Each year a small portion of AoIR conference fees go toward several Kelly Quinn Travel Scholarships for junior scholars to attend the conference. We want to recognize our scholarship recipients and share with you a little bit about them and their research interests.
Who are you?
I am Martina Di Tullio, archaeologist, anthropologist, and professor. I hold a degree in Archaeology and am currently a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. My research is being funded with a doctoral scholarship from CONICET. I am also a former research fellow at Weizenbaum Institut, Berlin. Currently I teach in popular education institutions.
Where are you from?
I am from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
What is your current area of study?
My area of study is digital anthropology. My doctoral research is an ethnography of the incorporation of the internet and digital media in the everyday lives of rural-Indigenous communities of the Jujuy Puna, in Northwestern Argentina. This area is part of the Lithium Triangle and is facing and resisting the advance of international mining extractivism. My purpose is to challenge hegemonic narratives on the transformation of societies through ICTs from a territorialized, decolonial perspective; and to highlight the political implications of the incorporation of digital technologies into everyday lives.
Describe the research you will present at AoIR2025.
At AoIR2025, I will be first attending the Doctoral Colloquium, where I will share an overview of my PhD research. Afterwards, at the Conference, I will be presenting a paper co-authored with Dr. Edgar Gómez-Cruz, which we titled “Territorializing Internet: WhatsApp use in Andean Argentina”. This work draws on my ethnographic fieldwork with two Quechua communities of the Jujuy Puna and focuses on the uses and incorporation of WhatsApp into their daily lives. We will be presenting these contexts, their histories, and worldviews in order to frame the local appropriation of WhatsApp in accordance with regional Andean ways of inhabiting and understanding the world. We will highlight how traditional kinship relations are extended, reproduced, and transformed by the many practices to which this app is integrated. We argue that only by understanding this process within its own historical context is it possible to identify the actual disruptions that digital technologies introduce into local lives. Our aim is to understand WhatsApp from the perspective of the territory—not merely through a relativist lens, but as a way to resist the coloniality of global discourses about the internet. We advocate for conducting internet research within local cultures, interrogating the logics of coloniality behind this use, while recognizing their possibilities for joy and liberation.
Have you presented at AoIR in the past? If so, what was your experience? If #AoIR2025 in Niterói is your first AoIR conference, what made you choose this conference? What do you expect from it?
This is my first time participating in AoIR, and is my first global conference. I chose to attend #AoIR2025 in Niterói because of its location in Latin America, so close to where I live. I am familiar with the reputation of the event and am looking forward to meeting and engaging in interesting conversations with participants from all over the world. I am certain this experience will broaden my understanding of the diverse approaches and topics within internet studies and will provide an ideal setting for fostering future collaborations. It will also be a significant opportunity to amplify awareness about the many complexities and injustices experienced by rural-Indigenous communities in Latin America in relation to digital development.
