Panel Brief: Digital Colonialism and the Technologies of Control
Hosted by Workstream 4.1: The Violence of Colonialism | CEVAW
This panel explores digital colonialism as an extension of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy into digital spaces. It examines how technologies become tools of racialised surveillance, gendered violence, and heteronormative control.
Focusing on the lived realities of those most impacted—Indigenous, racialised, queer, trans, and survivor communities—panelists will address tech-facilitated abuse including image-based violence, coercive control, doxxing, and algorithmic erasure. Discussions will trace connections between state surveillance, platform harms, and intimate partner violence, while highlighting acts of digital resistance, refusal, and care.
Presenter bios:
Dhaksh Sooriyakumaren (PhD candidate, CEVAW)
Dhaksh Sooriyakumaren is a Tamil person whose ancestral homelands are in the north and east of Illankai (Sri Lanka). They began their career as a civil engineer before shifting focus to social justice, governance, and critical research. Dhaksh is now a PhD candidate in the Centre of Critical Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University and a CEVAW scholarship holder. They are undertaking a multi-sited ethnography of digital surveillance and authoritarianism across Chennai, Colombo, and New York. Their work develops theoretical and creative frameworks to understand how trans, racialised, and other marginalised communities resist surveillance and build infrastructures of survivance. Situated at the intersections of surveillance studies, Indigenous and postcolonial studies, critical urban geography, and gender and sexuality studies, their research foregrounds anti-colonial, transnational solidarities.
Dr Madi Day (Associate Investigator CEVAW)
Dr Madi Day is a trans Murri who was raised up on Dharug Ngurra where they live and work in the Blak LGBTQIA+SB community. Their work joins a tradition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander trans people who continue the longest running protest to colonialism and carry an unbroken legacy of resistance to attacks on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, lives and systems of governance and kinship. Madi specialises in research and policy concerning Indigenous peoples, gendered violence, digital technology, and whiteness and the far right.
Dr Tamika Worrell (Associate Investigator CEVAW)
Tamika Worrell is from Gamilaroi Country, Western New South Wales in so-called Australia. She has been grown up by Dharug Ngurra (Country), where she continues to live and work. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Critical Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University and is also the Director of Research Training. Her research interests are broadly in Indigenous representation, Indigenous Higher Education success, education more broadly and digital lives, including artificial intelligence.
Michelle Gissara (Guest)
Michelle Gissara is a recipient of a Vice Chancellor’s Indigenous Predoctoral Research Fellowship at RMIT University. Her Honours research scrutinized news media representation of image-based abuse available to Victorians. Key recommendations from this research were presented at the ANZSOC (Australia and New Zealand Society of Criminology) Conference in 2021. She is currently embarking on a PhD exploring the lived experiences of First Nations women and LGBTQIA+ people who are victim-survivors of image-based sexual abuse. Her research interests include abuse and violence against women, Indigenous justice, and social and emotional well-being.
Rebekah Bowling (Guest)
Rebekah Bowling (she/her/ia) descends from Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, and Waitaha tribes in Te Waipounamu, also known as the South Island, in Aotearoa New Zealand. Rebekah is both a lecturer and PhD candidate in criminology at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her doctoral research explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), and Māori data sovereignty. Grounded in kaupapa Māori methodologies, her work focuses on Māori needs and aspirations in relation to tino rangatiratanga, our sovereignty, and how these interact with surveillance technologies, policing, and facial biometrics.