DIGSUM on the Dam

Last week, 25th and 26th October 2016, Simon Lindgren and Sam Merrill of DIGSUM’s digital sociology cluster attended a workshop at the University of Amsterdam dedicated to exploring the issue of materiality in the context of social movements’ use of digital media.

The workshop, which was entitled Materiality, Publicness and Digital Media was the second of three workshops that Sam has organised in partnership with Anastasia Kavada of the University of Westminster and Thomas Poell of the University of Amsterdam as part of his post-doctoral project and within DIGSUM’s STINT funded collaboration with the University of Westminster. The first workshop took place in London in June 2016 and focussed on questions of temporality and memory and the third, which will address the theme of spatiality, will take place in Nottingham in April 2017.

Attended by around 27 scholars from Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Italy and USA the Amsterdam event teased out some of the issues surrounding the digital traces and material extensions and consequences of contemporary protest. Simon and Sam contributed to a session dedicated to methods and approaches with papers respectively entitled Tracing Digital Referents to Materiality in Contemporary Protests: A Methodological Exploration and The Hybrid Materialities of Activist Memories: Tracing the Transductive Mobilisation of a Historical Photograph. As with the earlier workshop there are plans to publish proceedings as a special issue peer-review journal.