The paper examines how technologies intended for ensuring women’s safety affect freedom of movement and reproduce masculine domination over space. Since times immemorial, humans have had an innate desire to explore and discover new spaces. However, for women, this desire has often been curtailed, due to the fear of being harassed or assaulted. Women tend to live by the ‘rape clock’; their daily routines, clothes, travel schedules and companions are constantly adjusted according to the location they have to visit. The recent proliferation of safety apps seek to offer a more secure way to travel through neighbourhoods. Inbuilt with safety audits, these apps prescribe the routes that women can take to travel to their destinations. The apps allow users to evaluate their current location in terms of seemingly objective parameters like security, openness, crowd density, lighting and transportation. In addition, the users can proactively determine the ‘safety score’ of the locality depending on how they feel about it and can also share its photos to justify the score. However, the paper argues, safety apps tend to circumscribe women’s desire to loiter. By recommending routes to travel safely and by constantly prescribing the parameters that women need to keep in mind while venturing out, these apps narrow down the spaces women can access. It enhances the fear of being assaulted and curtails the pleasure of loitering. Secondly, the apps neglect the fact that conceptions of safety vary according to one’s social location. Most safety apps begin with the notion that their users comprise of an abstract, universal category of women. But, individuals hailing from different backgrounds, including class, caste, education, region and religion experience the world differently. What counts as a safe neighbourhood for one may be considered unsafe by another. The subjective evaluations in safety apps tend to present a lopsided notion of safety which may tilt the scales against localities frequented by people hailing from minority communities. This may have other cascading effects such as overpolicing, non-access to goods and financial services, etc. In addition, these apps tend to shift the onus of safety onto the woman. Moreover, the GPS tracking feature of apps is undergirded in the misogynistic logic that women’s movements are to be controlled. The paper therefore critically analyses intriguing questions — How do safety apps determine what constitutes a safe neighbourhood for women? To what extent do these apps encourage freedom of movement for women? How can safety apps be restructured to accommodate women’s desire to loiter?

Research on trust and news tends to focus on professional news (agents, organizations, institutions), ignores the content of news, and takes place during relatively settled times. This article seeks to remedy these gaps by examining how citizens used blogs to make and share news during a natural disaster and its aftermath. It draws on a case study of blogging in the wake of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and examines the perspective of blog users to understand how they built trust in each other and in their shared realities of the recovery and rebuilding periods. It draws on cultural sociology to illustrate how civil and anticivil cultural codes, embodied in culturally specific referents, were drawn upon to construct news messages and messengers, and by extension, trust in each other and a grounded ontological understanding of reality. It argues that the cultural affordances of the blog platform were helpful in users’ ability to build both forms of trust. It concludes with implications for emerging crises of climate change, global pandemics and the mass migration these produce.

From higher education to workplaces, institutions are increasingly adopting data-driven and semiautomated technologies to facilitate, manage, and arbitrate sexual affairs. These largely US-based systems, which I term “technologies of sexual governance,” are encoded with and reify particular ideologies about sexual (mis)conduct, and thus call for a critical feminist inquiry about their cultural, political, and moral implications for advancing a feminist sexual politics. Drawing from Halley et al.’s “governance feminism” framework, this article makes the case that a critical feminist inquiry into technologies of sexual governance must take into account the co-constitutive nature of feminist sexual politics and technology. Specifically, I argue that critical inquiries must begin by interrogating which feminist ideologies about sex and power gain purchase with and through particular computational logics and form. To demonstrate this approach, I offer two ways of reading feminist scholarly and popular responses to “antirape technologies” that capture both readings’ shortcomings, and I propose a third approach that captures the cultural work that particular feminist ideologies and technologies mutually perform. This article concludes by demonstrating how the third approach can advance a feminist analysis of workplace misconduct management softwares.

What has been referred to as the crisis of trust in social institutions has deep connections with communications, whether it be declining trust in news media and journalism, debates about the power of digital platforms and trust in online environments, questions surrounding media effects, the rise of political populism, or how trust or mistrust shapes interpersonal and intergroup communication. At the same time, trust in communications research has something of a “hidden history” when compared to disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, political science, and economics. Through a systematic literature review of uses of the concept of trust in six journals published by the International Communication Association— Journal of Communication ; Communication Theory ; Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication ; Human Communication Research ; Communication, Culture & Critique ; and Annals of the International Communication Association (formerly Communication Yearbook )—this article undertakes a chronological and thematic analysis of how research into trust has evolved among communication researchers from the 1950s to 2020. It concludes with a discussion of the distinctive contributions of communications as a scholarly field to trust studies more broadly.

As our contemporary problems of climate change, pandemics, tech reform, and worldwide wealth inequality demand global solidarities, cooperation, and collective and empathetic imagination, we need approaches that can carve critical pathways for an inclusive technological future. Much as technology is created to transcend borders and cultures, this essay proposes that cross-cultural feminism can do the same. This essay pioneers a framework that enables us to strive for global solidarities while decolonizing the feminist “common sense” that is institutionalized into how technologies are shaped. We advocate for an approach grounded in the materiality (embodiments), mobility (social movements), and modality (codes and modes of design). We believe this three-pronged lens can inform practice and help set the tenor for how to build cross-cultural feminist technologies for an inclusive future.

Value-sensitive design is an approach that seeks to explicitly center the values of design stakeholders. In doing so, the method provides a rich analytical backdrop in which to explore how participants make sense of values and embody values in their designs. In this study, I explore the broad question of how a value-sensitive design approach can be used to surface, address, and possibly reconcile the similar and different culturally informed ways we make sense of being feminist fathers. Two groups of self-proclaimed feminist fathers, white non-Latinx and nonwhite Latinx, engaged in a value-sensitive design approach to designing technology to support their conceptualizations of feminist fatherhood. Four themes around differences between the groups and the kinds of reflections the participants engaged in are summarized. Based on our findings, I contribute suggestions for adapting value-sensitive design approaches to scaffold certain kinds of reflection around authenticity and interpretation in ways that are more grounded in themes of nondominance.

This article discusses the cultural conceptions of trust underpinning the experimentation of blockchain startup applications beyond the financial sector. Based on qualitative research undertaken in the context of the so-called “Blockchain 2.0” scene, we show how a peculiar conception of trust, which blends the libertarian views of blockchain inventors with the neoliberal culture of competition and meritocracy that is typical of the startup world, underpins these implementations. As a result, we argue that “Blockchain 2.0” entrepreneurs ultimately fail to recognize the eminently social nature of the trust-building process. They emerge from our observation as unable to comprehend the extent to which the implementation of blockchain in a societal (i.e., not purely financial) context cannot do away with considerations about what kind of “social” the technology intervenes within, and find difficult to effectively conceive of how this technology embeds in existing social relations and power structures.

This article proposes a feminist geopolitics of technology framework that analyzes the connections between global politics and techno-empires through the lens of feminist scholarship. This framework has three dimensions: (1) grounding in place, (2) attention to everyday surviving and thriving, and (3) community. We draw on two long-term, community-oriented ethnographic research engagements in Cambodia and Ghana to illustrate how this approach might be used. This framework provides a resource for scholars to make sense of the contrasts between dominant narratives and lived experiences, particularly encouraging more sensitive and generative approaches to analyzing the conditions and dimensions of a shifting geopolitics of technology. In writing stories of caring, thriving, and grounded alternatives, we hope to foster and support initiatives that encourage personal agency and living the full human experience amid inequality and structural violence.

This article tackles the multiple facets of visibility, ranging from invisibility, a lack of recognition in society, to hypervisibility, when bodies are hyperexposed for commodification or criminalization purposes. We analyze the specific implications of achieving media visibility for one Black Brazilian woman in politics: Renata Souza, a Rio de Janeiro state legislator. Souza’s campaign and mandate have drawn inspiration from the legacy of Marielle Franco, a Black lesbian favela-born city councillor and human rights advocate who was murdered in March 2018. Our theoretical framework consists of three strands of research: visibility studies, intersectional feminism, and intersectional work on technologies and surveillance. We draw from autoethnographic approaches with the use of field notes, audio diaries, and interviews with members of Souza’s staff. We complement these with digital ethnographic observations of Souza’s and her allies’ social media profiles. We ask: If visibility is a goal for groups that are marginalized and silenced, what happens when they achieve it? When does visibility help to protect Black women? And when does visibility bring even greater vulnerability? In this article, we propose and define the concept of “link visibility” as a process led by women of color who need a high degree of social media publicness but are affected disproportionately by visibility-induced high levels of vulnerability. We argue that link visibility represents an intersectional feminist approach as well as a tool for solidarity building, and that both—intersectionality and link visibility—help bind oppressed realities in Brazil and elsewhere. Finally, we interrogate what can be done to protect women of color online, stopping the violence, threats, and fear.

What do algorithmic systems and viral pandemics have in common? They both expose and amplify structural social inequalities. They both appear neutral (think about the frequent use of the phrase ‘the virus doesn’t discriminate’), but they both result in outcomes that are worse for those with less power and privilege.

One of the most intriguing aspects of our augmented futures is how we will experience new social paradigms attached to bodily representation and identification. Digital and virtual space provide infinite possibilities for developing alternative manifestations and tools to express personal and social selves, but how we imagine these opportunities versus what we actually create are often two different things. There are two roadblocks to achieving such a transcendental experience. The first relates to existing gender-role cultures and biases, while the second is whether we will be able to let go of the intrepid role the body plays as an identity-defining-space.

Seventy-five percent of the world’s online population is from the global South, and nearly half is projected to be women. Yet public knowledge on the internet - exemplified by Wikipedia - is primarily constructed by (white) men from western Europe and North America. One in ten Wikipedia editors are estimated to self-identify as female. In other words, the internet of the majority is produced by the minority. But Wikipedia is only one example of the deeply skewed experience of the internet: from the design and architecture of the internet, to the production and reproduction of knowledge on the internet, this globalised “public sphere” not only reflects the structural and representative inequalities of our world, it can, in many ways, amplify and deepen them. Still, the internet’s socio-technical nature can also engender potentially emancipatory processes in which communities on the “margins” of both the physical and virtual worlds can produce and curate their own knowledge online. Whose Knowledge? is a global, multilingual campaign that aims to make public knowledge and the online experience less white, male, straight, and global North in origin. Using Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s exhortation to decolonize our methodologies, the Whose Knowledge? campaign has supported marginalised communities like Dalits from India and the diaspora, queer activists from Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Kumeyaay Native American Nation, to begin centering their knowledge online. The authors are feminist scholars, organizers, and technologists, and we describe the practices of decolonizing ourselves in this effort, in particular our approach to embedding feminist and anti-colonial values as we decolonize design, process, and metrics. We offer these possibilities and provocations for thinking further about a future feminist decolonized internet(s).

Growing political distrust in digital platforms has galvanized policy debates about how to best address issues associated with their market power and ad-run business models—including the proliferation of misinformation, privacy threats, and electoral interference. The range of proposed solutions includes growing calls for public-private policy regimes, such as co-regulation. Such proposals envision a role for digital platforms in addressing platform-related problems, whose contours need to be defined. In this article, we examine how platform companies attempt to influence these debates and define this role, focusing on the biggest U.S. digital platform companies: Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. We conduct a content analysis of a sample of 2019 public policy blogs, statements, and testimonies by key personnel at these companies to gain insight into (a) the policy issues they engage, (b) the policy preferences they communicate, and (c) what these communications reveal about their regulatory philosophies and visions of platform governance. The findings shed light on the politics underlying the debates over platform governance and provide insight into what co-regulatory approaches might look like in practice. We call these policy paradigms “frictionless regulation”: light and narrow regulatory oversight confined to baseline standard-setting, receptive to the private sector’s ongoing feedback, and prioritizing fast responsiveness to market needs over the slow and deliberative responsiveness to the public that is typical of democratic governance.

Personal and intimate consequences of cultural globalization have received little critical attention in comparison to scholarship on politics, finance, or the environment. Taking digital technology practices of young adult expatriates as an entry point to understand the emotional and affective consequences of transnational mobility, in this article we research the interrelated cultural politics of emotion, migration, and digitization of middle-class mobilities. Presenting a case study of digital experiences of young adult expatriates (aged fifteen to twenty-five years) living in the Netherlands, we seek to better understand how emotions and affects of middle-class transnational mobility are mediated through digital technologies. Our empirical argument draws from thirty-one semistructured, face-to-face in-depth interviews with young adult expatriates and smartphone photo-elicitation exercises. We develop the notion of transnational digital intimacy practices to address how transnational mobile subjects negotiate emotional precarity through selective smartphone and social media practices. Finally, we call into question the notion of “expatriates” as supposed elite mobiles with global privilege. This article is part of the Global Perspectives , Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

In the wake of globalization discourses and the so-called “spatial turn,” space and place have become central concepts in the social sciences and humanities and in migration studies in particular. Increasingly, and despite the widespread transformations in the ways we move and communicate today, place-making has gained important attention as a practice among diaspora groups, forced migrants, and refugees. To further advance insights in this field of research, the present study investigates the role of communication technologies in the place-making practices of the Yanacona indigenous community, which has been internally displaced in Colombia. In-depth interview data revealed that, for the Yanacona community, place-making is a collective process driven by cultural values of cooperation, collaboration, and solidarity. Building networks of support, protecting the community from disappearing, and restoring the collective identity are three practices that the Yanacona have adapted to make a place in the city of Bogotá. In this process, smartphones and social media are particularly relevant for many of the interviewees, who expressed both advantages and negative implications of these technologies for their community. Results also revealed how indigenous communities take on processes of social construction of technology, challenging the archaism discourse that hinders these communities, especially in the Global South. This study recognizes the relevance of paying attention to emergent indigenous media practices and networks in Colombia, arguing that they can be crucial for a community’s cultural survival after forced migration. This article is part of the Global Perspectives , Media and Communication special collection on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

Since the late 1980s, the population of Filipinas married to Japanese men has increased in Kyoto. Numerous women had initially entered Japan as entertainers, later found partners, and built families in the city. The growing numbers of resident Filipinas led to the organization of the local Pag-asa Filipino community. Considering migrants as city-makers, we explore how Filipina residents together with residents springing off earlier cohorts of migrants have contributed to the emergence of new socialities, among others by providing the (infra)structure for newly arriving migrants to access substantial citizenship rights and to foster ties with local residents. We look at these encounters, ties, and relationships forming on the premises of the Kyoto City Multicultural Exchange Networking Salon in terms of socialities as this allows us to avoid reifying the cultural essentialism that undergirds both Japanese nationalism and multiculturalism, while acknowledging the social and institutional constraints within which these socialities emerge and are made sense of. Empirically drawing upon data collected among the Kyoto Filipino community, we use the conceptual lens of hosting to capture how multiculturalism is made in Kyoto City, while challenging dichotomous conceptions of the host versus the migrant.

This introduction contextualizes thirteen papers included in the Global Perspectives Media and Communication special collection examining the interrelationships between media, migration, and nationalism. This collaborative project was initiated during the Media, Migration and the Rise of Nationalism seminar held in Tokyo in 2018. The seminar was organized around the themes of cosmopolitanism, migration control, transnationalism, and contact zones. This selection covers and brings together long-standing and unresolved debates, which will allow media and migration researchers to engage in a multiperspectival reconsideration of how politics, mobility, and mediation intersect and co-shape each other. In this article, we first position ourselves in relevant debates by charting implications and shared characteristics underlying the recent economic crisis, climate crisis, refugee crisis, and COVID-19 crisis. Section 1 of the article focuses on cosmopolitanism. This thorny scholarly debate is captured by the artist Takashi Tanihata in the works A Letter That Isn’t Read I and II . As we discuss, the artworks depict an endless loop of (mis)communicating goats, which represent the possibilities and implications of mediated solidarity and polarization. The special collection features three articles that further nuance the heated debates on the politics of representation and mediation in relation to cosmopolitanism. Section 2 of this article is thematized with a painting by the artist XX titled The Scents on the Borders , which depicts perfume bottles and their scents encountering each other. The work, as we argue, refers to the complex, evolving relationships between border-crossing subjects and technologies of migration management and control. A latest development shows how tech-driven surveillance experiments tap into sensing technologies including those related to the sense of smell to secure borders. The section consists of four articles that demonstrate how the politics of material and symbolic bordering proliferates outside and inside nation-state boundaries. Section 3 takes inspiration from an artwork titled The Vision (Reportage) , by Motoi Hirata, which features a violet sea snail as a motif to represent migrants and diaspora groups in terms of transnational connectivity. The section includes three articles that analyze the workings and lived experiences of connectivity and transnationalism across nation-state borders. In section 4 of this article, we take cues from Satsuki Hinokimoto’s abstract painting The Spread and link its deployment of isolated and interacting colored concentric circles to the evocative scholarly concept of the cultural contact zone. This section of the issue consists of three articles that focus on migrant encounters with difference and the politics of integration in various urban settings across the world. Finally, in our conclusion, we advocate for media and migration researchers to take up the critical concept of intersectionality to better acknowledge the internal heterogeneity of migrant communities alongside the similarities and differences among migrant communities in tandem with various interacting axes of agential identification and structural forms of oppression.

Respect for transgender rights broadly and recognition of nonbinary gender specifically have given rise to global legislative and policy-level reforms that purport to rectify discrimination faced by transgender and gender-diverse populations when traveling or migrating. In several countries, for example, the binary options “male” and “female” have been extended to include other possibilities in legal and travel documents, such as X, third gender, indeterminate, and unspecified. Drawing on qualitative data gathered from an online survey conducted over a period of one year, this article homes in on this phenomenon, asking how existing and expanding options for gender in passports could impact transgender and gender-diverse people’s ability to cross international borders. The article’s findings highlight how current border-security structures frequently pose a challenge for those not conforming to gender norms. Our analysis reveals an intricate set of negotiations and tensions, and elucidates the complex dynamics between macro-level practices of power and micro-level articulations of resistance that might interrupt the normative functions of law. This article also shows how existing and alternative options can be taken up in transformative ways that can be used to subvert otherwise restrictive policies. This article is part of the special issue “Media, Migration, and Nationalism” of the journal Global Perspectives , Media and Communication, guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

This article is part of the Global Perspectives , Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata. In line with the focus of this issue, we are interested in the ways in which open data is progressively used to construct indicators of the state’s performance in the form of race-ethnic categories. These data initiatives are typical for the ongoing quantification and datafication of society. Through APIs (application programming interfaces), both governmental bodies and third parties are given direct access to data, as well as the ways in which these data are structured. This infrastructure affords the appropriation of statistics concerning the national origins of Dutch citizens for new purposes. Through this data, race-ethnic categories are repurposed to measure the living conditions in the Netherlands, effectively keeping people with non-Dutch roots in the migrant category for up to three generations. To show how this process unfolds in the Netherlands, we investigate two web applications, the Allochtonenmeter and the Leefbaarometer, that make use of race-ethnically constructed data. We will argue that for a more complete understanding of the processes at play in the Dutch “data assemblage,” we need to enrich critical data studies with a postcolonial perspective. In this article, we consider race to be a verb rather than a noun, signifying a process or an action, as this takes away the necessity to communicate a nonessentialist perspective on what is raced, since the object of racing can be different in each new location, situation, and technical context. Our focus is therefore on how human characteristics such as nationality, ethnicity, or class are raced through data-driven processes and in relation to a particular history and culture in the Dutch context. In this light, we find that datafied systems do not merely report on particular groups in society but rather actively produce hierarchical distinctions between these groups.