The June 2024 Gen Z protests in Kenya marked a turning point in AI-generated activism, as digital tools became central to political resistance. Following state-led crackdowns, activists retreated online, deploying AI-generated satire, deepfake videos, and synthetic media to challenge government narratives. In response, the Kenyan government escalated AI-driven surveillance, censorship, and metadata tracking, leading to abductions, disappearances, and intensified digital repression. This paper examines how AI functions as both an instrument of political resistance and a tool of state control, creating a contested digital battleground. Using digital ethnography and document analysis, the study situates Kenya’s evolving civic space within broader trends of algorithmic governance and digital authoritarianism. Drawing on Feldstein’s (2023) framework of digital repression and Nyamnjoh’s (2023) critique of digital-human fluidity, it explores the shifting state-citizen relationship, where AI empowers both dissent and control. These findings highlight the escalating technological arms race between activists and the state, shaping Kenya’s future of digital governance and political expression.

Despite the increasing integration of digital technologies into everyday life, research on digital media engagement has largely focused on younger generations, marginalizing the experiences of older adults. This study examines the digital participation of elderly individuals, exploring the strategies they employ to navigate digital platforms, the benefits they derive, and the structural and cultural barriers that hinder their inclusion. Using in-depth interviews with 20 individuals aged 60-75+ from both rural and urban settings in South Korea, this research will provide a nuanced understanding of elderly digital engagement. Addressing the challenges that elderly face in their digital media use is critical to fostering social inclusion and reducing the digital divide, particularly as global aging trends continue to rise. By recognizing older adults as active participants in digital culture rather than passive users, this research contributes to a more inclusive understanding of digital engagement.

Digital documents, particularly those in Portable Document Format (PDF), are deeply embedded in contemporary bureaucratic, legal, and archival infrastructures. Their ubiquity, however, obscures the extent to which file formats actively shape epistemologies of authenticity. In an era where deep fakes and digital manipulations destabilize trust, authenticity is often understood as an inherent property of a document. This paper challenges that assumption, arguing that authenticity is not located within a document itself but in the structures surrounding it—its metadata, format, and circulation; the same structures which re-inscribe practices of informational and data colonialism.

Through a media archaeological approach, I examine the historical development of the PDF, its role in encoding file history, and its function in digital archives and legal frameworks. Drawing from format studies, source criticism, and political economy, this study interrogates how the PDF mediates authenticity, often reinforcing structures of power. The PDF’s affordances of fixity, encryption, and metadata control function as instruments of epistemic gatekeeping, ensuring not only the preservation of knowledge but also its restriction. Furthermore, the role of PDFs in machine learning datasets exemplifies how digitized errors become codified as historical truth, perpetuating systemic exclusions.

Despite the PDF’s entrenchment within digital infrastructures, counter-practices—such as speculative annotation and metadata subversion—challenge its assumed neutrality. By critically analyzing the PDF as both a site of continuity and rupture within digital infrastructures, this paper argues that dismantling data colonialism requires rethinking digital document infrastructures and exploring alternative, more inclusive models of authenticity.

Digital period tracking, facilitated by apps, wearables, and digital health platforms, has largely been examined through a Global North-centric lens. This paper shifts focus to India, where menstruators navigate period tracking within deeply stratified socio-digital environments marked by caste, class, gender, and infrastructural inequalities. While period-tracking apps are positioned as tools for reproductive autonomy, they often reinforce gendered surveillance, datafication, and exclusionary design practices.

By centering the experiences of caste-marginalized, queer, and rural menstruators, this research interrogates the socio-cultural conditions shaping digital menstrual health technologies. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participatory speculative design (PSD) as a methodological approach, the study critically examines how menstruators engage with and navigate digital period tracking.

Despite the promise of digital reproductive health technologies, this paper argues that period-tracking apps in India exist within a broader landscape of social and technological inequities. Identity markers such as caste, gender, and class significantly impact digital access, shaping who can engage with these technologies and under what conditions. Moreover, the lack of robust data protection laws raises concerns about privacy, surveillance, and the commodification of menstrual health data.

By critically examining digital period tracking through a Global Majority perspective, this paper contributes to discussions on self-tracking, technological justice, and digital health equity. It calls for a reimagining of menstrual technologies that are inclusive, culturally relevant, and designed with—not just for—marginalized menstruators.