Suay Melisa Özkula and I were honoured to receive an award at the annual International Communication Association (ICA) conference in Australia today. Our paper ‘Where is the Global South? A Systematic Review of Regional Visibilities in Digital Activism Research’ received the Top Faculty Paper from the ICA’s Activism, Communication and Social Justice Interest Group.

Many thanks to the reviewers and the ACSJ team (Rasha, Hanan and Betty) for the award.

If you are at #ICA24 you can see Suay present our paper as part of the Digital Activism and Social Justice panel on Monday (3:00 PM – 4:15 PM; Surfer’s Paradise 1 Star L3).

The abstract for the paper can be read below:

Where is the Global South? A Systematic Review of Regional Visibilities in Digital Activism Research

Recent scholarship has problematised the dominance of the Global North within communication research and called for de-westernisation to incorporate more cosmopolitan perspectives  (Badr & Ganter, 2021; Bosch, 2022; Waisbord, 2022). While some scholars argue that a ‘decolonial turn’ in digital media research is occurring (Couldry &Mejia, 2021), it remains unclear whether this is also the case in digital activism (abbreviated: DA) research. Extant scholarship suggests that ‘Western’ social media platforms and activism from Global North countries are over-represented within the field (e.g., Mahl et al., 2022; Ruess et al., 2021) including in research methods applied in these (Bosch, 2022; Schoon et al., 2020). This has, for example, been problematised within African (Moyo & Mutsvairo, 2018, Wasserman, 2018) and Latin-American contexts (Gómez-Cruz, et al., 2023; Medrado & Rega, 2023).

Other studies have drawn attention to the western-centric nature of information and communication technologies, as demonstrated by the countries from which their providers or designers originate (Arora, 2019). Much of this critical research has framed these digitally mediated exploitations as a manifestation of ‘data colonialism’, a concept describing how user data are processed at scale to produce economic value (Couldry & Mejias, 2021, 2019). In the same vein, cognate theories of  databased geographies’  (Arora, 2019),  ‘technocolonialism’ (Madianou, 2022), and ‘neocolonial media culture’ (Bosch, 2022, p. 299) illustrate how the growth of “big data” has often been linked to the exploitation of those residing in the Global South as knowledge about those regions is typically produced through the lens and paradigms of the Global North.

The evolution of ‘digital methods’ should theoretically create more opportunities for DA research on the Global South. These are typically software-based methods that draw on natively digital objects, methods, and data (Rogers, 2019; Venturini et al., 2018). However, it remains to be seen whether their use correlates with more representative DA research. The often prohibitive cost of these software packages, as well as their configuration for the study of “Western” social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter/X, and Instagram, suggest that they may primarily intended for privileged Global North researchers.

While previous meta-analyses and systematic reviews have explored either the relationship between ICTs and political engagement (e.g. Ruess et al., 2021; Boulianne et al., 2023) or the platforms being studied in DA research (anonymised), there has been no research to date exploring the geographic foci of empirical DA research, including in relation to digital methods specifically. This paper sets out to address this gap by presenting the results of a systematic review of DA research published between 2011 and 2018 (N=315). Specifically, it explores the representation of Global South and semi-periphery case studies in DA journal articles, the methods and platforms that feature in this body of research, and where the author(s) were based at the time of publication.