November 29, 2016
Remember when we used to read magazines– real, tangible, print magazines? Sometimes we’d pick them up at the dentist’s office, sometimes we’d have them delivered to our doorstep, but most of the time we’d be waiting in line at a grocery store check-out line and peruse the day’s headlines to pass the time. There were…
April 15, 2016
Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA) alum & current assistant professor at University of Michigan Joyojeet Pal will be back in Seattle for a few days in April. While he’s here, he will be giving a talk about uses of social media in “Global South” politics. Save the date, and see below for more details. We hope you’ll join us for this brown bag lunch discussion!
March 5, 2015
On Tuesday, March 10, 2015, Maria will present to the Data Management Association of Puget Sound (DAMA of Puget Sound) on her research involving collecting and analyzing data from social media platforms. Using examples from her work investigating the role of Facebook in the Arab Spring and the use of Twitter as a collective voice in political protests, Maria will explore the challenges that researchers face when collecting and analyzing data from social media platforms.
August 6, 2014
TASCHA researcher Jessica Beyer has a new book out, Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization, published by Oxford University Press. People use online social forums for all sorts of reasons, including political conversations, regardless of the site’s main purpose. But what leads some of these people to take their online political activity into the offline world of activism? In her book, Jessica looks at political consciousness and action in four communities, each born out of chaotic online social spaces that millions of individuals enter, spend time in, and exit moment by moment: Anonymous (4chan), IGN, World of Warcraft, and The Pirate Bay.
April 24, 2014
TASCHA Research Assistant Professor Maria Garrido has a chapter in a new book, Cyberactivism on the Participatory Web, edited by Martha McCaughey. Maria co-authored the chapter, “Twitter as the People’s Microphone: Emergence of Authorities during Protest Tweeting,” with Alexander Halavais of Arizona State University’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The chapter covers Maria and Alex’s research on over 30,000 Tweets using the #g20 hashtag, largely protest Tweets before, during, and after the 2009 G20 Meeting in Pittsburgh.
November 21, 2013
This summer, TASCHA and Facilitating Change wrapped up work on Georgia Civil Society 2.0, implemented between May 2012 and June 2013. Since then, we’ve taken some time to reflect on the project: what we’ve achieved, what we’ve learned.
July 9, 2013
I recently presented a paper on the different roles of Facebook during the Egyptian Arab Spring at the International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries (IFIP) 2013. This conference is one of the most important spaces to critically discuss the social implications of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in developing countries. IFIP not only brings together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers from different parts of the world, but also provides a multidisciplinary and multicultural space to discuss, plan, and work on theoretical, methodological, and practical challenges that ICT for development faces. IFIP 2013 focused on outlining crucial future challenges for the area, gaps that have not been addressed sufficiently, new technological possibilities, better understanding of institutional dimensions, and critical reflection on methodological approaches and theoretical positions that may guide our future thinking.
April 16, 2013
A recent TASCHA project, in the research area of Social Movements, explored how Facebook and social media was used in Egypt before and during the Arab Spring. The Youth, ICTs, and Democracy in Egypt project drew on social movement theory and emphasizes various lines of analysis, asking the main research question, how did the use of ICTs impact the evolution of the youth movement and the trajectory of the Egyptian revolution? Findings from this research have recently been presented at multiple venues by members of the project team.
July 23, 2012
The diffusion and exchange of knowledge between the dissent movements of the non-democratic countries is very important for the success of their struggle. Indeed, learning from both the best practices and mistakes of others who are in the similar situations helps you both to use the most effective tools, strategies and tactics in the similar situations of your own political endeavors, and to avoid errors which you could commit without such a knowledge transfer. During the Arab Spring such transfers occurred between many oppositional movements of the region, particularly – between the Tunisian and Egyptian ones.
July 12, 2012
Mid-December 2010 witnessed the largely unnoticed beginning of the sequence of highly contentious events which eventually changed the geopolitics of the whole Middle East. On December 17th, the individual protest action in the provincial Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid sparked a surge of protest activities which, within four weeks, ousted the long-ingrained regime of President Ben Ali and started a wave of revolutions across the whole Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, known as the “Arab Spring.” All these revolutions, despite their appearing differences, share a number of important features which allow researchers to classify them similarly. Particularly, in all these attempted revolutions, modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) played important roles.
