About the Summer School

The 2026 Southern Digitalities Summer School features three key components:

1. Theory and methods master classes on digital research methods; epistemic decolonization of digital media; and critical approaches to digital cultures and transformations led by instructors coming from leading media studies institutions.
2. Graduate students and early career scholars presenting their research and receiving feedback from faculty instructors and other participants.
3. A public symposium showcasing international keynote speakers exploring diverse dimensions of digital transformation across the Global South, with a focus on cultural practices, heritage formations, and future imaginaries.

Location: Hanoi, Vietnam

The 2026 Southern Digitalities Summer School is co-organized by the Center for Digital Cultures and Societies (University of Queensland, Australia), the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South (#IAS_NUQ) (Northwestern University in Qatar), and the School of Interdisciplinary Sciences and Arts (Vietnam National University, Vietnam).

Themes

The Southern Digitalities Summer School is designed to develop critical skills for early career scholars of media and communication working on digital transformations across a broad range of Asian contexts, spanning West, South, Central, East, Southeast Asia, and beyond. At the heart of the summer school is the concept of Southern digitalities—a notion that invites us to rethink how we theorize digitalities i.e. the condition of living in digital cultures by taking seriously digital experiences, cultures, and technology in the Global South, a nexus made up of diverse and interconnected digital encounters, practices, and frictions, rather than a neatly defined geography.

For this summer school, we are particularly interested in projects that address both the material infrastructures and immaterial affects that mediate everyday life, governance, labor, and cultural expression within and across Asia, also understood as a contested, and interconnected rather than bounded geography. Bringing together scholars working in, on, and from diverse contexts, topics, or disciplines, the summer school seeks to foster transnational and multilingual networks of theory and practice grounded in epistemologies and genealogies of the Global South.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Digital temporalities – Waiting, work, and rhythms in digital economies
• Subaltern infrastructures – Piracy, repair, and informal tech systems
• Technonationalism – Sovereignty, surveillance, and digital borders
• Viral politics – Memes, misinformation, and digital populism
• Gendered digitalities – Care, generation, inheritance
• Post-digital futures – Resistance, refusal, and alternative imaginaries
• Sensorial media – Sound, touch, and aesthetics of the interface
• Transnational (dis)connections – Diaspora, solidarity, border-crossing
• Digital ruin – Obsolescence, toxicity, and material afterlives

Instructors

1. Marwan M. Kraidy (Northwestern University in Qatar)
2. Nicholas Carah (University of Queensland, Australia)
3. Cheryll Ruth Soriano (De LaSalle University, Philippines)
4. Hatim El-Hibri (George Mason University, USA)
5. Clovis Bergère (Northwestern University in Qatar)
6. Giang Nguyen-Thu (University of Queensland, Australia)

Eligibility 

We invite applications from current graduate students and other early-career scholars (who have received their PhD within the past 4 years) in the social sciences and humanities. Applicants working on topics related to media, communications, and information studies in the Global South are encouraged to apply.

The working language of the Summer School is English; applicants should therefore have a strong command of English.

Round-trip economy airfare, accommodation, and meals will be covered for the duration of the Summer School.

Application

Interested applicants should submit the following:

1. Cover Page – Include your name, contact information, and institutional affiliation; and thesis/dissertation, supervisor name/contact information and expected completion date of degree (if applicable).
2. Research Proposal – Include the title of your project, research questions, topic significance, theoretical framework, methodological design, clear description of primary sources and necessary language skills, and where you are in the research process (1000 words maximum, not including bibliography).
3. Personal Narrative – Explain how your attendance at the 2026 Southern Digitalities Summer School can support your current research project and how you hope to benefit from attendance (500 words maximum).
4. CV – Not to exceed two singled-spaced pages

Please submit all application materials as a single PDF document to ias@qatar.northwestern.edu by December 10, 2025. 

We will review applications and may request additional information from applicants.

Accepted participants will be notified by email by mid-January and asked to submit a 6,000-8,000-word polished draft of a research paper for feedback by March 1, 2026.

Travel will only be booked upon submission of the polished draft.