Description:

Throughout the Spring Quarter, the Center for Latinx Digital Media invites you to a series of weekly seminars held over Zoom on Thursdays. You can now register (click here) to the seminar on Thursday, April 8, 2021 at 12-1 PM US CT, where Prof. Ulises A. Mejias (SUNY Oswego) will give a presentation entitled "Colonialism, Data, and Latinx: From ‘Informantes Nativos’ to ‘Sujetos No-Alineados’." 

Topic: Data colonialism presents unique modes, intensities and contexts, which differentiate it from historical colonialism. But both share a commonality of purpose: dispossession through extraction. In this presentation, the agency of the colonized subject is examined, from historic to data colonialism. A path for transitioning from datafied informants to non-aligned subjects is suggested, a path that seems well suited to the coloniality of Latinx subjectivity, but that all of us will need to embrace if we want to decolonize our data, and our futures.

Ulises A. Mejias is professor and director of the Institute for Global Engagement at SUNY Oswego. He is the author of “Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World” (2013), and with Nick Couldry, of “The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism” (2019).

This event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the Department of Communication Studies, the Department of Radio/Television/Film, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Latina and Latino Studies Program.