CPC Annual Conference 2022 Technology Justice: The Theories and Practices of Freedom

Event details

This event will take place at Coventry University over the course of two days, with keynote speakers, panel sessions, research showcases, and networking events. There will be limited remote and hybrid access for those who want to attend virtually, although we anticipate all panels and keynotes to be held in person.

While both liberation and, more importantly, freedom hold a philosophical framework based in the Eurocentric Enlightenment project, we are interested in discovering what lies beyond. In other words, and in the words of SA Smythe, “how do we think about technologies as various techniques, tools, or modalities for collective liberation?”¹ We take “technology” here to mean far more than the tools of electronic and digital life; technology is culture itself and rooted in the different matrices of knowledge humans develop about themselves, or what Michel Foucault identified as the technologies of production, signs, power, and the self.² Indeed, we are indebted to the genealogies of liberation espoused by Franz Fanon, Paolo Freire, Angela Davis and more, that neither begin nor end with the digital, but also consider more broadly the connections between racism; sexism, heterosexism, and cissexism; classism; ableism; capitalism, and other forms of injustice through which technology becomes the instrument of both oppression and resistance. At the same time, we are inspired to what Ashon Crawley calls “otherwise possibility,”³ and the need to interrogate the determinisms that suggest technology is either entirely to blame, OR our last and best hope.

We anticipate contributions that address both the possibilities and pitfalls of a postdigital justice paradigm, where the technologies of gender, race, care, surveillance, abolition and containment, humanitarianism, and community intersect and inform one another.

¹“Technologies of Black Freedoms: Calling On Black Studies Scholars, with SA Smythe,” Beacons 15. (December 25, 2021).

² Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” Lectures at University of Vermont Oct. 1982, in Technologies of the Self, 16-49. Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

³ “Technologies of Black Freedoms.”

Enquiries

For enquiries please contact Dr. Lindsay Balfour

+447700068556
Lindsay.balfour@coventry.ac.uk

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