Dr Francesca Romeo's Digital Necropolitics: Sovereign Power and Networked Resistance

Digital Necropolitics explores how virtual forums and digital reconstructions extend biological death, transforming it into a productive "after-life" that can reanimate the corpse as a constituent part of social identities and political movements. Focusing on the circulation of images that highlight the dead, dying, disappeared, or wounded body, my research explores how sovereignty and testimony are reshaped by critical media practices that challenge state power.

Dr. Francesca Romeo, is a Digital Studies Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Romeo received her BA in English with an emphasis in post-colonial literature from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Photography and an MS in Art History from Pratt Institute, and a PhD in Film and Digital Media from UC Santa Cruz. Her scholarship examines the nexus of digital media and political violence. Drawing upon visual studies and political theory to interrogate the nature of information and advocacy in the digital age, she is particularly invested in how networked resistance proliferates in a global context through the production and circulation of images. Her interest in the political efficacy of documentary images stems from a decades-long practice as a fine art photographer, in which she navigated themes of intimacy and addiction through the prism of various subcultures.