The BIEA Eastern Africa in the World seminar series invites scholars to centre the region in our inquiries, and to think the world from Eastern Africa. We approach the region as broadly defined, distinctive, yet also as a plurally constituted area-in-the-world. Across disciplines, we seek to explore Eastern Africa as world-making through time and across multiple domains. The series is convened by Professor Sharath Srinivasan, who is Vice-President for the Research at the BIEA.
“What in the World is AI? Eastern African Perspectives”
Monday 30th March (12-1.30pm BST (UK)/2-3.30pm EAT)
Eastern Africa is a focal point for innovative experimentation in new digital technologies and governance strategies, especially in artificial intelligence. It is also a space of reckoning with extractive, precarious labour structures and global technocapitalist logics embedded within the promise of these ‘digital’ modernities. This seminar will explore these tensions through the often hidden labour and infrastructure required to produce AI outputs, the lofty aspirations of AI-powered digital futures led by states in the region, as well as the widespread and creative resistance to the intended use of these digital products. From the vantage point of Eastern Africa, this panel challenges the singularity implied by “the AI revolution” and instead interrogates the set of relations shaped by extraction, translation, political imagination, human labour, and unfinished histories of colonial and capitalist power that make up what AI is, and might become.
Panelists:
Dr Stephanie Diepeveen (King’s College London)
Dr Adio Dinika (Distributed AI Research Institute and Universitat Bremen)
Dr George Karekwaivanane (University of Edinburgh)
Amanuel Kebede (University of Helsinki)
Chair: Prof Sharath Srinivasan (University of Cambridge)
Upcoming:
20th April, 12-1.30pm BST and 2-3.30pm EAT: “Urbanities and global circuits: Place and place-making in the world” (online only)
21st May, 12-1.30pm BST and 2-3.30pm EAT (TBC): “The new geopolitics of eastern Africa: Emerging regional responses” (online and in person, at BIEA Nairobi)
…and more to come