Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist Imaginaries and the Politics of Digital Technologies

Activists use digital technologies to communicate, coordinate, and organize for social change. But these big corporate digital platforms are also used to spread disinformation, racism, and abuse. Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge investigates the relationship between activism and technology, focusing on how activists think and talk about technology’s role in social change and what this tells us about the politics of digital technologies.

Researching movements in Italy, Hungary, and the United States, Elisabetta Ferrari examines how leftist activists construct technological imaginaries that appropriate, negotiate, and challenge Silicon Valley’s vision of technology. She argues that these imaginaries reflect and shape the politics of social movements: they matter for how activists think about their political possibilities. Ultimately, Ferrari centers the political and imaginative work that activists need to perform in order to navigate the politics of mainstream digital technologies.

Elisabetta Ferrari is Lecturer in Digital Media in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, UK.