Digitalities

Representative:

Natewindé Sawadogo natewinde.sawadogo@yahoo.fr

PI Members:

Jia Hui Lee, Mirco Schönfeld, Katharina Schramm, Rüdiger Seesemann (University of Bayreuth)

Overview

With their promises of development and technoscientific modernity, digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) offer new ways of self-expression, political organising and social relations that, in turn, inflect protest movements, revive cultural heritage and catalyse industrial and economic innovation. In this RS we will build on critical analytical frameworks in African Studies to closely investigate material aspects and practices of digitalisation, including their implications for society at large. These material aspects include the labour required to mine minerals and maintain algorithmic systems, the extraction of data from people and environments, and the dumping of electronic waste.

A focus on digital materialities also necessitates critical attention to digital practices: How do people use, repurpose, subvert and relate to the social media, biometrics, digital platforms and web-based applications which, in turn, come to matter as part of state projects and cultural expressions on the African continent?

Indeed, the digital has the potential to contribute to ongoing decolonisation processes, opening up opportunities for the creation of new publics, new social movements, and new imaginaries for future world-making (Getachew, 2019). Some African scholars have argued that, through social organisation, digital tools and platforms have enabled the formation of new worlds where people of marginalised identities e.g. queer Africans, women and civil society movement activists find community and empowerment. These have political and social effects in the physical world, as in the 2024 protests in Nairobi, where digital tools enabled the quick organisation of protests but also the surveillance of activists by the government.

Therefore, rather than opting for oversimplified notions of digital utopia or dystopia, the Digitalities RS treats both the matter and the meaning(s) of the digital -critically considering the cultural, social and historical world(s) it constructs and upholds and focusing on the politics and practices accompanying the spread, domestication and deployment of the digital in Africa. Treating the digital as matter means being attentive to infrastructures: networks of cables, the waste and impact of data servers, the mining of minerals for electronics, the availability of electricity. Treating the meaning(s) of the digital, we will examine how the digital intersects with and inspires African creative expressions (orature, art), and how African knowledges inform contested concepts such as virtual, digital, and intelligent with new meanings, as well as new forms of cross-border interaction such as digital restitution and collaborations in university, museum and governmental contexts.

Bringing to bear insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology, History, Sociology, Informatics, Data Science, and Religious Studies, we will examine the promises and dreams of technoscientific modernity as well as the perils that come with anonymity, disinformation and surveillance, contending with the social and political contexts of the digital in Africa through three lines of inquiry, namely (1) Archiving, (2) (Self)-Identification and (3) Knowledge Innovation.

Our methods will include (digital) ethnography, archival research, literary analysis, computational analysis, digital archiving and data-driven ecological monitoring. The aim of our methodological transdisciplinarity is to foster new forms of collaboration that raise crucial questions about inclusion, ethics and equity, as African states and communities innovate digitally and adopt more digital technologies into their everyday lives.

Altogether, digital materialities and practices reflect attempts at world-making in Africa, in the context of both online worlds (e.g. virtual reality, gaming or diasporic WhatsApp chat groups) and offline ones (e.g. where digital tools and technologies are used to document violence, circumvent surveillance and censorship, or critique hegemonic narratives about Africa). As articulated by Achille Mbembe, life itself has become a computable object (Mbembe, 2019a). While attending to the ways that people are bridging geographical divides to collaborate and communicate, researchers in this RS will at once reflexively attend to the political economies of knowledge creation that shape how scholars in Europe, Africa and elsewhere research, publish, and engage with communities. Likewise, we will examine the emergence of new publics (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Nyabola, 2018) and the extractive risks that come with digital colonialism (Kwet, 2019). Research in this field could also yield possible practical applications, including the ethical and strategic use of ChatGPT and other open science infrastructures that could extract and circulate African knowledges globally.