On 7 July 2026, the Centre of Governance and Human Rights convened the Cambridge Colloquium on Communication Technology and Politics at the Provost’s Lodge, King’s College. The colloquium brought together thirteen scholars from across the University and beyond working in different disciplines from Classics, History, English, Sociology, Middle Eastern Studies, to social psychology, for an afternoon of discussion about how the means of communication have been bound up with the making and unmaking of political power. It was convened by Professor Sharath Srinivasan, CGHR Co-Director, and Dr Antoine Sander, CGHR Research Associate, as part of the Centre’s work under its Communication Technology and Contentious Politics theme.
The premise was straightforward. Scholars working on writing, print, telegraphy, broadcasting and digital media study recognisably related problems—how a medium distributes authority, who is included and excluded by an infrastructure, what forms of refusal a technology invites—but they publish in different journals, cite different literatures and seldom find themselves in the same room. The colloquium was designed to put them there, with as little scaffolding as possible.
Discussion was organised around four communicative galaxies: the Turing (digital), the Edison (electric and broadcast), the Gutenberg (print), and the Seshat (writing) galaxies. Contributors were asked to speak briefly to a shared set of prompts. In the eras and societies they study, what is distinctive about the relationship between the means of communication and forms of social or political power? What unexpected modes of domination, and of resistance, did technological change introduce? And what does that vantage point suggest for thinking about power and politics in a digital present and future?
The Turing session was opened by Dr Maya Ganesh (Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence), Professor Ella McPherson (Sociology, and CGHR Co-Director), Dr Nanna Sæten (Gonville and Caius College) and Professor Sander van der Linden (Psychology). The Edison session was led by Dr Arthur Asseraf and Dr Jean-Michel Johnston (History). The Gutenberg session brought together Professor Clare Pettitt, Professor Jason Scott-Warren and Dr Edward Wilson-Lee (English). The Seshat session was opened by Tim Brookes (Endangered Alphabets Project), Dr Mehdy Shaddel (Middle Eastern Studies), Professor Philippa Steele and Dr Yanru Xu (Classics).
Much of the discussion turned on how readily the digital is narrated as the inevitable outcome of a succession of technologies, each replacing the last, and on how much that narrative conceals. Media, several contributors observed, do not die when new ones arrive; they are repositioned, and the political work they do shifts accordingly. A second thread concerned expectation: what a communication technology does often runs through what people believe it is doing, and those beliefs have repeatedly proved a poorer guide to outcomes than anyone expected. A third returned to exclusion — that every network constitutes an inside by constituting an outside, and that the politics of a medium is often clearest at its margins.
Underlying all of this was the normative purpose that animates the theme. If the arrangements we have are neither natural nor inevitable, the question of how civic action and democratic popular sovereignty might be radically rethought in our technological present becomes a live one rather than a rhetorical one. The colloquium did not settle it, and was not meant to. What it produced instead was a set of shared questions held in common across a group of scholars who had not previously worked together, and a strong sense that the conversation should continue.
