Coordinator
Prof. SHAH, Nishant
Associate Professor,
School of Journalism and Communication,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Narratives frame how we make meanings of the world. They are the conditions through which stories emerge, bodies get written, and media objects proliferate. Contemporary digital technologies dramatically change the stories being told, bodies telling them, and the media that shape them both.
Current Digital Narrative conditions are heavily informed by a rehearsal of doom, gloom, and crises, that we call ‘politics of despair’. This manifests itself in multiple ways – in how we design-think problems, how we conceptualize users, how we buy into the promise of AI, and how we imagine it. Digital capital and Silicon Valley fueled visions, with respect to current digital development in general and AI in particular, perpetuate myths that we have established as natural.
These myths reinforce the approaches we take and narratives we create to build and imagine our digital futures. They naturalize crises, perpetuate structures of oppression, encode violence, and ease us into politics of despair and apathy. These politics of despair produce stories that reinforce the brokenness of the world while breaking the bodies that are the most vulnerable, and media practices that generate inaction and resignation in the face of seemingly insurmountable crises.
This panel argues that we need to understand narratives as infrastructures that offer tactical elements of imagining, building, and repairing the world so that we move from crises to action, from apathy to hope, and from individual despair to collective care. Each panelist identifies a specific condition of digital crises and shows from their practice, interventions, approaches, and frameworks, ways by which we can create a practice of narrative change. This narrative change requires a decentering of the canon, dismantling geographies of privilege, focusing on communities that have been made invisible, creating new epistemologies from Majority Worlds, and engaging with radical generosity and hope as queer, feminist, and decolonial practices of imagining sustainable futures.
Speakers
Prof. VORA, Kalindi
Professor and Chair of Ethnicity Race and Migration,
Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies,
Professor of American Studies,
Yale University
Data Work as Care Work: Anti-Colonial Data Studies, AI and the Given World
Abstract: Part of the work of postcolonial studies, as well as its challenges by subaltern studies both in South Asian Studies and in Latin American decolonial theory, has been to recover submerged, silenced or otherwise erased or neglected histories of the colonized represent existing and possible subjects and lifeworlds. Development of new technologies based on the datafication and archiving of the world as information, from categorization to collection to database construction, revivify these issues as they come to bear on what Latin American decolonial thinker Anibel Quijano calls “the coloniality of modernity” (1999). To begin to explore what challenging ongoing coloniality in technology design could mean in the face of growing datafication, and to expand an argument for an anti-colonial approach within data studies, this article brings together insights from subaltern studies, postcolonial and decolonial thinking about archives together with Bowker and Star’s concept of “residual categories” to consider interdependent ways of being and knowing that are residues of current projects of datafication. After first describing some of the stakes of bringing together anti-colonial thinking and the idea of residual categories, the paper takes up recent labor organizing by Kenyan microworkers who draw attention to their devalued labor.
Dr. GANESH, Maya Indira
Associate Director (Research Partnerships) and Senior Research Associate,
Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence,
University of Cambridge
Theories and Methods for AI Futures? Notes from a Humanities and Social Sciences Classroom
Abstract: This presentation reports on three years of teaching and administering a master’s program on AI Ethics & Society for working professionals troubled by the development of AI and keen to make a change by adopting frameworks and toolkits for better, more responsible, and ethical AI. We challenge these cohorts of professionals to develop, instead, a ‘critical technical practice’. This presentation contends that such a practice is interdisciplinary and, for that reason, difficult to achieve. Critical technical practice as a frame and an ambition for critical pedagogy must contend with two kinds of pressures on the humanities and social sciences in higher education. The first is the assumed value of non-STEM disciplines to manage the harms and potentially negative outcomes of STEM research and development for society and the planet through framings like ‘ethics’ and ‘the social’; and second, the perceived non-value of HSS disciplines from English to Sociology to Journalism to the university and society more broadly as evidenced by defunding and dismantling of HSS departments in universities across the US and UK. This paper identifies existing and future epistemic trajectories and modes having to be adopted by educationists and scholars in response to how AI creates particular futures and forecloses others.
Dr. HUSSEN, Tigist Shewarega
Postdoctoral Researcher,
Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa Department of Psychology,
University of Cape Town
Global South Feminist Movements and Resistance: Technology and Violence
Abstract: In this presentation, I argue for expanding our understanding and theorising of deeply rooted technology-facilitated violence by revealing the connections among colonialism, transnational politics, nationalism, patriarchy, and the various feminisms promoted across media platforms. Through my experiences as a lead researcher in the Feminist Internet Research Network, it has become evident that the theorisation of technology and violence appears too rigid in framing technology-facilitated violence.
As I explore ways of expanding our understanding of violence and technology—particularly in the contexts of genocide and war—I am also focused on exploring “technologies of a livable future.” This concept is one of the themes presented at this conference, Infrastructures of Repair: Imagining Sustainable Digital Futures. While engaging in feminist critique, defense, and the articulation of realities, as well as opposing the inherent colonialist aspects and design of technologies, envisioning livable possibilities concretely is crucial. This might involve changing our relationship with technology, showcasing innovative ways feminists utilise tech, or collaborating with technologists to develop new solutions.
In this presentation, I will analyse technology-facilitated violence while exploring what a “livable future” means for feminists in the global south. I aim to focus on my deep passion for African feminist digital movement building and activism, which aligns with my scholarly pursuits and political investments in tech feminist research. Within the framework of a “livable future,” I pose the question: How can we envision and strive for a pan-Africanist feminist tech future?