Communication Links
“Nandoon na ang lahat”: Social Media and Filipino Migrants in Central Italy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Rafael
This paper highlights the effects of social media utilization by Filipino migrants in central Italy, underscoring the effects controlling one’s image to their online networks has on their migrant livelihoods. Research was done through participation observation, interviews, and focus group discussions of twenty-five Filipinos, namely in the areas of Rome, Siena, and the Rieti province. The project delineates both the extent of social media use and its importance in these Filipino-Italian migrant livelihoods, further utilizing Harvey and Myers’ critical hermeneutic framework, which recognizes the lack of neutrality in evaluating narrative data, as the basis of my analysis. This work shows that Filipino migrant social media use goes beyond recreation and networking. It reaffirms a positive transnational imaginary. Different factors, including the degree of social media utilization, digital literacy, and affiliation to their Filipino culture, vary the degree such upholding take place. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that upholding this imaginary attempts to curb Italian xenophobic tendencies, most notably by displaying similar or analogous cultural values and traditions, for the host culture to further recognize and accept these migrants in society. The ethnographic lens through which this phenomenon is examined additionally highlights social media as a coping mechanism for the separation from loved ones, difficult work experiences, and other factors faced by Filipino immigrants in Italy.
The Global Futures Lab: Alternative Visions on Non-western Futures
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paolo Cardini
This paper is based on the Global Futures Lab case study and an investigation on "non-western" futures (www.globalfutureslab.com). “Design Fiction is the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change” (Bruce Sterling). This way of looking at product design is part of the broader discourse that identifies critical and speculative design as a new methodological framework in which objects are seen as facilitators of conversations rather than goods to be bought or used. In the last decade, an impressive creative effort has been dedicated to this field producing an infinite variety of scenarios and fostering rich debates about ethics, technology, and society. However, the great majority of those future visions were and still are, a mere representation of the fears and the dreams of a restricted part of the global community. Also, the general aesthetic of that body of work has been strongly connected with a recognizable taste, often coming from the Holliwoodesque imaginary or from the dominating design establishment’s style. Global Futures Lab consists of a series of international workshops (Iran, Ethiopia, Cuba, Peru, India) where students have been invited to reflect on their own environments, traditions, and believes, and to envision futures respectful of their cultures. In opposition to a diffuse technological determinism, where society seems shaped by new technologies, the Global Futures Lab endorsed a sort of “cultural determinism” in which any idea of future should be built on localized visions and with the main intention to open a debate about a pluralistic perspective.
Conceptualising Politics through a Religious Framework: Ummah and Politics in Bangladesh
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mubashar Hasan
Bangladesh, a south Asian Muslim-majority country has received scholarly attention for growing religiosity, religious intolerance, Islamization, and extremism. Many scholars have pointed out that political expediency and state-led promotion of religion in public lives have shifted the nature of Bangladesh, a country emancipated as a secular entity in 1971. This article argues that these narratives fall short of conceptualising the context upon which religious forms of politics takes place. I argue that politics in a country is not devoid of certain conditions and conditions emerge within a concept that sets the discourse of politics in Bangladesh or any country. The article conceptualises the politics of Bangladesh through an Islamic concept Ummah or global brotherhood of Muslims and demonstrates that localization of this global religious concept in major party platforms and state have set the current political condition in Bangladesh.
The Power of Visual Manipulation: Eyewitness Testimony
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maria Fornieles
Our eyes are the receptors of more than 80% of the information we take in daily. From textbooks to social media, from old civilisations to influencers, visual manipulation is undoubtedly one of the keys of our society. What can we gather from neurosciences, anthropology, sociology, and pedagogy as the pillars of a language that we are born to experiment in, but not raised to apprehend?
