104 research outputs found
Nonhuman humanitarianism: when âAI for goodâ can be harmful
Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been introduced in humanitarian operations in order to help with the significant challenges the sector is facing. This article focuses on chatbots which have been proposed as an efficient method to improve communication with, and accountability to affected communities. Chatbots, together with other humanitarian AI applications such as biometrics, satellite imaging, predictive modelling and data visualisations, are often understood as part of the wider phenomenon of âAI for social goodâ. The article develops a decolonial critique of humanitarianism and critical algorithm studies which focuses on the power asymmetries underpinning both humanitarianism and AI. The article asks whether chatbots, as exemplars of âAI for goodâ, reproduce inequalities in the global context. Drawing on a mixed methods study that includes interviews with seven groups of stakeholders, the analysis observes that humanitarian chatbots do not fulfil claims such as âintelligenceâ. Yet AI applications still have powerful consequences. Apart from the risks associated with misinformation and data safeguarding, chatbots reduce communication to its barest instrumental forms which creates disconnects between affected communities and aid agencies. This disconnect is compounded by the extraction of value from data and experimentation with untested technologies. By reflecting the values of their designers and by asserting Eurocentric values in their programmed interactions, chatbots reproduce the coloniality of power. The article concludes that âAI for goodâ is an âenchantment of technologyâ that reworks the colonial legacies of humanitarianism whilst also occluding the power dynamics at play
Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulelaâs Minaret and Xiaolu Guoâs A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
This is the author's final draft post-refereeing as published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 207 DOI:10.1177/0021989412440433. The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/2/20
Education for Sustainable Development and retention: unravelling a research agenda
This paper considers the question of what education for sustainable development (ESD) research might signify when linked to the concept of âretentionâ, and how this relation (ESD and retention) might be researched. It considers two different perspectives on retention, as revealed through educational research trajectories, drawing on existing research and case studies. Firstly, it discusses an ESD research agenda that documents retention by focusing on the issue of keeping children in schools. This research agenda is typical of the existing discourses surrounding Education for All (EFA). It then discusses a related ESD research agenda that focuses more on the pedagogical and curricular aspects of retention, as this provides for a deeper understanding of how ESD can contribute to improving the quality of teaching and learning within a wider EFA retention agenda
Bye-bye Barack: dislocating afropolitanism, spectral marxism and dialectical disillusionment in two Obama-era novels
In contextually specific and formally distinctive ways, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichieâs Americanah and Imbolo Mbueâs Behold the Dreamers are fictional interrogations of Obamaâs presidential pledge to resuscitate the American dream on the wake of the global financial crash. This paper explores how they supplement and challenge familiar tropes associated with African and American, rather than African-American, diaspora writing. Given broader debates within transnational literary studies about flows and exchanges (of people, finance, cultural production, dissemination, consumption et al.) linking the global South and North, I consider how these texts grapple with the complexities and complicities of contemporary neoliberalism through the lens of renascent African Marxisms. While my chosen writers could not be described as Marxist, I engage with more materially oriented scholarship, such as Krishnanâs Writing Spatiality in West Africa and Ngugiâs The Rise of the African Novel, to consider how Americanah and Behold the Dreamers circulate in a global literary marketplace where certain texts, not to mention authors, are seen as symptomatic of an African and/or Afropolitan and/or âAfricapitalistâ renaissance. By grappling with Marxist-inflected scholarship, this paper interrogates the politics, as well as poetics, of the oft-conspicuous airbrushing of those socio-economic, specifically class concerns at the heart of these entangled debates
From Feminist Anarchy to Decolonization: Understanding abortion health activism before and after the Repeal of the 8th Amendment
This article analyses abortion health activism (AHA) in the Irish context. AHA is a form of activism focused on enabling abortion access where it is restricted. Historically, AHA has involved facilitating the movement of abortion seekers along âabortion trailsâ (Rossiter, 2009). Organisations operate transnationally, enabling access to abortion care across borders. Such AHA is a form of feminist anarchism, resisting prohibitions on abortion through direct action. However, AHA work has changed over time. Existing scholarship relates this to advancements in medical technology, particularly the emergence of telemedicine and the increased use of early medical abortion. This article goes beyond those explanations to explore how else AHA has changed by comparing the work of AHA before and after the Republic of Irelandâs referendum on abortion in May 2018. Based on this, I argue that there is a visible shift in the politics of AHA. Drawing on qualitative data from research on AHA organisations along the LiverpoolâIreland Abortion Corridor, specifically those based outside Ireland, the article argues that in the aftermath of the referendum, Irish AHA has increasingly moved towards decolonising feminist activism, thus drawing attention to the relationship between abortion health activists (AHAs) and broader political discourses entangled with abortion law reform
Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies
Taking German history and culture as a starting point, this essay suggests a historical approach to reconceptualising different forms of literary engagement with colonial discourse, colonial legacies and (post-) colonial memory in the context of Comparative Postcolonial Studies. The deliberate blending of a historical, a conceptual and a political understanding of the âpostcolonialâ in postcolonial scholarship raises problems of periodisation and historical terminology when, for example, anti-colonial discourse from the colonial period or colonialist discourse in Weimar Germany are labelled âpostcolonialâ. The colonial revisionism of Germanyâs interwar period is more usefully classed as post-imperial, as are particular strands of retrospective engagement with colonial history and legacy in British, French and other European literatures and cultures after 1945. At the same time, some recent developments in Francophone, Anglophone and German literature, e.g. Afropolitan writing, move beyond defining features of postcolonial discourse and raise the question of the post-postcolonial
Diversities, affinities and diasporas: a southern lens and methodology for understanding multilingualisms
We frame multilingualisms through a growing interest in a linguistics and sociology of the âsouthâ and acknowledge earlier contributions of linguists in Africa, the AmĂ©ricas and Asia who have engaged with human mobility, linguistic contact and consequential ecologies that alter over time and space. Recently, conversations of multilingualism have drifted in two directions. Southern conversations have become intertwined with âdecolonial theoryâ, and with âsouthernâ theory, thinking and epistemologies. In these, âsouthernâ is regarded as a metaphor for marginality, coloniality and entanglements of the geopolitical north and south. Northern debates that receive traction appear to focus on recent âre-awakeningsâ in Europe and North America that mis-remember southern experiences of linguistic diversity. We provide a contextual backdrop for articles in this issue that illustrate intelligences of multilingualisms and the linguistic citizenship of southern people. In these, southern multilingualisms are revealed as phenomena, rather than as a phenomenon defined usually in English. The intention is to suggest a third direction of mutual advantage in rethinking the social imaginary in relation to communality, entanglements and interconnectivities of both South and North
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