Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures

This book offers a much needed holistic and interdisciplinary perspective on digital politics. Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin stage an engaging conversation between leading and emerging scholars, who examine the history, political economy, and materiality of digital politics. Crucially, they do so from different geo-political, disciplinary, and conceptual angles, which generates vital new insights. And, as icing on the cake, the book offers two experimental research toolkits to explore the histories and social-technical imaginaries of digital politics. In sum, Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures is a creative and thought-provoking contribution.

-- Thomas Poell, Professor of Data, Cultural & Institutions, University of Amsterdam

Combining theoretical reflections and empirical diversity, this collection gathers interdisciplinary conversations about how the digital and the political are reconfiguring one another with implications for social movements, global warfare, infrastructural governance, citizen rights, and the future of archives.

Entangling the socio-cultural and the environmental with the digital, leading scholars and dynamic researchers open up the field of digital politics to the political economy of disinformation, critiques of development discourses and digital divides, and materialities of dirty data. The volume presents insights curated inexperimental multi-dimensional and multi-authored forms—interviews, maps, toolkits, and essays—which will inspire researchers and teachers of social media and digital technologies, and set a new benchmark for future collaborative knowledge production.

This volume not only offers a powerful argument for historicising digital research but also provides innovative methodologies and alternative imaginaries to understand digital histories and futures.

-- Rahul Mukherjee, Associate Professor of Television and New Media, University of Pennsylvania and author of Radiant Infrastruct