- Info
Anna Mongibello
Università di Napoli L’Orientale
Anna Mongibello is Tenure-track Researcher in English at the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Comparative Studies at the University of Naples "L'Orientale". She holds a PhD in Cultural and Post-colonial Studies of the Anglophone World from "L'Orientale", where she currently lectures BA and MA students on English Language and Linguistics. She is a member of the board of the Italian Association for Canadian Studies. She has worked and conducted her research on Indigenous Peoples and their representations in Canada and Italy.
Her research interests include Media and News Discourse; the sociolinguistic aspects of English (in relation to identity, power and ideologies), explored through a methodology that combines CDA and the tools offered by Corpus Linguistics; e-learning, virtual learning environments, virtual worlds, gaming and artificial realities connected to intercultural communicative competence and English as a lingua franca; translation and multilingualism; gender and language issues.
Decolonizing cyberspace: an analysis of Indigenous online activism.
2 Dicembre 2021
Conservatorio di Musica Giovan Battista Martini, Bologna
In her essay “Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace” (1996), award-winning Métis and Cree filmmaker and scholar Loretta Todd sees cyberspace as a Western product, a cyber-land dominated by the colonizer’s language and cultural ownership. While it is true that cyberspace has often been represented as “a new frontier” for Western civilization and control, Indigenous communities across the world have seen its potential as a means for resistance and revitalization. As a matter of fact, over the past decades, the use of technology like the Internet, mobile phones and social media by Indigenous peoples has rapidly increased, consequently leading to important changes in the way Indigenous activism is performed. Therefore, Indigenous spaces in the digital realm have soon become decolonized places of cultural affirmation and empowerment. New dynamic forms of Indigenous self-determination and network sovereignty (Duarte 2017) through social media, in particular, allow Indigenous people to “agitate, demand political recognition for Indigenous causes, and proffer contesting and challenging views that dismantle colonial preoccupations with Indigenous political unity” (Carlson and Frazer 2016).
The present study presents an analysis of recent Indigenous online activism in Canada, such as the Fairy Creek Blockade, to investigate the remediation of Indigenous resistance across cyberspace. This research aims at understanding how social media users utilize Twitter and Facebook to increase social actions. A social media analysis (Zappavigna 2018) approach is therefore employed to examine patterns of information flow focusing, in particular, on the use of hashtags to identify attitudes and experiences, and the way Indigenous activists build their online/offline identity.
