Lisa Parks and Assatu Wisseh

Lisa Parks is a Distinguished Professor of Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual and Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Globalization (in progress), and co-editor of: Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, and Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures, among other books. She has been a PI on major grants from the National Science Foundation and the US State Department and is committed to exploring how a greater understanding of media and communication systems can assist citizens, scholars, and policymakers advance campaigns for technological literacy, creative expression, and social and environmental justice. Parks directs the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab at UCSB and is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. 

Assatu Wisseh is a PhD candidate in the Film and Media Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. She studies media infrastructures through the lenses of Black feminisms, critical race theory, and coloniality. 

Title and abstract:

“The Nuances of Network Sovereignty: A Collaborative Study of Internet and Digital Technologies in the Blackfeet Nation” 

Lisa Parks and Assatu Wisseh, in partnership with Sarah DesRosier, Gaylene Ducharme, Trevor Spotted Eagle, and Wayne Smith 

Humanities research on digital technologies often focuses on urban post-industrial contexts far removed from Indigenous communities, histories, and experiences in rural North America. This is ironic given that U.S. networked communication and media have only been able to emerge historically because of the violent capture of indigenous lands and resources and displacement of Indigenous peoples (Schwoch, 2018). Building on Marisa Duarte’s important book, Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country (2017), this study of internet and mobile phone use in the Blackfeet community in Montana emphasizes the voices and experiences of Indigenous people and explores how they redirect and guide critical thinking around technology, empowerment, and sovereignty. Drawing on findings from a public internet forum we organized in Browning, Montana in 2019, site visits, and 38 interviews conducted on the Blackfeet territory in 2021, we seek to expand critical consciousness around Indigeneity and digital technologies and bring forth the sociotechnical contributions, knowledges, and experiences of Blackfeet community members. Toward that end, we explore how digital technologies are imagined, accessed, and used by residents of the Blackfeet Nation, and, in the process, engage with critical issues such as material conditions of rurality, nuances of network sovereignty, and sociotechnical relations in everyday life. 

For more info about partners see: https://globalmediaucsb.org/current-projects/network-sovereignty