Dear all,
++ With apologies for cross posting ++
Just a gentle reminder, please consider submitting an abstract to the session entitled Artificial Africa: Seeing urban algorithms through infrastructure, labour, justice and aesthetics at the upcoming EASST/4S conference in Prague August 18-21 2020 (see CfP below) and share with anyone potentially interested.
Deadline for abstract submission: 29th February 2020, please submit via the 4S/EASST website: https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/call-for-papers-and-panels/
Artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science are taking off in African cities, and with it, a new incarnation of development policy and practice is emerging. Following knowledge for development and ICT4D, AI4D targets transport, health and finance in anticipation of transforming African societies. The resultant problems with AI typical of debate in the Global North are also anticipated to impact African societies: displacement of labour, data protection and privacy, bias in algorithms and so on. We aim to move away from the idea that doing technoscience in African cities generates artificial social realities that are dislodged and disassociated from more authentic experience. In challenging the assumed universalism of AI, we invite paper proposals exploring four critical dimensions: infrastructure, justice, labour and aesthetics. What kinds of materialities support algorithmic-life in Africa, and how do tensions in the extension of critical infrastructure become points of creativity and vulnerability? What counts as the everyday work of data science and to what extent does it subvert the distinction between informal and formal labour that has long characterised studies of work in African cities? Does data science make possible a regenerative, ground-up form of justice in which un-alienated value circulates? What are the aesthetics of artificial intelligence in African cities and how are technoscientific futures infused with socio-political imaginaries? How do art and fiction provide alternative future-scapes? We hope to open up scope for critical interventions that rethink the relationship between knowledge, technoscience and society in Africa.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Africa, Afrofutures, infrastructure, labour
Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology, Postcolonial/Decolonial STS, and Knowledge, Theory and Method
Best wishes,
Kerry Holden, Matt Harsh and Ravtosh Bal
Dr Kerry Holden
School of Geography
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
102 Geography, Mile End, London E1 4NS
Tel: +44(0)20 7882 8416
Mob: +44 (0)7837665580
Email: k.holden@qmul.ac.uk
www.qmul.ac.uk
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