18th March 2024 1-2.15pm UK Time Online ( Zoom Registration)
The first seminar will include two papers. Locating African Cultural Agency in the Global Digital Economy: The Case of Music Platform Insider Activists by Jaana Serres (University of Groningen) and Imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship: techno-optimism and subversion in Ghanaian filmmaking by Robin Steedman (Copenhagen Business School)
Register to attend this seminar here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Gw1CqzQhSQimLo6QbUhWvA
Paper 1: Locating African Cultural Agency in the Global Digital Economy: The Case of Music Platform Insider Activists. While academic literature commonly denounces the corporate takeover, or recolonization, of African cultural industries associated with digital capitalism, African music stakeholders widely enact digital platforms as political vehicles to be seized upon for resistance against global marginalization. The past few years have witnessed a significant evolution in platforms’ intermediary function—from the Chinese-owned Boomplay and American startup Audiomack that dominate the continent’s music streaming market, to the GAFA’s newly aggressive strategy in Africa—they have emerged as actors of African music industries. Moving beyond the academic focus on data colonialism and the reproduction of hegemonies through algorithmic bias, this presentation foregrounds the self-identified “African” agents who steer these corporations and the symbolic, economic, and affective practices that they mediate in order to account for the hopes and political stakes invested into platform capitalism from the continent.
Jaana Serres is a postdoctoral researcher in media, cultural industries, and society at the University of Groningen. From 2018 to 2021, she was the Ioma Evans‐Pritchard scholar in the social anthropology of Africa at Oxford University, where she completed her PhD on the “Africa to the world” movement through the lens of the Nigerian music industry. Prior to her academic career, Jaana practiced law in New York, Paris and London, where she advised multilateral organizations, African governments, and multinational corporations.
Paper 2: Imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship: techno-optimism and subversion in Ghanaian filmmaking Do platforms offer a level playing field to hitherto marginalized filmmakers, such as African filmmakers? Are these platforms a space where anything is possible? According to techno-optimist imaginaries—imaginaries commonly propagated by Silicon Valley—the answer is yes. But such imaginaries of digital reach, growth, and prosperity must be rigorously interrogated. In this presentation that is precisely what I will do through the case of filmmakers in Ghana. I will show that platforms are taken up techno-optimistically by filmmakers in Ghana, but that this is only part of the story. Equally, filmmakers critique platforms and reflect carefully on the skills and access needed to benefit from them. Even more powerfully, they subvert universalizing imaginaries through the creation of distinctly Ghanaian alternatives.
Robin Steedman is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Creative Industries in Africa at Copenhagen Business School. She is interested in global creative and cultural industries, and in questions of diversity and inequality in media production, distribution, and viewership. Her work has been published in journals, such as Poetics, Information, Communication & Society, and Environment and Planning A. Her first book, Creative Hustling: Women Making and Distributing Films from Nairobi, was recently published by The MIT Press.