Toward a Pluriverse of Care: Messaging Transnational Indigenous Protest

Scholars of social media and social protest have established that social media simultaneously layers a digital means of communication over existing in-person relationships while also generating connective action across issue groups separated by time, place, geopolitics and ideology. For Indigenous peoples forcibly separated by colonial acts, political messaging via social media represents a means with which to catalyze morally just change across political borders and social groups. Considering the co-evolution of three movements–#Namakasia, #IdleNoMore, and #NoDAPL–reveals how the messaging around Indigenous transnational protest movements overlaps in various communicative spheres, relates to transnational energy infrastructure, and generates a politics calibrated to global Indigenous solidarity. 

Marisa Elena Duarte (Pascua Yaqui/Chicanx) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Duarte’s research focuses on Native and Indigenous approaches to digital technologies, in particular with regard to information, infrastructure, social media, and digital methods. She invokes an Indigenous decolonial approach to technology in her 2017 book Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country (UW Press). She teaches courses in Justice Theory and Learning Technologies in Native Education.

COMM230X: Digital Civil Society Speaker Series: This series provides a forum for scholars and community-based innovators to present their work, learn from those working on related issues from different disciplinary perspectives, and spark or nurture cross-disciplinary engagement around the big questions that animate the digital civil society Lab. Topics covered this quarter notably include polarization and social media, algorithmic audits, digital rights advocacy in Africa, transnational social movements, philanthropy and racial justice, misinformation and social protest.

This event is open to all members of the Stanford community and requires pre-registration with a stanford.edu email.

Speakers

• Marisa Elena Duarte - Assistant Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University