Info-viz and political activism
Channel: CeRch KCL
Date: 2014-03-26

21 January: Info-viz and political activism. Paolo Gerbaudo (King's College London)

 Abstract:

Info-visualisation is a practice that has been widely utilised in contemporary digital culture, in order to get to grips with the complex patterns emerging from huge sets of data. Among the different categories utilising info-viz, including programmers, marketers, financial analysts, security personnel, and government advisors, also activists have found in info-viz a powerful visual language to get to grips with the complexity of social grievances and economic problems in a highly complex and globalised world. In my presentation I will look at the political positioning of info-visualisation as a radical political language in collectives such as Bureau d-Etudes and RTMark, as well as drawing on my own work infondoalmar.info. I will discuss the extent to which info-viz can constitute a platform for radical politics, and look at some possible lines of future development of these practices.
Biography: 

Paolo Gerbaudo (1979) is lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King's College London. He has worked as a reporter for the Italian Left newspaper Il Manifesto and has been involved in anti-corporate, global justice and ecologist campaigns. His current research focuses on the use of new media and social media by social movements and emerging digital parties. He is the author of Tweets and the Streets (2012), a book analysing social media activism in the popular protest wave of 2011, from the Arab Spring, to the indignados and Occupy Wall Street. He has a PhD from Goldsmiths College, where he worked under the supervision of Professor Nick Couldry. He has previously taught at Middlesex University and the American University in Cairo. He is currently the convenor of the Digital Culture and Political Protest module at King's College London.