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Contribution short abstract:

With reference to Shi‘i Muslim digital collectives in Pakistan, this paper draws attention to moral basis that once dominated the issue of the commons. Do the digital commons point to ways of sharing resources that are governed by coexisting and often conflicting ethical outlooks?

Contribution long abstract:

For Twelver Shiʿi Muslims in Pakistan, the theological imperative of “azadari” [mourning the injustices faced by the family and successors of the Prophet Muhammad] finds new form on video sharing websites and social media. Digital collectives known as “azadari networks” use existing platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok to publicize Shiʿi faith. When uploading images, videos, or sounds to these sites these collectives appeal in the comments box for viewers to grab, save, and re-upload the recordings. This acts as a form of informal cloud storage. It also acts with a logic shared by videos of miracles, recitations that disclose love for the personhood and virtues of the Shi‘i Imams, and malediction memes that disavow the enemies of Shi‘i faith.Tto share is to disclose key ethics imperatives.

The practice of commoning azadari, celebratory disclosure, and disavowal operates within the distinct holism of Shi‘i ethics, in which to propel information towards one end is also to propel it against forces of injustice. This stands as a reminder of the moral basis that once dominated the issue of the commons, particularly in relation to a biophysical resource whose use must strike a balance between altruism and self-interest. To what extent does the digital commons cohere or break from this focus on temperance that situates morality as a distributed element of the system to which it pertains? Do the digital commons point to ways of sharing resources that are governed by coexisting and often conflicting ethical outlooks?

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Contribution short abstract:

This study investigates artistic cultural practices of African students in China within both physical and digital spaces. The findings demonstrate how African students rejected taken-for-granted categorizations, and in facing adversary and friction they find various ways to overcome them.

Contribution long abstract:

African students are increasingly finding their way to China as a destination for higher education in the 21 century. This study employs in-depth interviews regarding African students’ study and living experiences in China, and utilizes ethnographic methodologies to investigate artistic cultural practices of African students in China within both physical and digital spaces. The findings demonstrate how African students rejected taken-for-granted categorizations, and in facing adversary and friction they find various ways to overcome them. In particular, they constructed a hybrid identities system with the dynamic balance and tension between cosmopolitan international student status and Pan-African identity including African diasporas. Their hybrid identities are developed, strengthened and performed through both physical and digital interaction of daily life, social activities and their expression of material cultures. Along with physical encounters online platforms are set up to discuss shared problems. Through embodied art and cultural practices including food choices, hair styling, paintings, fashion design, music, dancing and stand-up comedy, serve both as individual expression but they also “speak out” about the incompatibility and suffering of African students resisting inequality, racism and discrimination. In sum, these practices reflect transcultural engagement, the reinforcement of their Pan-African identity and cosmopolitan global student disposition, but more importantly demonstrate the potential of artistic empowerment as a creative way to resist falling into the margins

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Contribution short abstract:

This study examines the potential of meme platforms as catalysts for collective action among Indonesian tech workers. It highlights how humor and online spaces enable these workers to navigate the precarity and injustices they experience in their work environment, and to organize against them.

Contribution long abstract:

Workers at technological companies are portrayed as often disregarding political establishments. Barbrook and Cameron (1996) described the technological workers at Silicon Valley as a group that advocates technology as the problem solver and to reduce the influence of nation-states in private lives. While the industry landscape has changed, similar depictions persist from more recent academic works to popular cultures. This portrayal often includes the success story and job prestige of working at big technological companies. However, beyond such a narrative, technological workers are facing precarity due to the industry's volatile nature. In this regard, some of them utilize social media to negotiate the situation.

This article discusses the sociality that emerged around Ecommurz, the satirical Instagram meme account that specifically addressed the experience of Indonesian technology workers. The article argues that through shared memes and online discussions on the common workers' experience, Ecommurz enables them to navigate the constant uncertainties in their work environment. Moreover, the account's diverse digital platforms become spaces for information exchange and collective action, fostering a sense of community and solidarity among tech workers in Indonesia's absence of workers' organized movement. These practices serve as the basis of organizations fighting against perceived injustices such as unpaid salaries and exploitative labour practices within Indonesian technological companies.

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Contribution short abstract:

Through a comparative angle, this speaker provides insight into the ways multimodal affordances of social media enable varied, both collective and individual acts of resistance and self-help when healthcare systems malfunction.

Contribution long abstract:

Though years have passed since the glorious days of Twitter's 2009-2013 use in grassroots mobilization, social media continue to play a pivotal role in crises and conflicts globally. As a digital ethnographer, I have studied the way digital is used in situations of crisis and precarity in a variety of settings. In my main line of work, I have been focusing on resistance to healthcare malfunctioning, in Poland and the US, inquiring into the role the Internet plays in everyday self-help practices when the systemic support fails. Simultaneously, however, I have been employing my ethnographic sensibilities casually, and rather habitually, when thrown into the windmill of more abrupt medical and humanitarian crises as a volunteer or advocate. The 2021 medicine shortage crisis in Lebanon, where I resided temporarily, relied on informal, social-media-based supplied networks. The 2022 escalation of the Russian war on Ukraine, made many Poles, myself included, use messaging apps and social networking sites on a scale never seen before to organize resistance and aid. Last, but not least, I have closely followed the 2023-2024 Israel-Palestine conflict, where the multimodality of social media is used thoroughly to document, mediate and advocate. Building on qualitative as well as quantitative data, I will bring to the roundtable a comparative overview of the many modes of health-related commoning, that occur or are enabled by digital communication technologies in situations of crisis and emergency. I will also reflect on the ambivalent role of digital anthropologists in such contexts.

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Contribution short abstract:

Online medical crowdfunding has created a common space for stories of health, illness, disability. Marketised logics create normative pressures, but political consciousness is also evident in campaigner and donor practices. How might anthropologists interpret contradictory evidence on 'resistance'?

Contribution long abstract:

The growth of online medical crowdfunding has created a common space for public storytelling about health, illness, disability. But this is often in the context of severe personal crises within precarious neoliberal healthcare systems. My three-year study of crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand explored this. On Givealittle, the national crowdfunding platform, more than 70% of the health-related campaigns relate to acute illness or disease (e.g. cancer). But other types of needs are also represented, my study focusing on people fundraising for gender-affirming care; weight-loss procedures; and wearable devices for chronic illnesses. The competitive, marketised setting put pressure on campaigners to craft words and images that made their (non-normative) bodies legible and deserving to fragmented audiences…. often in ways that reinforced ableist, racist, cis-normative, and fatphobic normativities. At the same time - despite claims in existing US-based literature that crowdfunding encourages highly individualising forms of storytelling, and masks structural issues - my data showed political consciousness and activist work as widespread in the actions and artifacts of both campaigners and potential donors. Can crowdfunding platforms become sites for civic conversation, advocacy, or protest? What does resistance look like in this setting, and how might anthropologists identify it, when there is such contradictory evidence on the potential of these digital assemblages for ‘undoing’ the systemic inequalities that drive people to them? Considering my experiences of researching ethnographically outside the geographic locus of existing literature, I also ask how specific the answers are, to the national/sociocultural contexts in which globalised technologies are engaged.