Southern Digitalities

Reimagining Digital Studies from the Global South

Author: Edited by Clovis Bergère, Marwan M. Kraidy, and Marina R. Krikorian

Beyond entrenched notions of digital studies research

Cloth – $125

978-0-252-04947-7

Paper – $35

978-0-252-08987-9

eBook – $19.95

978-0-252-04948-4

Publication Date

Paperback: 12/15/2026
Cloth: 12/15/2026

Series: The Geopolitics of Information

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About the Book

Western histories and ideas dominate studies of digital technologies despite the fact most of today’s digital users live outside the West. Clovis Bergère, Marwan M. Kraidy, and Marina R. Krikorian curate essays that explore new ways of understanding global digital life by centering the experiences, practices, and infrastructures of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

The contributors proceed from the idea that the plural term “digitalities” reflects how material conditions, social hierarchies, and local histories shape digital life. Their approach sees so-called Southern digitalities as a gateway to rethinking digital theory from a starting point that draws on grounded knowledge, multilingual concepts, and place-based research. Four organizing themes—data, belonging, work, and epistemologies—reveal how scholars can navigate and reinterpret digital systems with concepts and methods that challenge established ways of studying and understanding international digital life.

A merger of the theoretical and imaginative, Southern Digitalities provides a blueprint for uncovering more inclusive understandings of contemporary digital worlds.

About the Author

Clovis Bergère is the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar. Marwan M. Kraidy is dean and CEO of Northwestern in Qatar and the author of The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World and Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life. Marina R. Krikorian is the Assistant Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar.

Reviews

“A transformative volume that centers the Global South’s pluriversality, with close attention to race, gender, class, modernity, and religion. Through grounded research, contributors examine digital cultures and epistemologies in the lived realities of the digital majority. An essential contribution to digital and global media studies.”
—Bilge Yesil, author of Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order