The ACRPS launched the fifth International Winter School (IWS) on Saturday, 6 January 2024, under the title “Social Media, Surveillance, and Societies of Control.” The Winter School is being held in person from 6-11 January 2024 in the ACRPS Lecture Hall and is being livestreamed on ACRPS social media. In this round, 19 researchers will present their research projects in dedicated sessions, focusing on different aspects of social media and surveillance in different regions and examining it in relation to a variety of social and political issues.
The first day of the IWS began with welcoming remarks from Arab Center Researcher Hani Awad, who highlighted the main aims and purposes of the International Winter School and introduced the topic of this year’s program. He noted that the program provides the opportunity for PhD students and early career researchers to network with regional scholars and gain substantive knowledge. This round explores the interaction between social media, surveillance, and control by governments and corporations and the vulnerability of popular culture to manipulation and control through social media. Participants will look at social media and surveillance in different contexts such as the United States, Egypt, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, and Nigeria, examining a variety of social and political issues.
David Lyon, Former Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University, Kingston, and a pioneer in Surveillance Studies, delivered the first lecture of the IWS titled “Popular Metaphors for Surveillance and Why They Matter”. He explored three popular metaphors used in relation to surveillance: “Big Brother”, “Panopticon”, and the “Eye of God”. Lyon claimed that the use of these metaphors in the public evaluation of surveillance is important because they offer civil society opportunities to interact with public issues, which are bound up with the power of large corporations and their relationship with governments on the one hand, and with human rights, justice, care, and social-political participation, on the other.
This was followed by the first session of the IWS, in which Kawsar Ali presented her paper titled “The Empire Types Back: Palestinian E-Resistance and Its Settler Colonial Contexts,” offering examples of oppressive measures of the settler colonial authority of the Internet, as well as how Internet users, such as Palestinians and their allies, mobilize the Internet to “type back”. The session also featured a presentation by Ayah Soufan on “Exploring War Narratives, Digital Initiatives, and Censorship in the Israeli War on Gaza,”. Soufan’s paper used the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza as a case study to discuss how narratives play a crucial role in self-identification, justification, and defiance, evolving through daily adjustments and social media engagement.
In the second session, Ashraf Abumousa presented his paper titled “Humanitarianism in the Era of Digital Colonialism: The Case of Palestine”. Abumousa explored the impact of Israeli surveillance and control of the Palestinian digital space on humanitarian work. Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal then presented her paper titled “Digital Redlining in Historic Palestine? The Political Geography of the So-Called 'Digital Divide”. She examined how Palestinians are not only digitally redlined but are also stripped of their autonomy and privacy online, due to the pervasive use of surveillance logics and technologies and the multiple dimensions of information restrictions.
The remainder of the program will feature public lectures by specialized scholars in the study of social media and surveillance such as Taha Yasseri (University College Dublin), Ahmed Al-Rawi (Simon Fraser University), Marc Owen Jones (Hamad bin Khalifa University), and Rebecca L. Stein (Duke University). In addition to two roundtables: “Social Media and War” and “Social Media, Surveillance, and Societies of Control”; and two workshops: “Reverse Engineering Social Media” by Fadi Zaraket (ACRPS and Doha Institute for Graduate Studies), and “Using Social Media and AI for Community Safety: Tools, and Case Studies” by Hamdy Mubarak (Qatar Computing Research Institute). Participants will continue to present and receive feedback on their research papers in dedicated sessions.
