Online EventDecember 3 2020

Computing in/from the South: A Global Celebration

Launch event for Catalyst Journal Vol. 6 No. 2

Thursday, December 3, 2020
11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. ET

Join Data & Society, Catalyst, and Rede Mocambos for this special Global Launch event to honor the recent journal release edited by Sareeta Amrute and Luis Felipe R. Murillo: Computing in/from the South: A Special Section of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Featured researchers, artists, and participants will share the process behind their findings, and come together across borders to celebrate these research projects’ community building, shaping, and upending capacities. The event’s panels will be hosted live, and a recording will be shared afterwards. RSVP here to attend. Please note any accessibility requests in your RSVP.

When: Thursday, December 3, 2020

  • 9-10:15 a.m. PST
  • 11am-12:15 p.m. EST
  • 1-2:15 p.m. BRT
  • 6-7:15 p.m. EET
  • 9:30-10:45 p.m. IST
  • 12-1:15 a.m. CST (Fri Dec 4)

About the Special Issue

Computer expertise involves technical competence, infrastructures, interdependent economies, and distinctive political projects. Yet, most often, computing is examined from Silicon Valley outwards. In this special issue, we reverse this polarity by asking, what does computing expertise as political action look like from the South?

This special section explores distinctive manifestations of technical politics in the Global South, understood as a position in unfolding sociotechnical relationships as much as a geopolitical location. Through computer experts’ work and technopolitical imaginaries we ask:

  • How might new political forms incorporate the market logics of competitiveness, agility, autonomy, and risk while contending with non-liberal and, at times, anti-capitalistic dispositions?
  • How does shifting the dominant perspectives on computing afford an alternate view of progress and future societies
  • How do models of technical innovation become tied to state practices, public policies, expert community-building, and the everyday labor of embodied technical work?
  • How do practitioners ‘of the South’ pursue feminist and queer, anti-gentrification and free/open-source projects that might both yield viable substitute models and intensify relations of debt and inequality for, and crucially, within, the South?