prof. dr. M.I. (Marianne ) Franklin

In my research, I explore the geocultural politics of digital networked media and communications, culture and society at the online-offline nexus. Topics I have published under this rubric cover global trends in the music industry, everyday life online from a postcolonial perspective, media debates around veil dressing, human rights online and surveillance, ICT for Development issues in internet policy and decoloniality, digitalization and the arts in the case of music sampling.

With degrees (majors in History, Music; PhD in International Relations) and research funding from the Arts and Humanities as well as the Social Sciences, I deploy multidisciplinary and multi-sited ethnographic methodologies in my research. The aim is twofold: (1) to demystify the techno-economic determinism underpinning public and policy debates that put digitalization - the role of "Big Tech", "Big Data", and R&D into Artificial Intelligence - as the driving force of all sociocultural, political and economic transformations. (2) to question the Global North settings in which these debates take place and their implications for public culture and the arts.

Former Chair of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet), the UN-based Internet Rights and Principles Coalition of the Internet Governance Forum, founding Editor on OpenDemocracy of the Human Rights and the Internet series, and member of the Digital Constitutionalism Network, I have been active for some years in advocating human rights agendas for sustainable internet futures in national, regional, and global policymaking spaces.

 A recipient of research funding from the US Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Ford Foundation, and Australian Research Council, I am the 2022 Distinguished Scholar in Science, Technology, Art and International Relations from the International Studies Association.

Recent publications include Change the Record: Punk Women Music Politics (transcript Verlag); “Sustaining Human Rights for Internet Futures” in Research Handbook on Human Rights and Digital Technology, Second Edition, edited by Matthias C. Kettemann, Susannah Montgomery, Kilian Vieth-Ditlmann, and Ben Wagner. Edward Elgar Publishing (2024; 5-25); Sampling Politics: Music and the Geocultural (Oxford University Press); “Global Music Politics: Whose Playlist for Troubled Times?” Current History (2023).

Internet Decolonized, co-edited with Henna Zamurd Butt, is out with Oxford University Press in 2026