Developing a Decolonial Praxis Within ICT: An Autoethnography on Organizing a Participant-led Workshop

• In Event: “Antiracist Science”: Interrogating Knowledge Production, Interrupting Racism

Abstract

As a former software developer and software development educator turned critical scholar, I have observed within my social/professional networks a rising concern for unethical and unjust applications of technology. To nurture this concern, I organized a participant-led workshop with/for ICT workers and students, whom I know through my social/professional networks. The workshop challenged participants to collectively and creatively develop critical analyses of the problems facing them as technologists. Grounded in critical pedagogy and studies of settler colonialism, antiblackness and heteropatriarchy, the workshop’s goal was decolonial praxis.

I will present an autoethnography of my experiences co-organizing, facilitating, and reflecting on this workshop through the lens of critical race studies. I will speak to the personal motivations in engaging in decolonizing work, the hopes and inspirations that sustain this work, and the challenges and contradictions of entering into this work as a white male settler.

ICT workers and students are increasingly speaking, and in some cases organizing, against injustice caused by or linked to technology. Often missing in such actions, however, is a critical analysis of technology in relation to unequal power structures, particularly those (re)produced by the structures of settler colonialism, antiblackness and heteropatriarchy.

Both the workshop and the autoethnography belong to an effort to bridge this gap between the academy and industry. It is my hope that this work will contribute to the development of a decolonial praxis that connects scholars and ICT workers and students challenging the power of Big Tech.

Author

• Horatiu Halmaghi, McGill University