About
108
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Introduction
I am a Beatriz Galindo Distinguished Professor at the University of Valencia and Reader in Data Agency and Media Ecologies at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media, and Culture. With over 20 years of experience, my research focuses on digital activism, critical data studies, algorithm studies, and digital disconnection, particularly in Latin America and the Global South.
More about my research can be found at emilianotrere.com.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
August 2017 - present
November 2011 - April 2016
Position
- Associate Professor, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences
April 2016 - July 2017
Publications
Publications (108)
Not only are books written from positions that are never neutral, but they are also read from positions which are also never neutral. The three commentaries we received come from diverse perspectives (labor, gender, and decolonial studies) and each of them generates different readings and raises important questions. In the following response we wil...
This essay argues that Latin American scholarship and movement practice are key to understanding the dynamics of the datafied society and countering its inequities. Examining the sources of inspiration of a frontrunner seeking to decolonize the datafied society – the Big Data from the South Initiative ( BigDataSur) – we review Martín-Barbero's onto...
The commodification of disconnection has attracted growing scholarly attention. Previous research highlighted the instrumentalisation of disconnection for productivity, self-governance, and healthy life. Researchers have also explored the politics of the “products” used for disconnecting, such as smartphone applications and offline commodities. Yet...
In human–computer interaction, the notion of ‘seamless interface’ describes a smooth interactive system that eliminates any possibility of friction between users and digital devices or platforms. Although interface designers have developed sophisticated technologies and strategies to pursue this aspiration, a frictionless user experience remains an...
How global workers, influencers, and activists develop tactics of algorithmic resistance by appropriating and repurposing the same algorithms that control our lives.
Algorithms are all around us, permeating more and more aspects of our daily lives. While accounts of platform power tend to come across as bleak and monolithic, Algorithms of Resistanc...
This interview explores the research agenda of Emiliano Treré on activists digital disconnection practices and resistance to algorithms and social datafication in different latitudes. It takes his expert opinion on the cross-cutting continuums and tensions between the individual/collective and the practical/strategic in the field. The conversation...
Since the redemocratization of much of Latin America in the 1980s and a regional wave of anti-austerity protests in the 1990s, social movement studies has become an important part of sociological, political, and anthropological scholarship on the region. The subdiscipline has framed debates about formal and informal politics, spatial and relational...
Digital inequalities research has lacked a focus on voluntary non-use and its consequences, whereas digital disconnection studies have focused on non-use but neglected the material implications of digital inequalities. Located at the intersection between these two approaches, this article relies on twelve semi-structured interviews, observations an...
This paper aims to understand the practices and meanings associated with the creation and use of private chat groups on instant messaging services such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger and WeChat that are accessible only to platform workers of online food delivery services. We draw on participant observation in five countries (Italy, Spain, Mexico,...
While scholars of activism have begun to unfold the dynamics of the 'contentious politics of data', less explored are the forms of appropriation of algorithms to pursue political objectives by social movements. This article fills this gap by offering a novel theoretical framework, a conceptual vocabulary, and a typology to foreground and articulate...
In this article, we show the complexity of the relationship existing between the power of platforms and the agency of users through the case study of engagement groups (pods) on Instagram, on which we carried out an eight-month digital ethnography (October 2019-May 2020) to understand the processes of meaning-making that take place within them. Thr...
This article explores the influence that the educommunicative dimension of the 15M Movement has had on the creation and consolidation of a new ecosystem of independent media. To this end, we rely on a document analysis of the movement’s minutes and manifestos and on the review of the editorial principles and educational activities of a sample of in...
This study explores how Chinese riders game the algorithm-mediated governing system of food delivery service platforms and how they mobilize WeChat to build solidarity networks to assist each other and better cope with the platform economy. We rely on 12 interviews with Chinese riders from 4 platforms (Meituan, Eleme, SF Express and Flash EX) in 5...
Este artículo examina los imaginarios sobre Internet y su influencia en las formas de apropiación tecnológica por parte de los movimientos sociales. Se incide en el concepto de mito, la sublimación digital y la retórica ciberlibertaria que mistifica el poder emancipador de Internet. Mediante un trabajo empírico basado en 37 entrevistas, tres grupos...
This introductory essay illustrates the context, clarifies the relevance, and outlines the key themes of this Special Issue on “Latin American Perspectives on Datafication and Artificial intelligence”. It starts pointing out that so far, the engagement of Latin American scholarship in the exploration of data technologies and the rise of intelligent...
Short videos and short-video-based social media (SVB) platforms have provided Chinese consumers with a new way to protest against businesses. However, they have received scant attention from scholars. This study aims to fill this gap in two ways. Firstly, it will contextualize this phenomenon within the literature on consumer activism, foregroundin...
This article explores how people have reconfigured their dis/connective repertoires during COVID-19 pandemic-related lockdowns. Relying on a media ecology approach and on 45 interviews carried out in different parts of the world, it tackles two limitations of the digital discon-nection literature, namely social media reductionism and universalism,...
Digital media are normal. But this was not always true. For a long time, lay discourse, academic exhortations, pop culture narratives, and advocacy groups constructed new information and communications technologies as exceptional. Whether they were believed to be revolutionary, dangerous, rife with opportunity, or otherworldly, these tools and tech...
This chapter engages with the notion of digital media activism. The starting point is that current studies often fall short in situating digital media activism within a longer historical trajectory and in the context of a complex media ecology, comprising both old and new media interactions. As a result, they frequently assume activism has been (an...
Voicing systematically marginalised communities is a problem historically posed in the media and communications field, in terms of de-Westernisation and, more radically, cosmopolitanism. Such a problem has been magnified in the COVID-19 pandemic, with narratives from systematically devoiced communities – ranging from migrants to informal workers, e...
Este artículo explora los mitos e imaginarios sociales sobre Internet compartidos y vehiculados por el discurso académico y por los activistas de los nuevos movimientos sociales que utilizan la tecnología de forma intensiva como base de sus estrategias de organización y acción colectiva. Se indagan los discursos, imaginarios y mitos sobre la Red me...
Comunicación alternativa y comunitaria. La conformación del campo en Europa y el diálogo con América Latina Alternative and community communication. The shaping of the field in Europe and the dialogue with Latin America Comunicação alternativa e cominitária. A conformação do campo na Europa e o diálogo com a América Latina-Alejandro BARRANQUERO Uni...
In the first pandemic of the datafied society, the disempowered were denied a voice in the heavily quantified mainstream narrative. Featuring stories of invisibility, injustice, hope and resistance, this book gives voice to communities at the margins in the Global South and beyond. The multilingual, polycentric and pluriversal narration invites the...
Digital media are normal. But this was not always true. For a long time, lay discourse, academic exhortations, pop culture narratives, and advocacy groups constructed new information and communications technologies as exceptional. Whether they were believed to be revolutionary, dangerous, rife with opportunity, or otherworldly, these tools and tech...
Debates on the temporal shift associated with digitalization often stress notions of speed and acceleration. With the advent of big data and predictive analytics, the time-compressing features of digitalization are compounded within a distinct operative logic: that of pre-emption. The temporality of pre-emption attempts to project the past into a s...
Quantification is central to the narration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Numbers determine the existence of the problem and affect our ability to care and contribute to relief efforts. Yet many communities at the margins, including many areas of the Global South, are virtually absent from this number-based narration of the pandemic. This essay builds o...
This editorial introduces a themed section aimed to spark further reflections on the limits and boundaries of disconnection as a form of critique, activism and response to the pervasiveness of digital devices, platforms, and infrastructures. We outline two key limits in current thinking about disconnection: first, the universalist discourse of disc...
Disconnection has recently come to the forefront of public discussions as an antidote to an increasing saturation with digital technologies. Yet, experiences with disconnection are often reduced to a form of disengagement that diminishes their political impact. Disconnective practices focused on health and well-being are easily appropriated by big...
Drawing on interviews with social movements and organizations in Mexico and Spain, this paper sheds light on the dynamics of ‘backstage activism’ with a focus on WhatsApp. It illustrates how activists have integrated this app into their media ecologies to reinforce collective identity, cement internal solidarity and lower the pressure of protest. I...
Estudios empíricos han señalado que la interacción en las plataformas de los movimientos sociales suele ser muy baja, aunque otros autores argumentan que la Web 2.0 aumenta las posibilidades de participación y de interacción. Este artículo presenta un análisis cuali-cuantitativo de la página Facebook del Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignida...
Drawing on one hundred interviews with activists, this article examines the relationship between livestreaming and the democratic cultures of the 15M and Occupy movements. The article investigates how the technical affordances of livestreaming – immediacy, rawness, liveness and embedded/embodied perspective – connect with the movements’ understandi...
This article introduces the tenets of a theory of datafication of and in the Souths. It calls for a de-Westernization of critical data studies, in view of promoting a reparation to the cognitive injustice that fails to recognize non-mainstream ways of knowing the world through data. It situates the “Big Data from the South” research agenda as an ep...
Studying the nexus of media and social movements is a growing subfield in both media and social movement studies. Although there is an increasing number of studies that criticize the overemphasis of the importance of media technologies for social movements, questions of non-use, technology push-back and media refusal as explicit political practice...
The concept of technopolitics has been increasingly employed to interpret the contemporary uses of communication technologies by social movements and civil society organizations. This chapter tackles the historical and theoretical roots of the notion, by critically examining contributions from different disciplines, regions and strands of literatur...
Special Section of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique (http://www.triple-c.at) Edited by Todd Wolfson, Emiliano Treré, Paolo Gerbaudo, Peter FunketripleC 15 (2), 2017, pp. 390-542 Please note that the editors appear in reversed alphabetical order, not in order of importance. This special issue represents a collective effort, and all the...
This article presents findings from an empirical study of repertoires of contention and communication engaged during anti-austerity protests by the Indignados in Spain, the precarious generation in Italy, and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece. Drawing on 60 semistructured interviews with activists and independent media producers involved in the 2011 wa...
This article presents findings from an empirical study of repertoires of contention and communication engaged during anti-austerity protests by the Indignados in Spain, the precarious generation in Italy, and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece. Drawing on 60 semi-structured interviews with activists and independent media producers involved in the 2011 wa...
Examinations of civic engagement in digital culture—the technologies, designs, and practices that support connection through common purpose in civic, political, and social life.
Countless people around the world harness the affordances of digital media to enable democratic participation, coordinate disaster relief, campaign for policy change, and s...
Reseña del libro: Meneses Rocha, M. E. (2015). Ciberutopías. Democracia, Redes Sociales, Movimientos-Red. Ciu- dad de México: Editorial Porrúa, 169 pp.

Review of Todd Wolfson's book "Digital Rebellion: the Birth of the Cyber Left"
Various strands of literature on civic engagement, ‘big data’ and
open government view digital technologies as the key to easier government
accountability and citizens’ empowerment, and the solution to many of the
problems of contemporary democracies. Drawing on a critical analysis of
contemporary Mexican social and political phenomena, and on a tw...
Varias corrientes de la literatura sobre compromiso social, medios digitales y big data conciben las plataformas digitales como un atajo hacia la ren-dición de cuentas gubernamental y el empoderamiento de la ciudadanía. Se-gún estas visiones, las redes sociales y las nuevas posibilidades brindadas por el análisis de grandes datos represen-tan la so...
Studies adopting the media ecology metaphor to investigate social movements form a promising strand of literature that has emerged in the last years to overcome the communicative reductionism permeating the study of the relation between social movements and communication technologies. However, contributions that apply ecological visions to protest...
This article responds to current critiques about the myths of digital democracy drawing on the case study of the Italian Movimento 5 Stelle/5 Star Movement (5SM) lead by comedian-turned-politician Beppe Grillo. We argue that the political success of the 5SM was largely dependent on
a process of technological fetishism of the Net as an autonomous po...
This article starts from the recognition that digital social movements studies have progressively disregarded collective identity and the importance of internal communicative dynamics in contemporary social movements, in favour of the study of the technological affordances and the organizational capabilities of social media. Based on a two-year mul...
The role of digital communication within contemporary struggles in Latin America has not received the consideration it deserves, especially internationally in English-language scholarship. The articles in this Special Section aim to fill this gap and provide key guidelines to navigate the multifaceted tapestry of digital media resistance in Latin A...
In this conversation, professor and leading scholar on global social movements and contemporary protest Geoffrey Pleyers maps and critically reflects on the main battlefields of Latin American struggles, from resistance over land dispossession and extractivism to conflicts over information control and the quality of democracy, from the battle again...
In this conversation, Bernardo Gutierrez examines the multifaceted roles played by digital media technologies in the processes of resistance and emancipation of several Latin American countries, with a particular focus on Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. Relying on his extensive experience as a journalist and activist, and on the preliminary findings...
Este artículo se aleja de los análisis superficiales y entusiastas par ofrecer una exploración crítica de los alcances y las limitaciones de las prácticas de resistencia que se han desarrollado en los últimos años en el contexto mexicano alrededor de las redes sociales y, en particular, de las videoplataformas online
In this article, we analyze through a political economy of communication lens the historical and political contexts in which the #YoSoy132 movement emerged, the concentration of Mexican media system and the possibilities offered by social media to young people, situating the issue of media democratization at the centre of the #YoSoy132 struggle. Dr...
The aim of this article is to explore the use of 3 concepts of media studies—media practices, mediation, and mediatization—in order to build a conceptual framework to study social movements and the media. The article first provides a critical review of the literature about media and movements. Secondly, it offers an understanding of social movement...
Violence in Mexico has increased exponentially, especially since the decision of former president Calderón to start the ‘war on drugs’ in 2006. During the six years of the Calderón government (2006-2012), victims of the narco-war were treated as simple numbers, ‘collateral damages’ of a necessary war to protect the ‘security’ of the Mexican people....
In May 2012 the #YoSoy132 movement emerged as a strong political actor, asking for the democratization of Mexican media and criticizing the strategy of the PRI Party and its candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto. The available literature on the movement has repeatedly stressed the importance played by social media platforms, but few have problematized and...
The aim of this article is to explore the motivations that drove many ordinary people to produce citizen journalism after the earthquake that destroyed the Italian city of L'Aquila in 2009. Using in-depth interviews, we investigate the motivations and the obstacles underlying the publication of grassroots information related to the post-earthquake...
Empirical studies have pointed out that interaction in the technological platforms used by social movements is usually very low, even if other authors have argued that Web 2.0 increases the possibilities for participation and interaction. This article presents a quali-quantitative analysis of the Facebook page of the Movement for Peace with Justice...
Empirical studies have pointed out that interaction in the technological platforms used by social movements is usually very low, even if other authors have argued that Web 2.0 increases the possibilities for participation and interaction. This article presents a quali-quantitative analysis of the Facebook page of the Movement for Peace with Justice...
Este artículo aborda la experiencia del movimiento social #YoSoy132, a partir de la exploración de su surgimiento en el contexto político, social y mediático mexicano y del análisis de sus características, demandas y paralelismos con los nuevos movimientos sociales globales. Además, el artículo problematiza el papel de los medios digitales –en part...
