Short Abstract

This panel interrogates how people, in the African context, live, feel, and bridge division across digital infrastructures and offline worlds, tracing how technologies of connection become both tools of fracture and possibilities for repair.

Long Abstract

Across Africa, media technologies, algorithmic logics, and AI are reshaping socio-political belonging and moral discourse. They amplify some voices while muting others, transforming digital participation into acts of alignment, withdrawal, and contestation. Yet polarisation exceeds the digital: it is entangled with material histories of inequality, kinship, religion, and language that long predate social media but are now refracted through it. Anthropological scholarship invites us to see these dynamics through infrastructures, the material, moral, and affective systems that underpin connection and exclusion (Larkin, 2013; Simone, 2004). Digital infrastructures in the Africa context are not neutral; they are moral technologies (Mazzarella, 2017) that inherit colonial architectures of displacement visibility and control even as they promise new forms of togetherness. In this panel, we attempt to understand contestations where media, politics, and morality intersect, ranging for instance, the media publics of electoral politics in Kenya and Nigeria to faith-based broadcasting in post-Boko Haram Nigeria and even beyond. Further, we seek to answer questions such as: How do infrastructures of rumour, humour, prayer, or silence traverse digital and physical spaces, producing intimacy, mistrust, or resistance? What new political and moral subjectivities emerge when individuals inhabit parallel media worlds shaped by misinformation, prophetic vision, or activist hope? How do African digital infrastructures re-inscribe or subvert colonial and religious hierarchies of voice and power? Can AI-driven governance reproduce ethnic and class boundaries even as it claims neutrality, among others? By interrogating how African publics forge relational ethics across fractured networks, this panel asks what it means to bridge polarization when both connection and division are technologically and historically co-produced.

This Panel has 4 pending paper proposals.
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