17/8/24 – 31/8/24
In the second half of August this year, I undertook part of my SpaceX-Rise secondment in The Netherlands, hosted by Stroom Art Centre in The Hague. The secondment was coordinated by Stroom’s wonderful and brilliant Lua Vollard, a fellow SpaceX-Rise member who couldn’t have been more welcoming and supportive. I was fully immersed at the time in two ongoing research projects: a study of race and racism in sports video games, with Associate Professor Paul Campbell, University of Leicester, and Dr Anika Leslie-Walker, Nottingham Trent University; and a number of inquiries into the male-centred and reactionary/antifeminist online ‘Manosphere’, most notably a study of its Indian incarnation with Dr Saba Hussain, University of Birmingham. In this brief context, it’s difficult to encapsulate the full usefulness of this experience to these projects, and my broader agenda, but I will try.
My secondment took me first to Stroom itself (obviously) and exposure to some of the great work Lua continues to undertake there (including a really interesting project around women and gaming). I then visited New Institute, Rotterdam, where I was privileged to meet its senior researcher, Dr Ramon Amaro. This was followed by a meeting with Professor Geert Lovink at The Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. Finally, I met with Dr Daniël de Zeeuw, University of Amsterdam, to discuss our overlapping work with a view to future collaborations.
I had been grappling with two key challenges at the time – one practical, the other more conceptual. First, Paul had asked me to lead on a second article relating to our work on racism in video games, based on the same dataset as the first but geared more towards my digital-theoretical interests. Fully ‘unlocking’ this had proven frustrating – that is, until my encounter with Ramon whose groundbreaking work on technology and Black identities provided the ‘circuit breaker’ that enabled me to envision a second article genuinely differentiated from the first. Just yesterday (at the time of writing), this was accepted for publication in Oxford University Press’ exciting new Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context series.
The second, in some ways pretentious, ‘challenge’ related to my theoretical wavering over the respective utility of social vs. technological determinisms in understanding digital cultures – i.e. do we shape technologies, or do they shape us? My (now ongoing) discussions with Geert, a scholar with an extensive background in both digital research and (pre- and post-digital) social activism helped me realise how unhelpfully arbitrary the binary itself is. Complimenting this was both my subsequent meeting with Daniël, but also my wider exposure over the period (especially the work being undertaken at New institute) to art-practice engagements with the ‘digital’. These engagements seem to almost inevitably dissolve boundaries between human and technology, and in ways that continue to inform my more ‘theory’-based work as digital sociologist and writer.