Decolonizing the Curriculum in the Age of Digital Structural Violence

• In Event: Developing Culturally Responsive Curriculum in Higher Education in Challenging Times

Abstract

For our presentation, we will share how our work contributes to collective planning for a more equitable future. We assert that ethical considerations of technology’s role in shaping human development must be a central part of this important discourse. For far too long, we have been passive consumers of new technologies rather than proactive shapers of what role we want them to play in our and our students’ education. To this end, we offer the following paper as a synthesis of the issues at the intersection of technology and equity. We suggest recommendations about how we might equip ourselves and our students to be more active agents in challenging technology’s dehumanizing aspects and harnessing its prosocial benefits.
Algorithmic coloniality (Mohamed, Png, & Isaac, 2020), data coloniality (Couldry & Mejias, 2020), digital neocolonialism (Adams, 2019), and digital structural violence (Winters, et al., 2020) are some of the terms scholars have used to capture growing concern about how technology has been used to exacerbate inequality. To be sure, technology enthusiasts attempt to dismiss these arguments with quips like the story of Plato worrying that the new technology of his time (i.e., paper) would make people ignorant by allowing them not to have to rely on memory. Unfortunately, these preemptive strikes have been effective in silencing legitimate concerns about how the uncritical use of technology has intensified oppression in the form of facial recognition programs that confuse Black people with gorillas, translation software that over-identifies violence in Arabic words, and sentiment analysis tools that classify texts with LGBTQ content as negative (Gebru, 2020).
Hence, it would be educational malpractice not to teach students how to analyze the taken-for-granted assumptions undergirding the seemingly neutral technology that touches every aspect of their learning. Technological progress may be inevitable—and in many ways, good—but we need to continually update our theoretical tools alongside these developments to ensure their humane application. This process can include a thoughtful preservation of past developments, such as the integration of the Umbuntu sensibility, “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.” This is an older idea that has been applied in new ways to family and education as well as management and leadership. In this session, we hope to begin a discussion of how we might use this egalitarian philosophy to inform our and our students’ evolving relationship with technology.

Authors

• Laura Harrison, Ohio University

• Samba Bah, Ohio University