Contact
Other affiliations
Phone
01865 284230
Biography
Kira Allmann is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Media Law and Policy at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. Her current research focuses on digital inequality — how the ubiquitous digitization of our everyday lives is leaving people behind and what people are doing to fix it at a grassroots level. As the internet becomes increasingly essential to the fulfillment of a well-rounded human life, exclusion from the internet due to lack of access or literacy exacerbates other forms of gender-based, racial, geographic, and socio-economic marginalization and disenfranchisement. As an anthropologist, Kira uses ethnographic methods with people who are closing the digital divide from the bottom up, in their communities. She runs two research projects: (1) understanding the human geography of community networks (internet networks owned and operated by local communities) and (2) examining the role of public libraries in providing free digital services. Her work aims at developing more human-centered approaches to and policies for access to technology.
Kira is also the Communications Director at the Oxford Human Rights Hub and a research partner of the Whose Knowledge? campaign, which works to center the knowledge of marginalized communities on the web and raise awareness of the digital exclusions that keep the majority of the world from participating fully in digital knowledge creation and curation.
She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where her dissertation focused on how mobility between online and offline spaces constituted a practice of resistance during and after the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Between 2011 and 2015, Kira conducted ethnographic research in Egypt, blending online and offline qualitative methods, to investigate how the use of digital technologies by Egyptian youth were transforming virtual and physical spaces in the city of Cairo.
Education
DPhil, Oriental Studies (Islamic World), University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
MPhil (with Distinction), Modern Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
BA, Government and Linguistics, The College of William and Mary, Virginia, USA
Twitter: @KiraAllmann
Publications
Report (1)
Internet Publication (7)
DOI: 10.1038/d41586-018-07506-7
Other (1)
Review (1)
DOI: 10.1386/jams.9.2.389_5
Journal Article (1)
This article examines the use of everyday mobile technologies, and mobile telephony in particular, in political activism and protest during the 2011 Egyptian uprisings and throughout its continuing aftermath. The Arab revolutions have their own, now familiar, nomenclature, derived from the semantics of revolution and the digital age. Much of the language used to describe and analyze events in the Middle East has emphasized the “newness” of the technologies of protest and coordination and the uniquely 2.0 characteristics of these political movements. This article confronts this narrative, exploring the role of mobile telephony in Egypt during an ongoing period of political upheaval by moving away from the question of what is “new” or “revolutionary” toward what is ordinary put toward revolutionary ends. The article argues that the Arab Spring presents a crucial opportunity to interrogate and deconstruct the hybrid ecology of people and technological tools. By exploring several specific ways in which mobile telephony has played a role in the Egyptian revolution, this article demonstrates how a fixation on newness not only tells an incomplete story of this technologically mediated revolution but also undermines the ongoing practices of historicizing it.
Centres
Research programmes
Research projects
Research Interests
- Community internet networks
- Autonomous infrastructure
- Human rights in the information society
- Environmental impact of digital technologies
- Political economy of information and communication technologies (especially in the Middle East and North Africa)
- Class and mobility between the online and the offline (especially in the Middle East and North Africa)
- 2011 Egyptian revolution and counter-revolution
News articles for Kira Allmann
11 Dec 2020
*NEW* OxHRH podcast episode: Police Brutality in the United States (with Shea Streeter)
podcast
04 Dec 2020
*NEW* OxHRH podcast episode: Racial Hierarchy and Role of Whiteness (with Savala Trepczynski)
podcast
30 Oct 2020
*NEW* OxHRH Podcast Episode: A Decolonial Approach to Education and the Law (with Dr Foluke Adebisi)
podcast
16 Oct 2020
*NEW* OxHRH Podcast Episode: The Voice of Hong Kong in Exile (with Nathan Law)
podcast
25 Sep 2020
*NEW* OxHRH Podcast Episode: The Transformative Possibilities of a Constitution (with Joel Modiri and Gautam Bhatia)
podcast
11 Sep 2020
*NEW* OxHRH Podcast Available: The Internet, Climate Change, and Human Rights (with Michael Oghia)
podcast
24 Jul 2020
New OxHRH podcast episode - The Politics of Global Health Data (with Sara Davis)
podcast
26 Jun 2020
New OxHRH podcast episode - A Reason for Hope: The Pursuit of Restorative Justice in Colombia (with Judge Julieta Lemaitre)
podcast
15 May 2020
New OxHRH podcast episode - The Impact of Covid-19 on Worker's Rights in the UK (with Michael Ford, QC)
podcast
08 May 2020
New OxHRH podcast episode - The Need for Empathy: Understanding India's COVID-19 Lockdown (with Kalpana Kannabiran)
podcast
01 May 2020
New OxHRH podcast episode - Re-writing Chile's Constitution for Human Rights (with Nicolás Espejo Yaksic)
podcast
24 Apr 2020
New OxHRH podcast episode - Defending Human Rights During a the Covid-19 Pandemic (with Luisa Cabal, UNAIDS)
podcast
06 Mar 2020
OxHRH Celebrates International Women's Day 2020: Spotlighting the Work of OxHRH Women
16 Dec 2019
New OxHRH podcast: Comparative Human Rights Law Book Launch - Sandy Fredman in Conversation with Edwin Cameron
podcast
16 Dec 2019
New OxHRH Podcast: Comparative Human Rights Law Book Launch - Sandy Fredman in Conversation with Justice S. Muralidhar
podcast
07 Nov 2019
CSLS postdoc Dr Kira Allmann interviews Sol Luca de Tena, acting CEO of Zenzeleni community networks, for GenderIT
29 Oct 2019
The Impact of New and Emerging Internet Technologies on Climate Change and Human Rights: Submission to the Advisory Committee to the UN Human Rights Council
05 Aug 2019
Learning Lessons from Litigators: Realising the Right to Education Through Public Interest Lawyering
21 May 2019
Kira Allman awarded a knowledge exchange seed fund grant
30 Jan 2019
Sandy Fredman leads new research project to develop a human rights approach to sexual and reproductive health
Pages
Blog posts by Kira Allmann
17 Apr 2020
Reflecting on our research design: collecting data on digital services at Oxford libraries
By Kira Allmann
The Oxfordshire Digital Inclusion Project
14 Apr 2020
Covid-19 is increasing digital inequality: We need human connectivity to close the digital divide
By Kira Allmann
The Oxfordshire Digital Inclusion Project
02 Oct 2017
RightsUp #RightNow - A No-Man's Land of Justice: Holding Corporations Accountable for Human Rights
By Kira Allmann, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies
Oxford Business Law Blog