Eastern Africa in the World, A BIEA seminar series

The first event in this online series will be on Monday 30th March (12-1.30pm BST (UK) / 2-3.30pm EAT) on the theme “What in the World is AI? Eastern African Perspectives”.  Please sign up for the meeting link and updates at  https://biea.ac.uk/events/eafriwo.

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 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, we seek to challenge the singularity implied by “the AI revolution” and instead interrogate 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 Universität Bremen)
– Dr George Karekwaivanane  (University of Edinburgh)
– Amanuel Kebede  (University of Helsinki)

Chair: Prof Sharath Srinivasan, University of Cambridge

This event is part of the BIEA’s “Eastern Africa in the World” seminar series. It invites scholars to think about Eastern Africa, broadly defined, as a distinctive yet plurally constituted area-in-the-world. A region too frequently essentialised or fragmented in outsiders’ contradictory and entwined narratives, Eastern Africa lurches between being synonymous with historical absence, calamity and failure and redemptive visions of a techno-optimist ‘Silicon Savannah’ and ever ‘emerging’ promise. Too often, the region’s remarkability is penned reductively from perspectives elsewhere. Yet in its histories, imaginaries, agencies, and connectedness Eastern Africa is a region that has as often written the elsewheres of the world as been shaped by them. This is an intellectual space to think the world from Eastern Africa, and center the scholarly significance of Eastern Africa as world-making through time and across multiple domains.

Future events on the series:

• 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)