The DMS lab was delighted to host Dr Anselmo Matusse in our media, development and environment postgrad class for our past teaching block. An inspiring conversation about the digital environmental humanities, with discussions spanning infrastructure, extraction, platforms, ecology and the uneven environmental costs of digital life across the Global South. Grateful for the generous engagement, critical insights and rich discussion with our students.
#dmslab #environmentalhumanities #digitalhumanities @university_of_cape_town@cfmsuct
Join us on Tuesday, 19th May for a gameplay and discussion of Nyamakop’s latest game, Relooted (2026). Relooted is an action-platformer with Afro-futurist themes where the players goal is to reclaim cultural African artefacts from Western museums.
We’ll use this session not only to explore the game, but have a discussion led by CFMS lecturer Dr Danielle Becker on digital displays of reparation. Playing Relooted poses the question: are we witnessing material justice, or the illusion of it?
Date: Tuesday, 19th May
Time: 14:00-16:00
Venue: DMS Lab (AC Jordan A17)
Hybrid link available via the QR code on the attached poster.
Moved online due to severe weather!
Climate Leadership for Just Transition
Join us this Tuesday at out staff seminar for a special presentation by @fossilfreesa
📆 Tuesday, 12 May
🕑 13h00 to 14h00
📍 Scan the QR code or see link in story
Can't make it in person? Scan the QR code to join online
Universities should be pillars of Climate leadership. Fossil Free SA emerged from the 9 year campaign with over 5000 signatures from staff and students culminating in UCT's 2022 commitment to fossil fuel divestment (a prudent financial strategy and condition of moral authority on the climate emergency). What has happened since this commitment? What principles can UCT embrace to lead the way for climate action and a just energy transition in Africa? And, how can staff be part of this?
Universities are the institutions that lead most of the research outlining the scale and severity of the climate crisis, and its probable impacts on Africa. Many South African universities have missions and visions for being centres of social justice and should be communicating the full risks of climate change to society at large, offering social leadership rather than giving the wrong tacit signals to the rest of society. FFSA's Climate Leadership Platform offers a framework for UCT to do this.
New research strand at the DMS Lab! Led by Dr Danielle Becker, we’ll be working across platforms, African gaming cultures, feminist and queer play, and AI in games. We have supervision slots for two Hons students keen to work in this area for 2027, more info about how to apply coming your way next semester. Get in touch if this is your thing!
#dmslab #videogames #humanitiesresearch #universityofcapetown
New publication! What happens to platforms when they die? The piece reflects on Twitter/X as an infrastructural space that shaped political conversation, activist visibility, affective connection, and everyday public life, while asking what remains when platforms destabilise, decay, or transform beyond recognition.
#dmslab #researchpaper #twittergram
Critically Engaging with the SA Draft AI Policy
Professors, researchers, academics, and scholars from the Centre for Film and Media Studies and the Digital Media Sociology Lab at UCT met today to critically engage with the Draft South African National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Policy in the lab today. Noting what was lacking in the policy framework, they identified key areas to submit proposals for amendments - specifically in the Critical AI Literacy and Education, Journalism, and Creative Arts spheres.
Through critical engagement, media studies is ideally situated to comment on and inform policy such as this. The team is inspired and ready to get to work on drafting comments for submission.
Last Friday, DMS postgraduate students Fadiyah Rabin (PhD Candidate) and Storm Sadovsky (MA Candidate) delivered a guest lecture for CFMS’s Media, Development and the Environment course. Students were introduced to the Walkthrough method - a way to analyse apps and platforms from a qualitative research perspective. This was followed with a practical example of a DMS Lab collaborative paper on the South African app, EskomSePush.
Students were encouraged to test out the methodology themselves for a preliminary analysis of apps relating to development and the environment.
Congratulations to DMS postdoctorate fellow Nicola Davies-Laubscher on her recent publication alongside Dani Madrid-Morales, Herman Wasserman and Fatoumata Sow in Routledge’s Information Communication & Society.
It is open access and available at the link in our bio under “Recent Publications”.
Caps off, dreams on 🎓✨
Celebrating our incredible DMS graduates from the University of Cape Town — your hard work, resilience, and passion have brought you to this moment, and we couldn’t be prouder.
@cfmsuct
#UCTGrad #DMSGraduates #ClassOf2026 #ProudMoment #FutureLeaders
New Opportunities with Digital Humanities
Marie-Laure Massot, a research engineer from the French National Centre for Sientific Research, joined us for our Tuesday Seminar. Marie-Laure, using case studies from her work with the Digit_Hum initiative, showed us how Digital Humanities acts as a bridge between traditional research practices and the new opportunities afforded by technology.
One such affordance is the new technological tools that allow scholars to visualize research results in new and innovative format. The digital humanities allows scholars to be truly hybrid through utilizing traditional and new affordances for research. Digital Humanities open up exciting, new opportunities, but also new challenges.
Ultimately, the heart of Digital Humanities is the collective intelligence created by these hybrid, collaborative scholars.
Join us on Tuesday for the CFMS lunchtime seminar with Marie-Laure Massot, research engineer at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
For the past decade, the Digit_Hum initiative has served as an archive of the emerging field of digital humanities. Launched in 2015 by three research engineers at the École normale supérieure in Paris, initially as part of an annual symposium, it has since expanded to include surveys and profiles, video recordings, and illustrations, as well as the creation of resources for documentary and educational purposes. This diverse content reflects the evolution of the digital humanities in France over the past decade and is all accessible via its website (https://digithum.huma-num.fr/). As both a participant and witness to the emergence of these new practices, Digit_Hum has continuously documented and examined them, positioning itself at the intersection of the humanities and the digital field. Ten years of exchange, enrichment, and acculturation in the service of collective intelligence in the humanities and social sciences, illustrated through a few examples.
Date: Tuesday, 7th April
Time: 13:00
Venue: AC Jordan, 4A
Hybrid link available in bio.
