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Long abstract:

The innovation-turn in the humanitarian enterprise, fueled by a big data gold rush, has seen the desire to impose ‘safety’ and ‘order’ become the rationales for exploitative experimentation, creating a dichotomy between risky bodies (subject to risky, innovative technologies in contexts of heightened uncertainty) and safe bodies (subject to tested technologies in safe environments) bodies (Jacobsen 2015).

The push for, and resistance against, forms of techno-solutionism during the Ebola epidemic offers a compelling case to explore the relationship between AI, big data technologies and shifting notions of risk. Implicit in the opposition between humanitarian enterprises' techno-solutionism and the politics of refusal adopted by African actors are differing notions of risk tied to AI, big data, and biopolitics – risky African bodies in need of technological interventions versus risky technologies and big data that disenfranchise. Drawing from the frameworks of data colonialism (Couldry and Meijas 2015), techno-colonialism (Madinou 2018), and Foucauldian readings of risk (1978), the objective of this paper is to understand this dichotomy. How do emergency AI and big data technologies transform or (re)frame discourses of risk when transposed? How are they resisted?

Using Call Detail Records as a case study, the paper reflects on it as a socio-technical big data technology that converges data-oriented global networks, market logistics, international humanitarian infrastructures, and state actors to bring about new power arrangements and dynamics (Madianou 2019). It considers its function as an emergency media (Ellcessor 2022) that reshapes how societies understand, manage, and experience emergencies (Meier 2015; Dufield 2019).