What constitutes evidence of war and violence? What kind of data is considered “just cause” for military intervention? Relatedly, what data renders violence legible as war? Taking a broad approach to data as information/evidence (including as digital data, remote sensing, data found in/on human, nonhuman, and more than human bodies, and waste/pollution), this seminar addresses how data fits in the broader ecologies that constitute the endurance of colonial relations in shaping global violence. This includes violence that is rendered as war and not war. Bridget Guarasci and Eleana J. Kim argue that “‘ecology,’ for its part, is widely embraced in public and scholarly discourse to model complex entanglements of human and nonhuman processes and life forms. Yet it is often weighed down by organicist baggage of balance and holism, without a consistent focus on power.” Taking data drawn from bodies and environments as well as from war technologies, predictive AI, and digital practices, as central to shaping matrices of power, this seminar will consider data ecologies as they reveal or conceal the colonial infrastructures that frame war and violence as just or unjust, liberal or illiberal, humanitarian or inhumane.
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Data Ecologies, Colonial Infrastructures, and Terrains of Warfare
Mon, Oct 24, 20226:30 pm to 8:30 pm -
Tue, Oct 25, 20226:30 pm to 8:30 pm
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Public Talk: Sensing War: Temporal and Spatial Ecologies of Perceptible Violence
Wed, Oct 26, 20227:00 pm
Neda Atanasoski is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (2013), co-author of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019), and co-editor of Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of
Revolution (2022), both with Kalindi Vora. She is currently the co-editor of the journal Critical Ethnic Studies. Previously, Atanasoski was Professor and founding co-Director of the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz.
Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, “Killer Robots: Feeling Human in the Field of War”
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer “From the Eyes of Bees: Biorobotic Border Security and the Resurgence of
Bee Collectives in the Yucatan”Andrea Miller, “Shadows of War, Traces of Policing:The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in
Preemption.”Max Liboiron, “Pollution is Colonialism”
Kate Brown, “Bodily Secrets”
Sarah Kanouse and Shiloh Krupar “A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado”