User:Kim/reading/Sinthujan Varatharajah and Moshtari Hilal: Hierarchies of Solidarity
Wirklichkeit Books, 2024
A conversation between two authors, originally held in a Instagram live stream, now published as bilingual printed text. Together they question: what does it mean to practice solidarity? and what does it mean to do this on digital platforms?. In here they draw from a wide rage of knowledges, starting from lived experience seeping into political entanglements, philosophical and media critical studies.
- solidarity as reciprocity is even more emphasized not only through the back and forth nature of a conversation but also in the way the text was later written collaboratively, made into a book
- different (or missing) digital infrastructures bring forth different temporalities and flows of information
- news monopolies, anything besides 'mainstream' was hardly accessible
- censorship
Visibilities, as with invisibilities are produced and managed
- practical and everyday forms of solidarity, every day forms of protest ---- reminded me of 'user tactics' resisting algorithms (in Post Scriptum: The Great Algorithm, Valentina Tanni)
- what does it mean to bring academics + research into oppressed groups? possible gain in visibility for group, but bad when group remains passive informer while researchers take advantage
The capacity to receive critique is also central to the practice of solidarity.
Why do experiences of suffering have to outperform another in order to earn our attention or empathy?
- One conflict, oppression cant be explained or treated through the lense of another (liberation for one does not result in liberation for all)
- though this lense is often used by protestors/ oppressed themselves with this trying to make their own struggle comprehendable (to the west)
- this is also about language, that is often missing to express suffering so precedents or comparable events are used
- platforms + economies
- when solidarity becomes state doctrine