Confronting Challenges (Asynchronous Session)
Custodians of Culture: Graffiti as a Form of Political Protest during the George Floyd Riots that led to the removal of Christopher Columbus statues in Chicago View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jonathan Gross
This study examines the proliferation of graffiti in the wake of the George Floyd riots. In what ways did Europe, under austerity, anticipate the riots in the United States? I compare the graffiti artists of Athens in 2014 with those in Chicago and St. Paul in 2020. My argument is that graffiti is a form of political prophecy, one that has an increasingly global reach and message. The effort to relegate Athenian graffiti of 2014 to a museum in Chicago in the summer of 2015, however well intentioned, aestheticized what was essentially a form of political protest. I compare the graffiti on the letters outside the CNN building in Atlanta during the George Floyd protests with the recent controversy regarding a mural to John Coltrane in Philadelphia. What is street art and why does it matter? How do graffiti artists rewrite the landscape of political protest in real time, leading to political change in the aesthetic realm, such as the removal of statues of Stephen Douglas and Christopher Columbus in ways that challenge the role of museums and curators as custodians of culture.
Preserving Biodiversity: An Initiative to Save the National Bird of India View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sangeeta Sharma, Arpan Bumb
The imbalances in the bird population are evident throughout the world. The Pandemic proved to be a relief as the pollution levels came down and the different Avian species became visible. Humans were confined in four walls and wildlife got space to move freely. This was just the right time to take a step to restore the endangered species. The purpose to take this initiative was to spread awareness amongst the people and provide a conducive environment for the birds to eat and reproduce without the encroachment of humans. The number of the national bird was counted at the commencement of the project and the process was repeated after regular intervals to gauge the impact of the initiative.
From Class Reductionism to Color Consciousness: Interrogating Racialized Global Capitalism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pushkala Prasad
The long standing insistence in Progressive circles that class and class alone plays a vital role in shaping the trajectory of global capitalism has limited discussions on the equally salient role played by race. This self-imposed omission may well be coming to an end. Even before the emphatic demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, critics of global capitalism have been calling for an end to class reductionism and a shift toward color consciousness in understanding it. This paper builds on some of these arguments by expanding Bourdieu's ideas of symbolic capital to include race, and by incorporating legal notions of whiteness as status property put forth by critical legal scholars. When racial identities operate as forms of symbolic capital and status property, they drive the formation of split labor markets, foster colorism in employment and consumption, and heighten the racialized accumulation by dispossession across the planet. We conclude by considering some implications for the post-covid world.
An NGO as a Prism: Shedding Light on Decades of Transition in South Africa through a Youth-Development Organization View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Margaret Perrow
The Joint Enrichment Project (JEP) was a non-government organization (NGO) prominent in South African youth development from 1986-2008, one of many institutions that played a key role in bringing South Africa out of apartheid and into the global economy in the 1990s. NGOs that attempted to partner with the new government after the 1994 transition to democracy faced many challenges, including a new ‘bureaucracy’ of development that eventually led to JEP’s closure. Some researchers have been critical of development NGOs like JEP, arguing that they contribute only marginally to socio-economic change because they are generally unable to scale up their programs. While on the surface JEP’s story might confirm this criticism, its hidden institutional history challenges it. As development theorists have urged, to fully understand the effectiveness of an NGO, both its intended and unintended impacts must be considered. But exactly how an institution’s influence is spread, its impact on socio-economic change, and its impact on individual lives over time typically remain hidden. Drawing on over 20 years of research (grounded in methods of history, ethnography, and applied linguistics), this paper explores those impacts. Including the life trajectories of JEP's constituents (directors, staff, participants) as a critical part of the institution's history reveals a concrete, intimate version of a bigger societal story: decades of anti-apartheid struggle, transition to democracy, subsequent socio-economic changes, and socio-economic reproduction. Considering the NGO as a prism puts this bigger story into human terms, refracting ‘layers’ of socio-economic change and reproduction in post-apartheid South Africa.
Digital Neocolonialism: Chinese Artificial Intelligence in Africa View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Willem Gravett
China’s ambition to become a world leader in AI by 2030 includes using developing countries as laboratories to improve its surveillance technologies. In March 2018, the Chinese artificial intelligence company, CloudWalk, signed an agreement with the government of Zimbabwe to deploy facial recognition technology in the African nation. This agreement is unique in Africa in that Harare will send biometric data on thousands of Zimbabwean faces to Chinese companies to train their algorithms on African faces in order to diversify their data sets and improve the accuracy of their products. The currency here is not merely dollars — it is data. Not only does China’s mining of Zimbabweans’ data resurrects painful memories of the European powers pillaging Africa for its human and natural resources during the colonial era, but Chinese technology exports to the African continent, especially facial recognition technology, also raise grave human rights concerns.
