Digital Activism in Asia Reader

Puthiya Purayil Sneha is Programme Officer with the Researchers at Work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), India. Her training is in humanities, and she has previously worked with a research programme on higher education in India at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, (CSCS) Bangalore. At CIS she is presently engaged with­a­project on mapping the emergent field of Digital Humanities in India, and is also interested in questions on changing modes of knowledge production in the humanities with the advent of the internet and new digital technologies.

Sumandro Chattapadhyay is Research Director at the Centre for Internet and Society, India. He leads the open data activities at CIS, and also the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme. His academic interests span over topics of history and politics of informatics in India, new media and technology studies, and data infrastructures and economies; and is also­keenly­interested in questions and techniques of digital humanities.

Denisse Albornoz is Ecuadorian and resides in Toronto. She­worked­for 11 months at the Centre for Internet and Society as a program associate for the Making Change project, looking at methods for change at the intersections of art, technology and activism. She continued her research back in Toronto exploring how trans-media storytelling practices are used in Bangalore to challenge dominant discourses and strengthen citizenship habits. She graduated from the International Development Studies program at the University of Toronto in 2015.

Esra’a Al Shafei is the founder and director of Mideast Youth,­a­network of online platforms that amplify under-reported and marginalized voices throughout the Middle East and North Africa. She is­a­recipient of the Berkman Award from Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society for “outstanding contributions to the internet and its impact on society,” and is currently­a­Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow. Previously, she was an Echoing Green Fellow and­a­Senior TED Fellow. In 2011 she was featured in Fast Company as one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” and awarded the Monaco Media Prize, which acknowledges innovative uses of media for the betterment of humanity. In 2014, she was featured in Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list of social entrepreneurs making an impact in the world. The same year, Mideast Youth received the Human Rights Tulip, awarded annually to an organization which promotes and supports human rights in innovative ways

Maesy Angelina works on research and social innovation for women empowerment and poverty reduction in Jakarta, Indonesia. Her weekends are spent running POST, an independent bookshop and creative space that she co-founded in a traditional market in Jakarta.

Htaike Htaike Aung is the Programme Manager at Myanmar ICT for Development Organisation, or MIDO. She is interested in Internet culture, and has been involved in Internet propagation events in Myanmar since 2006. She is a computer privacy and circumvention activist. Htaike Htaike conducts trainings on Internet and digital security for the human rights defenders in Myanmar. She is one of the founders of the Myanmar Bloggers Society, and is an organizer of the Barcamp Yangon, http://www.barcampyangon.org/index. html, considered one of the biggest Barcamp gatherings in the world. She has also worked with several international NGOs to provide ICT training to grassroots activists and workers

Anat Ben-David is a lecturer in the department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University of Israel.

Nandini Chami is Senior Research Associate at IT for Change http://www. itforchange.net/,­a­Bangalore-based NGO, working on information society theory and practice from the standpoint of gender equality and social justice. Her research interests are: democracy and citizenship in the digital age and community informatics

Tracey Cheng was born in the U.S. and raised in Taiwan. She received both her Bachelor’s degree in Comparative Religion and her degree in Master of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) from the University of Washington. She currently resides in Taiwan.

Armand Hurault has been working on the Middle East since 2008 and on the political dynamics and forms of dissent of the Arab Spring since 2011. He is currently deputy coordinator at ASML,­a­Syro-French organization supporting the emergence of an alternative and professional media landscape in Syria. Armand holds­a­first master’s degree from Sciences-Po, France, and­a­second in Middle East Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Rachael Jolley is the editor of Index on Censorship magazine. Having started as a news reporter on a local newspaper, she moved on to writing for magazines, newspapers and websites in the UK and internationally (including The Times, the Financial Times and The Guardian). She has been editorial director at think tank British Future, managing editor for monthly magazine Business Traveller, and editor of Business Traveller Middle East, and commissioning editor (online) for the Fabian Society. She also launched the quarterly magazine Public Health Today.

Youngmi Kim is an associate professor at the department of International Relations­/­Public policy at Central European University. She received her PhD from the University of Sheffield (UK) in 2007 and joined CEU in 2009. Youngmi was previously­a­Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow and an ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and has also taught at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her main interests are in comparative politics, especially in the study of political parties and party systems in new democracies, online politics, and comparative regionalism. Her current research explores online political participation and its relationship with offline activism, and the impact of political culture on political behavior.

Merlyna Lim is­a­scholar studying ICT (Information and Communication Studies), particularly on the socio-political shaping of new media in nonWestern contexts. She has been appointed a Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Global Network Society in the School of Journalism and Communication Carleton University in 2014. Formerly she was­a­Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and a­Distinguished Scholar of Technology and Public Engagement of the School of Social Transformation Justice and Social Inquiry Program and the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. She previously held a Networked Public Research Associate position at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She got her PhD, with distinction (cum laude), from University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands, with­a­dissertation entitled “@rchipelago Online: The Internet and Political Activism in Indonesia.”

Sarah McKeever graduated from the University of Chicago in 2010 with­adegree in International Studies, focusing on contemporary Indian politics and society. She was­a­Fulbright-Nehru English Teaching Assistant from 2010-2011, working in­a­government school in New Delhi to assist in English language comprehension and verbal skills. After working in Washington, D.C. on SinoIndian relations, Ms. McKeever graduated with an MSc in Contemporary India from the University of Oxford in 2013. She is currently working on her PhD in Contemporary India Studies at the India Institute at King’s College London. Her work focuses on the impact of social media on contemporary political movements.

Subhashish Panigrahi is an an educator and open source activist based in Bangalore, India. He is­a­long time Wikimedian and is involved in India’s first GLAM project. Currently he is working at the Access To Knowledge program of the Centre for Internet and Society. In the past, he has worked on building partnerships with GLAM institutions, universities, language research organizations, government departments and individuals for bringing more scholarly and encyclopedic content on language, culture and history under free licenses. He has learning interests in building collaborative GLAM projects that operate in low cost and bring institutions, resourceful experts and scholars under one roof. He has been involved in various language related conferences and spoken in both policy and implementation discourses around open knowledge and open source.

Prabhas Pokharel is a practitioner using technology for social development in the developing world, focusing on Nepal. He is currently working as a Product Design Fellow at the Kathmandu Living Labs, responding to the Nepal earthquake with information products utilizing technology and crowd intelligence. He has­worked­in roles ranging from the very technical (software developer) to the the very non-technical (researcher­/­blogger) in places ranging from Nepal, India, Kenya, Kosovo, Nigeria, Peru and the United States. Some examples of his work include: the development of technology infrastructure to support local-level grant-making in Nigeria, and helping establish the UNICEF Innovations Labs in Kosovo. Prabhas is a native of Nepal. Starting in the fall of 2015, he will be ­a ­student at the Product Design program at Stanford University.

Puthiya Purayil Sneha is Programme Officer with the Researchers at Work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), India. Her training is in humanities, and she has previously worked with a research programme on higher education in India at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, (CSCS) Bangalore. At CIS she is presently engaged with­a­project on mapping the emergent field of Digital Humanities in India, and is also interested in questions on changing modes of knowledge production in the humanities with the advent of the internet and new digital technologies.

Padmini Ray Murray joined the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore in January 2015. Ray Murray is one of the founders of the South Asian Digital Humanities Network and currently serves as vice-chair of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, as editor-in-chief at SHARP news, and on the editorial board at Technoculture. Her research interests span the history of the book, public history, comics, videogames and literary studies. Ray Murray received her PhD in 2008 from the University of Edinburgh.

Urvashi Sarkar is­ a ­freelance journalist with an interest in politics, gender and culture. She currently works in the development sector and is a former reporter with The Hindu.

Shobha S V is a digital media professional working in India. She is a trained journalist with an experience of working with media organisations viz. Daily News and Analysis, Times group and Mid-Day. A sociologist by training, she currently works for a women’s rights organisation working on issues relatyed to violence against women. She has experience in researching women’s experiences on social media, managing digital content, and designing and implementing projects related to crowd sourced knowledge and social justice.

YiPing (Zona) Tsou is a language and intercultural educator as well as creative learning entrepreneur. She holds­a­degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures from National Taiwan University and an M.A. in Cultural Studies from National Central University and has presented her poetic and scholarly work internationally. A translator, lecturer, and frequent collaborator, Tsou co-founded Becoming, the first crowd-learning community for cross-cultural creatives in Taipei. She also started­a­creative center in Kaohsiung called InBetween to bring together cultural literacy and language learning.

Hu Yong is a professor at Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communication, and a well-known new media critic and Chinese Internet pioneer.Before joining the faculty of Peking University, Hu Yong has­workedfor­a­number of media sources for over 15 years, including China Daily, Lifeweek, China Internet Weekly and China Central Television. He is active in industry affairs as he is co-founder of the Digital Forum of China,­a­nonprofit organization that promotes public awareness of digitization and advocates a­free and responsible Internet. In 2000, Hu Yong was nominated for China’s list of top Internet industry figures. Hu Yong is­a­founding director for Communication Association of China (CAC) and China New Media Communication Association (CNMCA). His publications include Internet: The King Who Rules, the first book introducing the Internet to Chinese readers, and The Rising Cacophony: Personal Expression and Public Discussion in the Internet Age, documenting major transformations in the Chinese cyberspace.

Huma Yusuf is­a­freelance media researcher and­a­Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. She holds a master’s degree from MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. She was a research associate at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media during the 2007-2008 academic year. Her academic research at MIT examined how new media platforms and mediated practices help shape urban identity and negotiate street violence. As a print and online journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan, she reports on Pakistani politics, media trends, development, and violence against women. She is the recipient of the European Commission’s 2006 Natali Lorenzo Prize for Human Rights Journalism and the UNESCO­/­Pakistan Press Foundation 2005 Gender in Journalism Award.

Weiyu Zhang is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore. She graduated from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in New Media and Civic Engagement, Social and Cognitive Psychology of New Media.