Paula Uimonen | Stockholm University (original) (raw)
Books by Paula Uimonen
Published in Digital Divides: The New Challenges and Opportunities of e-Inclusion, edited by Kim ... more Published in Digital Divides: The New Challenges and Opportunities of e-Inclusion, edited by Kim Andreasson. CRC Press. 2015
The aim of this book is to explore digital media and intercultural interaction at an arts college... more The aim of this book is to explore digital media and intercultural interaction at an arts college in Tanzania through innovative forms of ethnographic representation. The book and the series website weave together visual and aural narratives, interviews and observations, life stories and video documentaries, art performances and productions. It paints a vivid portrayal of everyday life in East Africa's only institute for practical art training, while tracing the rich cultural history of a state that has mixed tribalism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and cosmopolitanism in astonishingly creative ways.
While following the anthropological tradition of thick description, Digital Drama employs a more artistic and accessible style of writing. Dramatic, ethnographic details are interspersed with theoretical postulations to explain and make sense of the unfolding narratives. The accompanying website visualizes and sensualizes the stories narrated in the book, unfolding a dramatic world of African dance, music, theater, and digital culture.
To its pioneers, the Internet is not just a technology but also a culture. This culture is instru... more To its pioneers, the Internet is not just a technology but also a culture. This culture is instructive of the social and cultural embeddedness of the Internet. So are the people whose lifestyles are informed by the culture of networking, the Internet pioneers. These are the social nodes of the internet, individuals who have actively contributed to its expansion around the world. Reflecting the ethos of the culture of networking, their activities are aimed at spreading the internet and the spirit in which it has been developed. Their vision is one of social improvement through global interconnectedness. Their strategy is transnational networking.
At a time when the Internet is becoming ubiquitous in many Western countries, this book focuses on its expansion in developing countries. Based on the visions and experiences of Internet pioneers, it identifies the cultural characteristics of the Internet, the distribution of which represents an instance of global cultural flow. Combining case studies in Southeast Asia with an examination of international activities and discourses, this book is the first to provide a comparative, empirical study of Internet development in the developing world.
Papers by Paula Uimonen
Deleted Journal, 2021
This article interrogates how people in Kaole relate to the ocean spiritually. Located on the Swa... more This article interrogates how people in Kaole relate to the ocean spiritually. Located on the Swahili coast in Tanzania, with a long history of transoceanic connections, Kaole is a fishing community where everyday life is lived alongside and through the ocean. Drawing on exploratory fieldwork in preparation of our new research project Swahili Ocean Worlds, in this article we share some of our initial findings, which we contextualise with the help of scholarly work on the Swahili world and Islam in Africa. To broaden our scope, we also engage with some comparative material from other parts of the world. In conceptualising Swahili ocean worlds, we draw on the anthropology of water, which has ascertained the centrality of water in the making of social worlds. But to grasp the spiritual relationality of the ocean, we adopt a pluriversal approach, with an emphasis on multiple worldings in an emergent world of many worlds. Our aim is to go beyond the focus on materiality and sociality in the anthropology of water, to interrogate the spirituality of the ocean in terms of spiritual beings as well as becomings.
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2023
Social Anthropology, Oct 23, 2009
Coming of Age in Second Life. An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human : Boellstorff, Tom. ... more Coming of Age in Second Life. An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human : Boellstorff, Tom. 2008.
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Connect to Collect shares the results of the Nordic research project Collecting Social Photo (201... more Connect to Collect shares the results of the Nordic research project Collecting Social Photo (2017-2020), which has explored the collection of social digital photography in new and innovative ways. The anthology consist of 278 pages well illustrated with social digital photos. It can also be downloaded from DiVA portal (a Swedish finding tool for research publications and student theses) http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1429411 Connect to Collect consists of four parts. The first part provides a conceptual framework for social digital photography in relation to the collection of visual cultural heritage. In Chapter 1 Anna Dahlgren reviews current research in the field and frames the implications for collecting social digital photography, by raising questions around ethics, the roles of museums and archives as providers of long-term commitment and open sources, and as providers of context. In Chapter 2 Lisa Ehlin discusses the practices and expressions of images, primarily among younger generations. She discusses the very realness of online social life for digital natives, and how sharing has become a way to see and be seen. In Chapter 3, Paula Uimonen summarises survey results from the research project, framed in a discussion on social media photography and digital cultural heritage. The chapter outlines the holistic approach of the project and insights gained from its innovative efforts in collecting digital visual heritage. The second part presents the 11 case studies carried out by the project team (Elisabeth Boogh, Kajsa Hartig, Bente Jensen, Anni Wallenius). The chapters in this part are categorised into three relevant themes to explore, based on the theory of social photography as well as the practices of the institutions. The themes are: places, practices and events. A central part of the case studies has been to examine the entire process of collecting, from idea and planning to collecting and acquisition, to identify critical points where new methods challenge existing work practices as well as opportunities where online collecting could benefit the museum or archive in a much broader sense than just developing photography collections. The third part presents new collecting interfaces. Chapter 7 discusses the development of a new prototype web app for collecting social digital photography. The web app is open source and can be downloaded from GitHub and is discussed more thoroughly in the next blog post. Chapter 8 explores image recognition as a feature of collecting processes. Arran Rees writes about the experiments made in the project by running images collected in the case studies through three different image recognition services to explore their usefulness in regards to social digital photography collections. The fourth part concludes the anthology and presents a set recommendations and a toolkit for collecting designed to support museums and archives wishing to initiate collecting projects. It is uploaded separetly. http://collectingsocialphoto.nordiskamuseet.se/
Invoking Flora Nwapa: Nigerian women writers, femininity and spirituality in world literature, 2020
https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-revie... more https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-reviewed series of academic monographs and edited volumes. The series strives to provide an open access platform for contemporary anthropological research. With its unique insights into the human condition, anthropology offers a fresh perspective on social life around the world, which the series aims to convey.
Published in Digital Divides: The New Challenges and Opportunities of e-Inclusion, edited by Kim ... more Published in Digital Divides: The New Challenges and Opportunities of e-Inclusion, edited by Kim Andreasson. CRC Press. 2015
Anthropology and Humanism, 2019
SummaryThis article explores how women writers in Nigeria and Tanzania use digital media, drawing... more SummaryThis article explores how women writers in Nigeria and Tanzania use digital media, drawing parallels between infrastructural enablement and literary worldmaking. It argues that female African writers offer insights into the embodied practices and cultural imaginaries of digitally mediated creativity, which can shed light on the paradoxical entanglements of infrastructure.
Social Anthropology, 2009
annual conference of the Internet Society, INET, 1997
This paper explores the potential role of the Internet in promoting sustainable and equitable dev... more This paper explores the potential role of the Internet in promoting sustainable and equitable development in Third World countries. Possibilities of using the Internet in a way that will benefit society at large and vulnerable groups in particular are analyzed within the wider framework of ...
American Anthropologist, 2009
at Los Angeles Johannes Fabian's contributions to anthropology are distinctive. Depending on wher... more at Los Angeles Johannes Fabian's contributions to anthropology are distinctive. Depending on where you start, he is an Africanist; a linguistic anthropologist; a partisan and critic of the "Writing Culture" moment in U.S. anthropology; a folklorist and student of popular culture; a historian of drug use by colonial anthropologists; a theorist of time, memory, and alterity; and now something of a hacker. Two books have been published recently that capture some of his heterogeneously distinctive work. The first, Memory against Culture, collects several recent talks and articles, including one called "Ethnography from the Virtual Archive," which is the germ of the second book, Ethnography as Commentary. This second book is both a meditation on creating a "virtual archive" of ethnographic sources and a "late ethnography" of a popular ritual that Fabian experienced in 1974 in Zaire with a healer named Kahenga. Ethnography as Commentary is a fabulous (and short) book. It is an excellent introduction to the detailed practice of ethnographic interpretation; it is also a very thoughtprovoking meditation on the changing possibilities of the ethnographic monograph after the Internet and of the idea of ethnography as commentary. Last, it is an experiment in "late ethnography," in which an explanation of a cultural event (Kahenga's ritual exclusion and protection of Fabian's house) is conducted through memory, notes, and other sources; contrasted with the practice of writing history; and used to shed light on the authority of ethnographies based in contemporary sources. The core of the experiment discussed by Fabian in Ethnography as Commentary is the creation of an online resource of materials: The Language and Popular Culture in
Digital Photography and Everyday Life
This chapter focuses on mobile photography in Tanzania, with an emphasis on the materiality of pr... more This chapter focuses on mobile photography in Tanzania, with an emphasis on the materiality of production and circulation. Shaped by the materiality of the mobile phone, a personal artefact that em ...
Invoking Flora Nwapa: Nigerian women writers, femininity and spirituality in world literature, 2020
https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-revie... more https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-reviewed series of academic monographs and edited volumes. The series strives to provide an open access platform for contemporary anthropological research. With its unique insights into the human condition, anthropology offers a fresh perspective on social life around the world, which the series aims to convey.
The Anthropologist as Writer, 2016
https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-revie... more https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-reviewed series of academic monographs and edited volumes. The series strives to provide an open access platform for contemporary anthropological research. With its unique insights into the human condition, anthropology offers a fresh perspective on social life around the world, which the series aims to convey.
Published in Digital Divides: The New Challenges and Opportunities of e-Inclusion, edited by Kim ... more Published in Digital Divides: The New Challenges and Opportunities of e-Inclusion, edited by Kim Andreasson. CRC Press. 2015
The aim of this book is to explore digital media and intercultural interaction at an arts college... more The aim of this book is to explore digital media and intercultural interaction at an arts college in Tanzania through innovative forms of ethnographic representation. The book and the series website weave together visual and aural narratives, interviews and observations, life stories and video documentaries, art performances and productions. It paints a vivid portrayal of everyday life in East Africa's only institute for practical art training, while tracing the rich cultural history of a state that has mixed tribalism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and cosmopolitanism in astonishingly creative ways.
While following the anthropological tradition of thick description, Digital Drama employs a more artistic and accessible style of writing. Dramatic, ethnographic details are interspersed with theoretical postulations to explain and make sense of the unfolding narratives. The accompanying website visualizes and sensualizes the stories narrated in the book, unfolding a dramatic world of African dance, music, theater, and digital culture.
To its pioneers, the Internet is not just a technology but also a culture. This culture is instru... more To its pioneers, the Internet is not just a technology but also a culture. This culture is instructive of the social and cultural embeddedness of the Internet. So are the people whose lifestyles are informed by the culture of networking, the Internet pioneers. These are the social nodes of the internet, individuals who have actively contributed to its expansion around the world. Reflecting the ethos of the culture of networking, their activities are aimed at spreading the internet and the spirit in which it has been developed. Their vision is one of social improvement through global interconnectedness. Their strategy is transnational networking.
At a time when the Internet is becoming ubiquitous in many Western countries, this book focuses on its expansion in developing countries. Based on the visions and experiences of Internet pioneers, it identifies the cultural characteristics of the Internet, the distribution of which represents an instance of global cultural flow. Combining case studies in Southeast Asia with an examination of international activities and discourses, this book is the first to provide a comparative, empirical study of Internet development in the developing world.
Deleted Journal, 2021
This article interrogates how people in Kaole relate to the ocean spiritually. Located on the Swa... more This article interrogates how people in Kaole relate to the ocean spiritually. Located on the Swahili coast in Tanzania, with a long history of transoceanic connections, Kaole is a fishing community where everyday life is lived alongside and through the ocean. Drawing on exploratory fieldwork in preparation of our new research project Swahili Ocean Worlds, in this article we share some of our initial findings, which we contextualise with the help of scholarly work on the Swahili world and Islam in Africa. To broaden our scope, we also engage with some comparative material from other parts of the world. In conceptualising Swahili ocean worlds, we draw on the anthropology of water, which has ascertained the centrality of water in the making of social worlds. But to grasp the spiritual relationality of the ocean, we adopt a pluriversal approach, with an emphasis on multiple worldings in an emergent world of many worlds. Our aim is to go beyond the focus on materiality and sociality in the anthropology of water, to interrogate the spirituality of the ocean in terms of spiritual beings as well as becomings.
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2023
Social Anthropology, Oct 23, 2009
Coming of Age in Second Life. An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human : Boellstorff, Tom. ... more Coming of Age in Second Life. An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human : Boellstorff, Tom. 2008.
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Connect to Collect shares the results of the Nordic research project Collecting Social Photo (201... more Connect to Collect shares the results of the Nordic research project Collecting Social Photo (2017-2020), which has explored the collection of social digital photography in new and innovative ways. The anthology consist of 278 pages well illustrated with social digital photos. It can also be downloaded from DiVA portal (a Swedish finding tool for research publications and student theses) http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1429411 Connect to Collect consists of four parts. The first part provides a conceptual framework for social digital photography in relation to the collection of visual cultural heritage. In Chapter 1 Anna Dahlgren reviews current research in the field and frames the implications for collecting social digital photography, by raising questions around ethics, the roles of museums and archives as providers of long-term commitment and open sources, and as providers of context. In Chapter 2 Lisa Ehlin discusses the practices and expressions of images, primarily among younger generations. She discusses the very realness of online social life for digital natives, and how sharing has become a way to see and be seen. In Chapter 3, Paula Uimonen summarises survey results from the research project, framed in a discussion on social media photography and digital cultural heritage. The chapter outlines the holistic approach of the project and insights gained from its innovative efforts in collecting digital visual heritage. The second part presents the 11 case studies carried out by the project team (Elisabeth Boogh, Kajsa Hartig, Bente Jensen, Anni Wallenius). The chapters in this part are categorised into three relevant themes to explore, based on the theory of social photography as well as the practices of the institutions. The themes are: places, practices and events. A central part of the case studies has been to examine the entire process of collecting, from idea and planning to collecting and acquisition, to identify critical points where new methods challenge existing work practices as well as opportunities where online collecting could benefit the museum or archive in a much broader sense than just developing photography collections. The third part presents new collecting interfaces. Chapter 7 discusses the development of a new prototype web app for collecting social digital photography. The web app is open source and can be downloaded from GitHub and is discussed more thoroughly in the next blog post. Chapter 8 explores image recognition as a feature of collecting processes. Arran Rees writes about the experiments made in the project by running images collected in the case studies through three different image recognition services to explore their usefulness in regards to social digital photography collections. The fourth part concludes the anthology and presents a set recommendations and a toolkit for collecting designed to support museums and archives wishing to initiate collecting projects. It is uploaded separetly. http://collectingsocialphoto.nordiskamuseet.se/
Invoking Flora Nwapa: Nigerian women writers, femininity and spirituality in world literature, 2020
https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-revie... more https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-reviewed series of academic monographs and edited volumes. The series strives to provide an open access platform for contemporary anthropological research. With its unique insights into the human condition, anthropology offers a fresh perspective on social life around the world, which the series aims to convey.
Published in Digital Divides: The New Challenges and Opportunities of e-Inclusion, edited by Kim ... more Published in Digital Divides: The New Challenges and Opportunities of e-Inclusion, edited by Kim Andreasson. CRC Press. 2015
Anthropology and Humanism, 2019
SummaryThis article explores how women writers in Nigeria and Tanzania use digital media, drawing... more SummaryThis article explores how women writers in Nigeria and Tanzania use digital media, drawing parallels between infrastructural enablement and literary worldmaking. It argues that female African writers offer insights into the embodied practices and cultural imaginaries of digitally mediated creativity, which can shed light on the paradoxical entanglements of infrastructure.
Social Anthropology, 2009
annual conference of the Internet Society, INET, 1997
This paper explores the potential role of the Internet in promoting sustainable and equitable dev... more This paper explores the potential role of the Internet in promoting sustainable and equitable development in Third World countries. Possibilities of using the Internet in a way that will benefit society at large and vulnerable groups in particular are analyzed within the wider framework of ...
American Anthropologist, 2009
at Los Angeles Johannes Fabian's contributions to anthropology are distinctive. Depending on wher... more at Los Angeles Johannes Fabian's contributions to anthropology are distinctive. Depending on where you start, he is an Africanist; a linguistic anthropologist; a partisan and critic of the "Writing Culture" moment in U.S. anthropology; a folklorist and student of popular culture; a historian of drug use by colonial anthropologists; a theorist of time, memory, and alterity; and now something of a hacker. Two books have been published recently that capture some of his heterogeneously distinctive work. The first, Memory against Culture, collects several recent talks and articles, including one called "Ethnography from the Virtual Archive," which is the germ of the second book, Ethnography as Commentary. This second book is both a meditation on creating a "virtual archive" of ethnographic sources and a "late ethnography" of a popular ritual that Fabian experienced in 1974 in Zaire with a healer named Kahenga. Ethnography as Commentary is a fabulous (and short) book. It is an excellent introduction to the detailed practice of ethnographic interpretation; it is also a very thoughtprovoking meditation on the changing possibilities of the ethnographic monograph after the Internet and of the idea of ethnography as commentary. Last, it is an experiment in "late ethnography," in which an explanation of a cultural event (Kahenga's ritual exclusion and protection of Fabian's house) is conducted through memory, notes, and other sources; contrasted with the practice of writing history; and used to shed light on the authority of ethnographies based in contemporary sources. The core of the experiment discussed by Fabian in Ethnography as Commentary is the creation of an online resource of materials: The Language and Popular Culture in
Digital Photography and Everyday Life
This chapter focuses on mobile photography in Tanzania, with an emphasis on the materiality of pr... more This chapter focuses on mobile photography in Tanzania, with an emphasis on the materiality of production and circulation. Shaped by the materiality of the mobile phone, a personal artefact that em ...
Invoking Flora Nwapa: Nigerian women writers, femininity and spirituality in world literature, 2020
https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-revie... more https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-reviewed series of academic monographs and edited volumes. The series strives to provide an open access platform for contemporary anthropological research. With its unique insights into the human condition, anthropology offers a fresh perspective on social life around the world, which the series aims to convey.
The Anthropologist as Writer, 2016
https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-revie... more https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-reviewed series of academic monographs and edited volumes. The series strives to provide an open access platform for contemporary anthropological research. With its unique insights into the human condition, anthropology offers a fresh perspective on social life around the world, which the series aims to convey.
https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-revie... more https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-reviewed series of academic monographs and edited volumes. The series strives to provide an open access platform for contemporary anthropological research. With its unique insights into the human condition, anthropology offers a fresh perspective on social life around the world, which the series aims to convey.
https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-revie... more https://www.stock holmuniversitypress.se/site/books/series/anthropology-society/) is a peer-reviewed series of academic monographs and edited volumes. The series strives to provide an open access platform for contemporary anthropological research. With its unique insights into the human condition, anthropology offers a fresh perspective on social life around the world, which the series aims to convey.