Coloniality of Digital Infrastructure

We know that infrastructure is the stuff our lives run on - the roads and bridges of contemporary life. But digital infrastructure, like its material forebears, enables domination at the same time that it offers speed, efficacy, development. How does recent attention to digital infrastructure cover for imperial domination, neocolonialism, and other forms of extractivism?

Panel

Chao Tayiana Maina is a Kenyan digital heritage specialist and digital humanities scholar working at the intersection of culture and technology. She is a computer scientist by profession and a historian by passion. Her work primarily focuses on the application of technology in the preservation, engagement and dissemination of African heritage. She is the founder of African Digital Heritage, a co-founder of the Museum of British Colonialism and a co-founder of the Open Restitution Africa project.

Luis Tayori is the director of the ECA Amarakaeri (The Executor of the Administration Contract of the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve), an Indigenous organization that co-manages, together with the National Service of Natural Areas Protected by the State (SERNANP), the area that is part of the ancestral territory of the native Harakbut people. Since 2006, the collaboration between Indigenous peoples and the Peruvian state to monitor the reserve includes the use of new technologies (such as the Mapeo application and drones) by community guards, park rangers, and technicians to protect their ancestral forests from illegal mining and logging. Previously, Luis was president of the Indigenous organization COHARYIMA (Harakbut, Yine, Matsiguenka Council).

Rocío Amorozo Coba is a freelance conference interpreter and translator based in Quito and an active member of AIIC, the International Association of Conference Interpreters. Since 2006, she has provided professional interpreting services in Spanish, English, and French to a myriad of entities, international organizations, and government agencies. She has helped breach language barriers in small peer-to-peer discussions as well as in high profile international conferences in different countries.