Tuesday, April 27, 2021 10:30am to 12pm
About this Event
Panelists:
Miriyam Aouragh, University of Westminster
Paula Chakravartty, New York University
Nick Couldry, London School of Economics
Ulises Mejias, SUNY Oswego
About the event:
Maps and surveys of "new worlds," passport photos and vaccination cards to control the movement of "impure" bodies, accounting spreadsheets used in plantations of enslaved peoples ... all of these technologies suggest that data has always been an instrument of colonialism.
But can the history of European and American colonialism also help interpret contemporary phenomena like algorithmic racial violence, quarantine apps and vaccination apartheid, the injustices of the gig economy, and disinformation campaigns that threaten democratic futures? By examining these trends not just in the context of the past few decades, but through the lens of the past 500 years, attendees can perhaps gain new insights into why theories of capitalist production may not be enough to make sense of the extractivist technologies of today. These technologies need to be understood as manifestations of something deeper, constitutive of colonialism. Only by looking at the histories of colonial extraction and appropriation of land, nature and labor can one understand that lives are being reconfigured in unprecedented ways, through the medium of data.
Confronted with the new infrastructures of data colonialism, which perpetuate old racial, gender and class injustices, the world must learn from past and present anti-colonial and anti-racist movements and thinkers. Decolonising our data in this context means developing new strategies for resisting the new extractivist order, and for re-imagining internet governance and the digital commons.
Join this important discussion with four authors who, in different ways, have analysed our datafied world through the framework of coloniality.
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