About the Lecture

Debates about data, AI and digitization take over media and communication studies. Positivist scholarship in the field keeps developing innovative and interdisciplinary big data methods while advocating for greater access to corporate data for research purposes. Qualitative and critical scholars question the blind spots and harms of datafication. The digitization of all social spheres makes it such that whether you research film, music, journalism, advertisement, or political communication, talking about data has become seemingly unescapable for media and communication scholars.

This talk will tackle what many see as five key challenges for the future of our field: time; field porosity; geographic boundaries; data access; and new training and preparedness for scholars. Our current moment calls for balancing the need to slow down with the necessity to attend urgently to the harms of datafication. What are we to do in the face of these two imperatives?

About Dr. Toussaint Nothias

Toussaint Nothias is a global media scholar working on journalism, civil society, and digital technologies. He is currently the research director of the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab and an Affiliate Faculty in African Studies at Stanford University.