Staying with the digital: a comparative study of encounters mediated by peer-support platforms in London and Taipei Seminar

Abstract

In this talk, Yu-Shan will explain how her academic journey from Durham to Helsinki has led her to “stay with the digital”. She will begin by focusing on why to research the digital and how she has navigated through the various troubles this has entailed. Building upon this, she then introduces her research project for the Anniversary Research Fellowship. Her project aims to explore what ‘being with oneself and others’ means by studying encounters in, through and beyond peer-support platforms in London and Taipei. The project will employ an innovative blend of mixed methods, including a comparative strategy, data visualisation, interview and art-based participatory projects to discern when and how specific encounters are rendered helpful to mentally vulnerable individuals. A comparative analysis of different cultures and societies in Taipei and London has the potential to uncover new ethical ways of being and living with oneself and others. She will also explain how this project contributes to wider debates around changing spaces, norms and practices of encounters and further implications for algorithmic governance, vulnerability and ethics.

Speaker Information

Dr Yu-Shan Tseng

I am a Taiwanese digital/urban geographer with a PhD in human geography from Durham University. I have recently joined the University of Southampton as an Anniversary Research Fellow in September 2023. Prior to this, I held an independent three-year postdoctoral position at the University of Helsinki.

My research explores and compares the impacts of digital platforms and algorithms on democracy and urban everyday life in both the Global North and East. I have published extensively on topics of digital democracy and platform urbanism (often using a comparative ethnography or a mixed method) in Social and Cultural Geography, Urban Studies, Big Data and Society, and more. I am currently revising a monograph (as part of the Antipode book series) that unpacks democratic politics geographically – both in urban and digital space as well as from three cities (Madrid, Taipei, and Helsinki).

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