Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant Project AFROEUROPECYBERSPACE (101110473) & Director of the WOC Research Center Digital Diaspora

Department 10: Linguistics and Literary Studies, U Bremen

„Afroeurope and Cyberspace: Imaginations of Diasporic Communities, Digital Agency and Poetic Strategies – Unravelling the Textures“
Funding period: 2024-2029.

Recently, more and more people of African descent in Romance-speaking Europe have started to tell their stories online, re-appropriating the narrative of who they are and why they are here. The ERC-funded AFROEUROPECYBERSPACE project investigates how they use the internet to gain visibility and participate in knowledge production. Studying online magazines, blogs and other digital formats, it explores how people of African descent narrate experiences of racialisation and of (un)belonging on their own terms and uncovers the challenges they face in cyberspace. The project combines Afroeuropean, postcolonial and digital media studies with literary and cultural studies’ approaches. The aim is to examine the poetic strategies, textures and symbols used to imagine a diaspora online, unravelling the narratives that shape emerging Afrodiasporic subjectivities.