WoC-lab Digital Diaspora

The ERC project collaborates with the lab “Digital Diaspora” which is part of the U Bremen interdisciplinary and collaborative research platform Worlds of Contradiction (WoC).

Considering that diasporic movements are generating renewed interests in digital media, the Worlds of Contradiction Lab at the University of Bremen takes on the task of theoretically exploring a fresh relationship between diaspora and (post-)digitality. We investigate how marginalized groups design themselves as decentralized “imagined communities” (B. Anderson) in the internet.

The lab focuses on the intersections of diasporic existence in analogue reality and its digital projection: the notion of the “postdigital” captures this dissolution of boundaries between these two areas. Although these intersections are a characteristic of diasporic communities in the present, they are not exempt from contradictions and conflicts that are to be examined.