Browsing by Author "Roberts, Tony"

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    Digital citizenship in Africa
    (Zed Books, 2023-05-23) Bosch, Tanja; Roberts, Tony; Bosch, Tanja
    Since the so-called Arab Spring, citizens of African countries have continued to use digital tools in creative ways to ensure that marginalised voices are heard, and to demand for the rights they are entitled to in law: to freely associate, to form opinions, and to express them online without fear of violence or arrest. The authors of this compelling open access volume have brought to life this dramatic struggle for the digital realm between citizens and governments; documenting in vivid detail how citizens are using mobile and internet tools in powerful viral global campaigns to hold governments accountable and force policy change. With contributions from scholars across the continent, Digital Citizenship in Africa illustrates how citizens have been using VPNs, encryption, and privacy-protecting browsers to resist limits on their rights to privacy and political speech. This book dramatically expands our understanding of the vast and growing arsenal of tech tools, tactics, and techniques now being deployed by repressive governments to limit the ability of citizens to safely and openly express opposition to government and corporate actions. AI-enabled surveillance, covertly deployed disinformation, and internet shutdowns are documented in ten countries, concluding with recommendations on how to curb government and corporate power, and how to re-invigorate digital citizenship across Africa. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.
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    Open Access
    Feminist digital citizenship in Africa
    (Zed Books, 2025-12-30) Bosch, Tanja; Roberts, Tony; Bosch, Tanja; Roberts, Tony
    Feminist Digital Citizenship in Africa: Agency, Rights and Resistance, edited by Tanja Bosch and Tony Roberts (Zed Books, Bloomsbury, 2025), is the first edited volume authored entirely by African feminist scholars to document the continent's emerging wave of digital citizenship. The book theorises feminist digital citizenship as the use of mobile and internet technologies, particularly social media, to participate in civic and political life in ways that advance gender rights, bodily autonomy, and sexual freedoms long suppressed within mainstream public spheres. Ten country-specific case studies spanning Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone Africa, including Nigeria, Zambia, South Africa, Guinea, Egypt, Mozambique, Malawi, Sudan, and Ethiopia, examine episodes of feminist contention in which digital tools are mobilised to circumvent patriarchal editorial control in legacy media and political institutions, generating counter-publics where marginalised voices articulate rights claims directly. The volume develops a "digital dialectic" framework that holds in tension the productive affordances of digital platforms, including the capacity to build safe spaces and sustain transnational solidarity, against their concurrent use by patriarchal actors to conduct surveillance, disinformation, and online gender-based violence. Chapters draw on intersectional analysis attentive to gender, race, sexuality, class, and coloniality, with sustained attention to LGBTQ+ struggles and transgender online solidarity practices. The introductory chapter situates the case studies within a critique of white Western digital feminism and articulates a conformist-reformist-transformist framework for differentiating modes of feminist digital action. Building on the editors' earlier volume Digital Citizenship in Africa: Technologies of Agency and Repression (2023), the collection contributes to digital media studies, African studies, gender and queer studies, and citizenship theory. The book is published open access under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) through Bloomsbury Open Collections.