Technocolonialism: digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian response to refugee crises

Digital innovation and data practices are increasingly central to the humanitarian response to recent refugee and migration crises. In this article I introduce the concept of technocolonialism to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial relationships of dependency. Technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that data and digital innovation play in entrenching power asymmetries between refugees and aid agencies and ultimately inequalities in the global context. This occurs through a number of interconnected processes: by extracting value from refugee data and innovation practices for the benefit of various stakeholders; by materializing discrimination associated with colonialism; by contributing to the production of social orders that entrench the ‘coloniality of power’ and by justifying some of these practices under the context of ‘emergencies’. By reproducing the power asymmetries of humanitarianism, data and innovation practices become constitutive of humanitarian crises themselves

Integrated hazard identification within the risk management of industrial biological processes

In recent years bioprocesses are becoming a cornerstone of the production industry and have been implemented for large scale production. Despite its importance, the safety of such processes has not been yet systematically analyzed and studied. The hazards of biotechnological processes entail both conventional chemical process hazards and biohazards related to the presence of microorganisms. In the present study a specific methodology for hazard identification in biotechnological processes has been developed, aimed at the integrated assessment of conventional hazards and biohazards at industrial scale. The potentialities and outcome of the methodology were tested by its application to the anaerobic digestion of animal manure for biogas production, which represents a widespread bioprocess for energy production from renewable sources

The rhetorics and myths of anti-piracy campaigns: criminalization, moral pedagogy and capitalist property relations in the classroom

Studying remixed texts with adolescents and young adults can open up space for important discussions of creativity, ethical appropriation, and media power. © 2013 International Reading Association