
Where: Sheffield City Hall, The event will be live streamed. Details to follow.
Dr. Seeta Peña Gangadharan, London School of Economics. Dr. Gangadharan is an associate professor in media and communications at LSE. Her work focuses on inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization, as well as questions of democracy, social justice, and technological governance. She co-leads two projects: Our Data Bodies, which examines the impact of data collection and data-driven technologies on U.S. marginalized communities, and Justice, Equity, and Technology, which studies data-driven technologies and infrastructures in European civil society.
Timeliness and technological refusal: Reflections on quantum-mania and industry’s power
From tech worker walkouts and increased union drives, to coordinated withdrawals by advertisers from platforms, to protests against Big Tech and tech infrastructure, people and institutions everywhere are expressing their discontent with the business of technology. To some, these actions serve as evidence that technological refusal is a practicable form of politicizing technology and technology governance, even if it doesn’t conspicuously reimagine or transform the institutions under critique. To others, these events represent “too little, too late,” arguing that they occur at a time when path dependencies have congealed, and industrial policies and industry power are already sunk into the foundations of social, economic, and political life.
These competing interpretations raise the question: when is technological refusal most timely? To answer this question, I explore timeliness through the lens of the quantum internet, a so-called “frontier” technology in its pre-commercial stage. I use insights from common sets of objections arising from social movements and other ad hoc efforts to ban, interrupt, or transform automated technologies to speculate: Who might push back on quantum internet? Why? How? And with what effect? In fact, timely refusal in the early stages of industrial development and innovation requires new, daunting kinds of engagement and forms of institutional support.
Plenary Panel
AoIR: THE ERAS TOUR
When: 31 October 2024
Where: The Wave Lecture Theatre 1
At #AoIR2024 in Sheffield, we will be celebrating AoIR’s 25th birthday. We are delighted to announce this year’s plenary panel that we are calling, Reflections: 25 Years of (Ao) Internet Research, also known as AoIR: The Eras Tour. We’ve invited seven AoIR members to each represent a five-year period in AoIR’s history, from its first conference in 2000, through to 2024 and beyond. Each panel member will deliver a short provocation, and we will then switch to a roundtable format, where panel members will answer questions from our Chair, before opening up to questions from audience members. The plenary panel will be followed by a drinks and finger food reception.
Happy 25th birthday, AoIR!
CHAIR | Helen Kennedy, Professor of Digital Society, University of Sheffield (she/her).
Helen Kennedy FBA FAcSS, University of Sheffield, she/her. My first AOIR was IR5, in Brighton, 20 years ago, I was on the Conference Committee for IR13 in Salford and I’ve also supported the doctoral colloquium. I’m interested in macro-level, normative questions about what kind of Internet / digital society we want and what we need to do to get there, questions that I think all of the plenary panel speakers are engaging with, in one way or another.
2000-2004 | Nancy Baym, Senior Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research (she/her) + Steve Jones, UIC Distinguished Professor of Communication, Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago (he/him).
Nancy: My research focuses on how people interpret new communication technologies and incorporate them into their lives with what consequences for themselves, societies, and technological development. I was a founding member of AoIR, organized the first conference in 2000, and served as the first Vice President and second President. I think of internet research circa 2000-2005 as characterized by a focus on language, identity, and community, all topics that remain crucially important as we consider the infusion of large language models and other forms of AI into the internet.
Steve: I suppose the question then was whether there was a scholarly space, for lack of a better term, for people who were studying internet and internet related things. What triggered AoIR was that I noticed people I knew from various disciplines all interested in what was happening with the internet and all unable to find much interest in it from their disciplinary colleagues. So I kind of put out a signal. Ever since I’ve wondered, is there a field? Should there be? Has internet research permeated so completely into existing disciplines as to make that moot?
2005-2009 | Susanna Paasonen, Professor of Media Studies, University of Turku (she/her). I am interested in the value of sexual sociability online, plus the different vulnerabilities and intimacies that emerge in datafied culture. My first AoIR was in 2000 and I’ve since been program chair for Milwaukee in 2009, served on the Exec 2015-17 and co-chaired the doctoral colloquium five times altogether. My assigned era saw the emergence of social media: this was no minor transformation, and to an extent one that we’re still trying to get our heads around.
2010-2014 | Limor Shifman, Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (she/her). I am currently studying how people from different cultures shape values through what they do on social media. My first AoIR conference, aptly titled “Let’s Play,” was in 2007 in Vancouver. It was formative for me in many ways. In a nutshell, I will frame the era between social networking sites and social media, zooming into the example of memes becoming “memes.”
2015-2019 | Ready for it? Raquel Recuero, Associate Professor in the Communication and Languages Department at the Universidade Federal de Pelotas/Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (she/her). Look what you made me do. My work focuses on the challenges social media platforms pose to public discourse, especially in Latin America. Don’t blame me! AoIR has been integral to my career with my first conference in Vancouver (2007), and I have also served as an Open Seat on the Executive Committee. Wildest dreams. The era of full platform API access began in 2015, but subsequent issues and the closure of these tools now raise concerns about the future of internet research.
2020-2024 | Crystal Abidin, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University (she/her). I broadly study influencers and social media pop culture in the Asia Pacific region and why everyday people love and hate them, but my research is also driven by what makes me happy and what makes me angry – how can we Spark More Joy and how can we fight The Bad Guys? I attended my first AoIR as a PhD student when it was held in my area of the world in Daegu (2014) with many thanks to an invitation to join a panel by Julian Hopkins, I served on the Exec for 4 years (2017–2021), and hope I don’t retire until after I attend the 50th anniversary conference of AoIR <3. 2020–2024 was the era of What Is Even Happening: Pandemic, Infodemic, Grief; Platforms, Deplatforms, Grief; Creators, Content, Grief; War, Conflict, Grief; Automation, AI, Grief.
Futures | Catherine Knight Steele, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland College Park, Director of the Black Communication and Technology Lab. My work at the moment considers the relationship between Black Joy and digitality, including work on speculation, automation, and manifestations of pleasure and pain online. I attended my first AoIR conference in 2010 as a graduate student studying the blogosphere and Black feminism. Watching conversations about race at AoIR move from somewhat passive apathy to more direct engagement on a global scale, the future of the organization and of internet research more broadly is dependant upon our willingness and insistence upon centering these discussions in our work and bringing this critical eye into more public dialogues about our digital futures.
