New Fellow at ENS: Welcome Siarhei Liubimau
We are happy to welcome Siarhei Liubimau as the latest guest researcher in our ENS fellowship program "Datafication in European Societies". During his stay from 8-27 April 2024, he will be hosted by ENS Professor Migle Bareikyte with whom he co-organizes the DAAD Summer School “Platformization, Digital Disinformation and Non-Democratic Politics: Belarus in Comparative Perspective” in July 2024 at the EHU in Vilnius.
Siarhei Liubimau is Associate Professor and Lead of the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism at the European Humanities University in Vilnius. He explores through the infrastructure lens the relations between digital platforms (both big commercial and bottom-up civic tech), everyday, and non-democratic politics. His project at ENS looks at the quantitative and qualitative aspects of Instagram usage in Belarus and Venezuela from the perspective of repressive measures taken by both states in the digital sphere.
Siarhei Liubimau will be the first speaker in the open ENS Research Seminar this summer semester. On 23 April at 4:15 PM, he will give a talk on "Platformization of Politics in Non-Democracies: Comparative Perspective on Claim-Making, Repressions, and Social Media Public in Belarus''.
The seminar will take place in a hybrid format both in the ENS Coworking Space at Collegium Polonicum and on Zoom. Everyone interested is welcome to join the open format.
Siarhei Liubimau's project studies the relations between repressions in authoritarian states and the usage of digital platforms, with the focus on the case of the Instagram usage in Belarus and in Venezuela. During the seminar, he will talk about the role of digital platforms in Belarus' unfinished revolution of 2020 and the digitalization of state repressions. He will further discuss how analysis of ‘big data’ helps us to understand the resulting social media public in Belarus in comparative perspective (with emphasis on Venezuela among other comparable cases).
Welcome at ENS - looking forward to working with you!