Tiara Roxanne: On Data Colonialism

In this lecture, indigenous cyberfeminist and artist Tiara Roxanne will discuss settler colonialism and data colonialism, interrogating colonial structures embedded within machine learning systems. Western Indigenous cultures have been colonized, dehumanized and silenced. As dependency on digitality grows culturally, socially and institutionally, it is crucial to highlight how settler colonialism is embedded in techno-culture (the way in which we socialize, intimize and learn eg) not only to re-assert Indigenous voices into these paradigms, but to think, imagine and navigate through these modes together.

CV:
Tiara Roxanne is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Data & Society in NYC. They are a Tarascan Mestiza scholar and artist based in Berlin. Their research and artistic practice investigates the encounter between Indigeneity and AI by interrogating colonial structures embedded within machine learning systems. Their work explores the notion that decolonization is not possible, we must establish decolonial gestures, a concept developed in their dissertation, Recovering Indigeneity: Territorial Dehiscence and Digital Immanence" which was completed under the supervision of Catherine Malabou. In this way, decolonial gestures stand in as forces and modes of decolonial or anti-colonial embodied actions. Moreover, as a performance artist and practitioner, they work between the digital and the material using textile.