Focus
The ALiGN (ALternative Global Network) Media Lab focuses on research, knowledge mobilization, and public engagement at the intersection of media (especially digital media), contestation of power, and collective resistance.
Research
Broadly defined, ALiGN research revolves around the relationship between media and communication technologies, especially digital media, and collective/social movements, focusing on the spatialities, temporalities, and materialities of the movements. ALiGN research is trans and inter-disciplinary in nature. It combines methods from social sciences (e.g. online/offline ethnography, historiography, interviews, participant observation, and content analysis) and computational science (e.g. computational network analysis, data mining, data visualization), use both small and big data approaches, and utilize visual, audial, and textual analysis.
Mission
ALiGN’s mission is to work with communities and groups in engaging with and challenging dominant narratives, creating alternative narratives, and carving spaces of hope and resistance. This engagement will hopefully provide a tool or method to contest existing frameworks, and allow new narratives from the voices and spaces often found on the margins to be heard. We aspire to also cooperate with communities to find ways to utilize digital technologies and alternative media for civic engagement, participation, and creating alternative networks. Partnering with communities and activists, we hope to generate alternative narratives about social movements, telling stories and reporting on new research, movements, and developments.
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