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Research Areas

Digital Justice, Algorithmic Culture, Critical Coding Studies, Intersectional Internet Studies, Post-Colonial and Anti-Colonial Feminist Approaches to Science and Technology Studies, Cybercolonialism, Migration and Mobilities, Mobile/Migrant Feminism, Marginalized knowledge forms and research methodologies.

Supervision

Myla Devora Held / PhD Candidate

Biography

I received my PhD at the Department of Sociology of Diversity at the University of Kassel, Germany. Between 2015-2022, I worked as a postdoc researcher and (co-)initiated and received project grants, and coordinated them. One of these projects was an interdisciplinary project entitled “RE:Coding Algorithmic Culture” and the other major project was entitled “Migrantischer Feminismus (Migrant Feminism).” In the early beginning of my postdoc years, I became one of the project leads of a transnational research group “Digital Feminist Collective” founded at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, and had the great opportunity to meet and work with amazing and inspiring feminist scholars. From 2019 to 2020, I held an interim full-professorship position of 6 months at the Department of Sociology, at the Justus-Liebig-University, Germany. In July 2023, I happily joined the ���ϳԹ���Դ Department of Sociology as a tenure-track assistant professor with special focus on Digital Justice.

During these years, I also worked together and organized different cultural, social and political gatherings and events with the (local) BI*PoC communities in Germany, which constituted one of the most substantial drives of my scholarly engagements. As a strong believer of the importance of transmission of knowledge, I highly value the wisdom and non-institutionalized knowledge forms which are present and create the foundation of these communities. While I have intellectually benefited from their generous knowledge sharing practices, as a professional learner and a re-searcher, I have always been ready and have tried to share my scholarly knowledge and resources with these communities in accordance with their demands and needs. I aim and hope to continue this practice at ���ϳԹ���Դ, as well.

The scope of my current research project primarily emerges from the areas of Algorithmic Culture, Critical Coding Studies, Postcolonial Sociology and Anti-colonial Feminist Epistemologies and Methodologies. Broadly speaking, my work explores the emerging power relations and inequalities as well as the emanating subjectivities and agencies in cyberspace. By following Radhika Gajjala (2012; 2019), Roopika Risam (2019) and Danielle Coleman (2019) works, in my research, for instance, I propose and introduce two concepts: Cybercolonialism and Cybaltern. While the term ‘cybercolonialism’ focuses on the spatial aspects of the new forms of power relations shaped in and by the digital space, the concept of ‘cybaltern’ -- which is a portmanteau term of ‘cyborg’ and ‘subaltern’ -- defines a cursor subjectivity, as I argue, and is one of these emerging subjectivities in cyberspace.

My research, in the long term, aims to bring its theoretical, conceptual and methodological perspectives together in an intersectional digital feminist framework which deals with the questions of agency and access in the context of digital justice.

Teaching

• SOCY 201 Migration and Mobilities (Fall)
• SOCY 304 Algorithmic Cultures and Digital Justice (Winter)
• SOCY 428 Cybercolonialism (Winter)