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- Convenors:
-
Antonia Witt
(Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF))
Naomi Kilungu (Daystar University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Disciplinary streams:
- Digital trends and technology
Short Abstract
This panel brings to light the multiplicity of African experiences with, responses to, and alternatives to digital colonialism. It examines how material, political, and epistemic conflicts around AI shape everyday life and the distribution of resources and power on the continent.
Long Abstract
In the dominant narrative about global technological change and artificial intelligence, Africa and Africans are often made invisible, relegated to a position of bystanding and exclusion. In contrast, the burgeoning literature on digital colonialism and uneven datafication shows how global technological change centrally draws on African resources, and increasingly permeates lifeworlds, power, and politics on the continent. Against this backdrop, this panel seeks to move beyond these macro-stories on AI in Africa by exploring its conflictive nature. The panel thereby brings to light the multiplicity of African experiences with, responses to, and alternatives to digital colonialism. It examines how material, political, and epistemic conflicts around AI shape everyday life and the distribution of resources and power on the continent. In so doing, the panel starts from the observation that the societal impact of AI in Africa itself is a site of competing prisms, experiences, and ambitions. Contributions are invited to explore conflicts around the construction of data centers (and their water and energy demands), over regulatory and institutional frameworks to govern AI, contests over cross-border data flows and data sovereignty, the often-invisible labor of data annotation and content moderation, conflicts over whose knowledges and values shape AI, and competing imaginaries of AI futures articulated by states, communities, and tech companies alike. In line with the conference theme, the panel therefore not only seeks to elevate Africa-centred knowledge on the societal effects of emerging technologies, but also to advance conceptual vocabulary through which we can make sense of these unfolding developments.