Technology, Violence, and Resistance: Feminist, Decolonial, and Intersectional Perspectives

Abstract

Technological systems amplify historical forms of colonization in a complex arrangement of practices, materialities, territories, bodies, and subjectivities. This new epistemological order based on data extractivism and the capture of social life (Couldry and Mejias 2018) reproduces exclusion, violence, and threatens life. This panel will address the connections between structural and technological violence–from design and infrastructure, big data, code and algorithms, surveillance and data extraction, to intimate forms of online violence such as non-consensual dissemination of intimate images, trolling, and stalking. These forms of violence increasingly affect marginalized communities-women,  LGBTQ+ and gender non-conforming individuals, low-income communities, people of color-as they integrate the datafied society, as well as becoming the focus of activism. Following this year’s theme, this transdisciplinary panel aims to explore the different forms of technology-related violence, as well as the ways in which communities interrupt violence and create regenerative strategies of resistance that imagine other futures in the spirit of a Feminist STS that hopes “…for transformations of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing” (Haraway 1988). Thus, we invite papers that focus on the possibilities of rethinking technologies to design for the pluriverse: a world where many worlds fit (Escobar 2018). We welcome papers that analyze configurations of oppression and resistance at the personal, community or systemic level, as well as the politics of violence embedded throughout technologies. We are especially interested in papers that employ feminist, decolonial, and intersectional perspectives, focusing on the Global South as well as on marginalized communities in the Global North.

Chair

• Isabel Gabel, University of Pennsylvania

Individual Presentations

• Intimate Demolitions: Violence, Repair, and Colonial Technologies in Urban Morocco - Daniel Williford, University of Michigan

• Responding to the Violent and Extractive Logic of Data Mining with Environmental Data Justice - Lourdes Annette Vera, Northeastern University; Becky K Mansfield, Ohio State University

• Subversive Bodies: Life, Death and DNA in Contemporary Mexico - Ernesto Schwartz Marin, Exeter University

• Media Scarcity on the New Silk Road: A Study of the Pak-China Fiber Optic Cable - Ayesha Omer, New York University

Session Organizer

• Firuzeh Shokooh-Valle, Franklin and Marshall College