Events

12 Oct 2023

16:00 – 17:30 (UTC+8, HKT)

Webinar

Dr Olga Boichak

Dr Olga Boichak is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney (Australia), where she leads the Computational Social Science Lab. She writes for a range of academic and popular media on the topics of participatory cultures, infrastructures, and remote humanitarianism surrounding Russia’s war against Ukraine. She is currently working on a project that maps topographies of digital sovereignty as part of her Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship.

Social media have reconfigured the international relief landscape by opening discursive spaces for grassroots storytelling and activism. Bringing the images of distant suffering closer than ever before and affording an array of opportunities for framing, representing, and responding to crisis events, platforms have shifted the relationship between information and capacity for action. This shift has precipitated the move of geographically dispersed humanitarian actors from the margins of the global geopolitical landscape toward its centre. Situating the inquiry in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine, this presentation foregrounds participative humanitarian patterns across platform-mediated international communities at scale. In doing so, it raises a series of important questions regarding values, motivations, and responsibilities of witnessing remote wars that hit close to home.

For details: https://linktr.ee/cssl_cuhk