Sociality and Digitality: An Exploration of New Forms of Digital Social Connection and Belonging in Africa

Dear Colleagues,

The media landscape is changing significantly on multiple levels, including through the rapid advancement and adoption of new media technologies, the increased use of mobile technologies in everyday life, and the potential for media consumers to transition into media producers. These changes have led to a proliferation of news sources, changes in the economics of news production, and the rise of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation. This situation is as true for Africa as the rest of the world, but it takes on particular, localised forms on this continent. The uncertainty regarding the future of news prompts questions about the emergence of new information ecosystems as a resource for building new social structures, addressing inequality and exclusion, and meeting other social needs. As such, studying the transformative role of information technologies and the resulting new infrastructures of connection is critical. As neoliberal economies in the developing world witness the deterioration of public infrastructure, valuable lessons can be gleaned from the Global South media models for navigating conditions of extensive inequality, political patronage, clientelism, and deregulation.

This research focus arises from a Mellon Foundation-funded project based at the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa (from 2018 to 2024) in which postgraduate students and academics investigated what new forms of sociality were being facilitated by increasing digital and mobile use in African contexts. Focusing on the complex relationship between two rapidly changing environments—digital and socio-political—the project aimed to investigate the kinds of sociality being constituted by different forms of mobile and social media and how these forms speak to issues of social belonging and calls for social change. Conscious that many African citizens still live under conditions of coloniality, as well as that democracy in many places functions in name only, we set out to understand how digital affordances might facilitate self-expression, new forms of political association, and calls for social change. While new media forms are changing the world and relationships in the political and social arena, people in the Global South are also reshaping the uses of these media in particular and interesting ways. Our aim is to seek contributions that probe how digital and social forms of self-expression and group expression, communication, knowledge-making, and archiving are being used in this new iteration of an ongoing struggle for full personhood, recognition, and inclusion. In particular, how digital and social media are used for forging new socialities, new social relationships, and new forms of political association for challenging current political, social, and economic arrangements in Africa, is a key focus of this Special Issue.

We invite contributions in the following thematic areas:

• Media and social belonging;
• Social media and new socialities;
• Young people and digital media;
• Coloniality and digitality in Africa
• Digitality and democracy in the Global South;
• Youth and self-expression via digital media;
• Digital media and wellbeing;
• New forms of political association and action;
• The materiality of digital devices and networks;
• New methods for the study of digitality in the Global South;
• Innovative uses of digital media in unequal contexts.

Prof. Dr. Anthea Garman
Dr. Nonhlanhla Ndlovu
Guest Editors

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• digitality
• sociality
• coloniality
• African ways of being
• social change
• social belonging
• inequality
• Global South