Description:

Throughout the academic year, the Center for Latinx Digital Media invites you to a series of weekly seminars held over Zoom on Thursdays. You can now register (click here) to the next seminar of the Fall 2021 quarter, happening next Thursday, October 14 at 12-1 PM US CT. Professor David Nemer (University of Virginia) will give a presentation entitled “Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the digital mundane in Favelas of Brazil.”

Abstract: Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don't just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish.

David Nemer is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Latin American Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of “Technology of the Oppressed” (forthcoming February 2022, MIT Press) and “Favela Digital: The other side of technology” (2013, GSA). Nemer has a PhD in Computing, Culture, and Society from Indiana University, and a Master’s in Anthropology from the University of Virginia, and in Computer Science from Saarland University. He is also an Affiliated Scholar at Princeton University’s Brazil Lab. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the Department of Communication Studies, the Department of Radio/Television/Film, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Latina and Latino Studies Program.