UCL Americas International Development Lecture 2024 by Julie Cupples

This talk draws on material from long-term research in Central America and from a forthcoming book that explores the ways in which Indigenous, Afrodescendant and mestizo broadcasters, digital activists and consumers are appropriating digital and other media resources to challenge erasure, marginalization, racism, political authoritarianism, and environmental destruction and to generate cultural modes of belonging and dynamic intercultural solidarities. It outlines how, amidst a context of entrenched coloniality and political violence, there’s an inspirational politics of life at work that articulates alternative ways of knowing and being. It focuses on Costa Rican calypso as a transmedia practice and on the digital activisms that have emerged in the wake of the 2018 popular uprising in Nicaragua.

Julie Cupples is Professor of Human Geography and Cultural Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her work is focused on questions of media convergence and transmediation; race, gender, and sexuality; disasters; electoral geographies; and decolonial movements and struggles and is carried out mostly in Latin America, especially Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Colombia and the San Andrés archipelago, as well as in Aotearoa New Zealand.  She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of nine books, the most recent of which is Transmedia Geographies: Decolonization, Democratization, Cultural Citizenship and Media Convergence which will be published later this year with Rutgers University Press.