A Brief Introduction to Decolonial Computing

Does computing need to be decolonized, and if so, how should such decolonization be effected? This short essay introduces a recent proposal at the fringes of computing, which attempts to engage these and other related questions

Voices of the Governed: towards a theory of the translocal

In this article I want to interrogate the political, economic, and social conditions that enable the extraction of natural and mineral resources from Indigenous and rural communities in Africa, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific. The end of direct colonialism and the emergence of the development state did not necessarily translate into forms of local sovereignty for these communities who bore the brunt of development. I describe the emergence of resource wars in the postcolonial era and how organizational technologies of extraction, exclusion and expulsion lead to dispossession and death. I conclude by discussing possibilities of resistance and develop the notion of translocal resistance where local actors most affected by development are able to forge a series of temporary coalitions with international and national groups in an attempt to promote some form of participatory democracy. The article advance debates on postcolonialism by developing theoretical insights from translocal modes of resistance that open up new analytical spaces marked by particular configurations of market, state and civil society actors

Theorizing from the borders: Shifting to geo- and body-politics of knowledge

'Borders' will be in the twenty-first century what 'frontiers' where in the nineteenth. Frontiers were conceived as the line indicating the last point in the relentless march of civilization. On the one side of the frontiers was civilization; on the other, nothing; just barbarism or emptiness. The march of civilization and the idea of the frontiers created a geographic and body-graphic divide. Certain areas of the planet were designated as the location of the barbarians, and since the eighteenth century, of the primitives. In one stroke, bodies were classified and assigned a given place on the planet. But who had the authority to enact such a classification, and what was the logic of that classification? Furthermore, the classification of the world by region, and the link established between regions and people inhabiting them, was parallel to the march of civilization and companions of it: on the other side of the epistemic frontiers, people do not think or theorize; hence, one of the reasons they were considered barbarians. Copyright © 2006 Sage Publications

Theorizing from the borders: Shifting to geo- and body-politics of knowledge

'Borders' will be in the twenty-first century what 'frontiers' where in the nineteenth. Frontiers were conceived as the line indicating the last point in the relentless march of civilization. On the one side of the frontiers was civilization; on the other, nothing; just barbarism or emptiness. The march of civilization and the idea of the frontiers created a geographic and body-graphic divide. Certain areas of the planet were designated as the location of the barbarians, and since the eighteenth century, of the primitives. In one stroke, bodies were classified and assigned a given place on the planet. But who had the authority to enact such a classification, and what was the logic of that classification? Furthermore, the classification of the world by region, and the link established between regions and people inhabiting them, was parallel to the march of civilization and companions of it: on the other side of the epistemic frontiers, people do not think or theorize; hence, one of the reasons they were considered barbarians. Copyright © 2006 Sage Publications

Theorizing from the borders (Argentina & Russia)

Border thinking or theorizing emerged from and as a response to the violence (frontiers) of imperial/territorial epistemology and the rhetoric of modernity (and globalization) of salvation that continues to be implemented on the assumption of the inferiority or devilish intentions of the Other and, therefore, continues to justify oppression and exploitation as well as eradication of the difference. Border thinking is the epistemology of the exteriority; that is, of the outside created from the inside; and as such, it is always a decolonial project. Recent immigration to the imperial sites of Europe and the USA-crossing the imperial and colonial differences-contributes to maintaining the conditions for border thinking that emerged from the very inception of modern imperial expansion. In this regard, critical border thinking displaces and subsumes Max Horkheimer’s ‘critical theory’ which was and still is grounded in the experience of European internal history (Horkheimer, 1937). ‘Critical border thinking’ instead is grounded in the experiences of the colonies and subaltern empires. Consequently, it provides the epistemology that was denied by imperial expansion. ‘Critical border thinking’ also denies the epistemic privilege of the humanities and the social sciences-the privilege of an observer that makes the rest of the world an object of observation (from Orientalism to Area Studies). It also moves away from the post-colonial toward the de-colonial, shifting to the geo-and body-politics of knowledge. © 2016 Taylor & Francis