3 PM - 5 PM SAST: Plenary Panel on Decolonization and Beyond
Virtual; see registration link above to attend
Dwai Bannerjee: “Computing in the Time of Decolonization”
Taking South Asia as a key historical case study, I explore how postcolonial nations navigated the legacies of colonialism to build computational infrastructures. By tracing the efforts to establish advanced computational facilities and the barriers faced-including limited resources and political tensions-I underscore the transformative impact of decolonization on the global computing landscape. Finally, this exploration provides insights into the ongoing ambition for technological sovereignty in the Global South.
David Gray Widder & Tamara Kneese: “Salvage Anthropology and ‘Low Resource NLP’: What Computer Science Can Learn from Anthropology’s ‘Critical Turn’”
We show how the unchallenged notion of “good” can go painfully awry, unless accompanied by an examination of how or for whom “good” is defined. We do this through an analysis of anthropology’s reflexive or critical turn: we compare “Low Resource NLP”-which attempts to build computational tools that work equally well on languages in the Global South as they do in English, with salvage anthropology-an ethnographic practice that sought to preserve supposedly dying Indigenous cultures for posterity.
More information on schedule criticalai.org/designjustice/...
About DJAI
DESIGN JUSTICE AI is a collaboration between faculty representing four humanities centers and the Design Justice Network. Lead PI Lauren M. E. Goodlad (Distinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature, Chair of the Critical AI @ Rutgers initiative, and editor of Critical AI) and co-PI Matthew Stone (Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers) represent the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers (with the collaboration of CCA Director Colin Jager); co-PI Katherine Bode (Professor of Literary and Textual Studies at ANU) represents the ANU’s Humanities Research Centre), co-PI Vukosi Marivate (Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria and lead for the Data Science for Social Impact Group) represents Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship), and co-PI Eleni Coundouriotis (Professor of English at UConn) represents University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute (in collaboration with current director Anna Mae Duane).