Thanks to Kimberly Takahata and Alex Gil for inviting me!
Friday, April 19th
4pm in Studio Butler (208b)
Columbia University Libraries
Decolonizing Data Regimes
In this age of datafication, the quantification of human bodies, behaviors, and interactions has raised myriad concerns about ethics and privacy. My talk takes a media archaeological approach to sift through those prehistories which have shaped our contemporary digital landscape. Specifically, I historicize trends toward datafication in the context of colonial communication networks in the Global South. The data regimes we see today are premised upon a colonial geography and a colonial rhetoric of technomodernity, and to decolonize digital platforms we must take a long historical view on data ethics grounded in the Global South. My talk articulates some of these possibilities for postcolonial data interventions for digital infrastructures.
Dhanashree Thorat 