Introduction: digital activism in the Global South

This article introduces the Special Issue on Digital Activism in the Global South: Agency, Identity, and Representation. It adopts the critical lens of Cultural Discourse Studies (CDS), arguing that contemporary digital resistance cannot be adequately understood through either celebratory narratives of technological democratization or reductive accounts of platform determinism. Bringing together contributions from diverse geopolitical and cultural contexts, the Special Issue examines how marginalized communities strategically appropriate digital media infrastructures to negotiate visibility, identity, memory, legitimacy, and political agency within deeply unequal communication environments structured by colonial histories, racialization, caste hierarchy, developmental inequality, and platform capitalism. Rather than conceptualizing digital activism as a universalized form of technologically enabled participation, the issue foregrounds it as a heterogeneous field of culturally situated discursive struggles shaped by uneven historical and intercultural relations.