Part of the work of postcolonial studies, as well as its challenges by subaltern studies both in South Asian Studies and in Latin American decolonial theory, has been to recover submerged, silenced or otherwise erased or neglected histories of the colonized represent existing and possible subjects and lifeworlds. Development of new technologies based in the datafication and archiving of the world as information, from categorization to collection to database construction, revivify these issues. To begin to explore what challenging ongoing coloniality in technology design could mean in the face of growing datafication, and to expand an argument for an anti-colonial approach within data studies, this article brings together insights from subaltern studies, postcolonial and decolonial thinking about archives together with feminist STS scholars Bowker and Star’s concept of “residual categories” to consider interdependent ways of being and knowing that are residues of current projects of datafication.

Bio: Kalindi Vora (she/they) is Professor and Chair of Ethnicity Race and Migration, and Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies and of American Studies with an affiliate appointment in History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. She is author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (winner of the 2018 4S Bernal Prize), Surrogate Humanity: Race Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures (co-authored with Neda Atanasoski, 2019); Re-Imagining Reproduction: Surrogacy, Labor and Technologies of Human Reproduction; and Technoprecarious (with the Precarity Lab).

Co-sponsored by the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Communication Department, and the Digital Aesthetics Workshop (DAW)