Thursday May 28, 12.15 - 13.00 at Galaxen [map] and on Zoom
On Thursday the 28th of May DIGSUM will host a seminar as part of the new seminar series celebrating a decade of interdisciplinary digital scholarship at Umeå University. Throughout the year, DIGSUM will host monthly seminars featuring leading researchers, emerging scholars, and invited speakers working at the intersection of digital technology and society. In this seminar Daniela Jaramillo-Dent, University of Zürich, will talk about “Platformed visual (Im)mobilities”. This will be the final seminar for this semester, but the seminar series will continue in the autumn.
Abstract
This talk examines platform logics shaping visual (im)mobilities across digital spaces for different communities during political unrest. Drawing on research with migrant and mainstream influencers in the US, Spain, and Switzerland, it explores three dimensions of visual (im)mobility in algorithmic environments. Literal (im)mobilities emerge as migrant creators use visual content to represent physical mobility by challenging dominant media framings. Migrants remain constrained by political tensions, oppressive legislation, and anti-immigration sentiment that immobilize them through hateful engagement and problematic coverage. Metaphorical (im)mobilities describe how online communities across the range of precarity and privilege pivot toward rights-based content as survival strategy, moving from privileged creation toward digital politicization and witnessing through visual activism. Platformed (im)mobilities interrogate how visual narratives become (im)mobilized through deletion or self-censorship. Platform moderation, online hate, and commercial interests create differential content mobilities, raising challenges for studying social phenomena within platform architectures that shape visibility hierarchies.
Daniela Jaramillo-Dent is Senior Research and Teaching Associate at the Media Change and Innovation Division, at the Department of Communication and Media Research (IKMZ), University of Zurich (UZH) and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). She is an internet scholar and speaker whose research and teaching span platform cultures, influencer studies, digital ethnography, and critical approaches to social media ecosystems. Her work examines how algorithmic logics, platform governance, and immaterial labor and value shape content creation, visibility, and participation, with a sustained focus on diasporic communities, Latin America, and the Majority World. She also develops and teaches visual and platform-based methods for examining digital cultures and human-computer interaction, contributing to methodological innovation in internet research.
Seminars take place over lunch once a month on Thursdays in Galaxen at Umeå University. All students, researchers, and interested colleagues are warmly welcome! Zoom links will be available for some of the events, stay tuned! For more information see [here].
For those participating online, the Zoom-meeting for all seminars in the seminar series is:
https://umu.zoom.us/j/67690806973
Meeting ID: 676 9080 6973