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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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?
• 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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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
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