Resistance Within and Against Digital Surveillance Regimes

Talk at Resistance Psychology Network, 3 March 2025

Although the first decade of the 21^st century was dominated by a fascination with the role of digital technologies in socio-political mobilisation and resistance movements, the widespread surveillance and controlling affordances of digital technologies – especially after the Snowden revelations- had a sobering effect. In this talk, Azadeh Akbari will discuss the concurrent evolution of digital resistance and digital authoritarianism in the context of Iran’s women’s rights movement. She discusses women’s resistance in cyberspace, digital censorship and control, and the meaning of these developments in everyday life. She argues that expansive datafication of different aspects of life fundamentally changes human subjectivity and embodiment and cannot be countered by conventional resistance strategies.