th eSTEeM Annual Conference: STEM Futures Supporting ...

Decolonising Computing

Syed Mustafa AliSchool of Computing and Communications

6th eSTEeM Annual Conference:

STEM Futures – Supporting Students to Succeed

25-26 April 2017

Provocation

• “In an increasingly conservative age, the ‘mainstream’

easily co-opts its opponents by exploiting … broad-brush

portrayals – for instance, by enrolling women and racial

and ethnic minorities in key planning positions to

implement neoliberal policies under the banner of

friendly labels like empowerment, inclusivity,

sustainability, livability, or self-sufficiency.” (pp.672-673)

Wyly, E. (2014) Automated (post)positivism. Urban Geography 35(5): 669–690

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Background (and Foreground)

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Questions

• Does computing need to be decolonised, and if so, how

should such decolonisation be effected?

• Isn’t it somewhat of a stretch to describe computing as

colonial, especially since colonialism as a phenomenon

tied up with imperial structures of domination and

settlement is a thing of the past?

• How can computing be colonial if the ‘age of empires’ is

over and we live in a postcolonial world?

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Outline

1. What is Computing?

2. Colonialism, Postcolonialism and Coloniality

3. Colonial Computing

4. Decoloniality

5. Decolonial Computing Questions, Maxims and Skills

6. Further Information

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What is Computing?

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What is Computing?

• The essence of technology is by no means anything

technological

– Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning

Technology” (1954)

• The essence of computing is by no means anything

computational

– Brian Cantwell Smith, On The Origin of Objects (1996)

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What is Computing?

• “Computation is not a distinct or autonomous subject

matter, but is instead a complex practice, involving the

design, construction, maintenance, and use of

intentional systems.” (Cantwell-Smith 1996)

• What is intentionality?

– Relational comportment of human beings to their

world, with the latter understood as an ‘equipmental

whole’ (Heidegger)8

What is Computing?

• How to think about ‘human being’?

• How to think about ‘the world’?

• From where (and when)?

• Whose thinking counts, and why?

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Colonialism• “With the conquest of the societies

and the cultures which inhabit what

today is called Latin America [in

1492 CE], began the constitution of

a new world order, culminating, five

hundred years later, in a global

power covering the whole planet.

This process implied a violent

concentration of the world’s

resources under the control and for

the benefit of a small European

minority – and above all, of its ruling

classes.”

Anibal Quijano (2007)

• The violence of ‘world-making’

Zone of BeingCore, Europe

‘The West’

Zone of Non-BeingPeriphery, Non-Europe

‘The Rest’

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Postcolonialism• Colonialism as a project of European political domination

formally ends with the national liberation and independence

movements of the 1960s

• Ongoing legacy of colonialism in contemporary societies in

the form of social discrimination that has outlived formal

colonialism and became integrated in succeeding

postcolonial social orders (core and periphery)

• Practices and legacies of European colonialism in social

orders and forms of knowledge

– i.e. structuring logics of coloniality11

Colonial Computing

• Robotics, Ubicomp, the IoT etc.

– Eurocentrically-universal abstract (i.e. race-less)

conceptions of the body in robotics, theories of

embodied cognition, smart sensor technologies etc.

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Colonial Computing

• AI, Big Data, Crowdworking etc.

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Decoloniality

• Critical (i.e. power-relational) thinking emerging in the

colonies and ex-colonies

• Trans-disciplinary ‘horizon’ foregrounding race as

organizing principle in a system of ‘entangled’ structural

hierarchies (asymmetric power relationships)

• Focus on epistemic (but also ontological) decolonization

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Decoloniality

• Geo-politics and body-

politics of knowledge– Concrete (material, embodied,

particular, raced) vs. abstract

(immaterial, disembodied,

universalizing, de-raced)

epistemology

• Thinking from the margins

(borders, periphery) and

in terms of marginalised

knowledges

• Where, When, Who and

How of Knowledge

SPACE

TIME

Geography

History

Epistemology

Subject-Object

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Decolonial Computing Questions

• How does computing as a

modern / colonial

phenomenon help to

maintain, expand and

refine colonial modernity?

• How can computing as a

modern / colonial

phenomenon be resisted?

• What is computing, who

gets to decide this, from

where (and when) and

how?

• What does it mean to do

computing from the

borders (margins,

periphery)?

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Decolonial Computing Maxims• Practitioners and researchers adopting a decolonial computing

perspective are required, at a minimum, to do the following:

1. Consider their geo-political and body-political orientations when

designing, building, researching or theorizing about computing

phenomena

2. Embrace the ‘decolonial option’ as a compensatory ethics,

attempting to think through what it might mean to design and

build computing systems with and for those situated at the

peripheries of the world system, informed by epistemologies

located at such sites, with a view to undermining the asymmetry

of local-global power relationships and effecting the ‘decentering’

of Eurocentric / West-centric universals 17

Decolonial Computing Skills

• “The relevance of algorithmic skills that allow a facility

with the relevant ideas in math and computer science

as well as the education of computing professionals in

social science and ethics ... Yet saying that today’s

ethical critic needs a facility with these tools of

computing imagines a different kind of scholar who is

able to bridge the social and technological” (p.4986)

Sandvig et al. (2016) When the Algorithm Itself Is a Racist: Diagnosing Ethical Harm in the

Basic Components of Software. International Journal of Communication 10: 4972–499018

Further InformationAli, S.M. (2014) Towards a Decolonial Computing.

In Ambiguous Technologies: Philosophical issues,

Practical Solutions, Human Nature: Proceedings of

the Tenth International Conference on Computer

Ethics – Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE 2013).

Edited by Elizabeth A. Buchanan, Paul B, de Laat,

Herman T. Tavani and Jenny Klucarich. Portugal:

International Society of Ethics and Information

Technology, pp.28-35.

Ali, S.M. (2016) A Brief Introduction to Decolonial

Computing. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM

Magazine for Students – Cultures of Computing

22(4): 16-21.

Ali, S.M. (Forthcoming) The Decolonial Question

Concerning Computing.

Ali, S.M. (Forthcoming) Decolonising Information

Narratives.19