Algorithms of Resistance

VR (The Swedish Research Council) has approved funding for the DIGSUM project Algorithms of Resistance: Analysing and harnessing anti-racist activism in the age of datafication, which will run between 2020 and 2022.

The project will analyse anti-racist campaigns online, with a particular focus on the role of datafication, automation, and algorithmic agency. While previous research has focused on racism being inscribed into "oppressive" algorithms, this project will study acts of anti-racist resistance that are governed and enabled by similar forms of hybrid (human/machine) agency.

The project will use online ethnography, activist interviews, and data science methods to be able to both grasp the subtler and emergent strategies surrounding digital anti-racism, and to assess its impacts and mechanisms at a more large-scale level of the networked society.

This research is important in order to avoid technological determinism, i.e. assuming that digital platforms and algorithms are inherently oppressive. These same platforms and logics can also be deployed in order to fight oppression. This is because the same technology can have quite different results when introduced into different contexts and under different circumstances.

The project PI, Professor Simon Lindgren, will work alongside Dr Sam Merrill, and collaborators Raazesh Sainudiin and Mattias Gardell from Uppsala University.