academic – Dr. Kasprzak

I’m pleased to be on the organizing committee of Strategic Narratives of Technology and Africa, a conference taking place in Funchal, Madeira, September 1 & 2.

The conference brings scholars, technologists, and cultural producers together on the island of Madeira: a European territory off the coast of Africa, a historical site of mutual entanglement between the Atlantic continents, and a point of departure for European expansion. Here we’ll strategize ways to revisit, reframe, and recode the future of technology on and for both continents.

What can African theorists, technologists, and cultural producers do to generate alternatives to the influx of neocolonial narratives of tech entrepreneurship? What are key epistemologies and ways of being which are endemic in Africa that should be offered to the world through new systems and processes? How can an African information economy avoid the dynamics of the resource curse, where connectivity is extractive and exercised upon African citizens rather than by and through them? What can Western technologists do differently, and what are the spaces for collaboration?

This conference aims to reinvestigate these relationships and more in order to engender dialog between African and Western audiences and participants, who should leave Madeira equipped with new strategies and new collaborative partnerships.

Keynotes include Achille Mbembe, Nanjira Sambuli, Ntone Edjabe and Sarah Nuttall.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

The South by Southwest conference panel picker allows anyone who considers themselves to be part of the SXSW community to vote on panels that will appear at next year’s conferences in music, film, and interactive technologies. It’s a good, simple way to get people involved in the content they would invest their time in seeing.

As you can see from the pie chart, SXSW organisers are no fools, however: say what you like about the “wisdom of the crowd”, the advisory board and staff still run the show (and that’s a good thing).

What struck me after a quick browse was a certain homogenous feel to the panel titles. Nearly all of them are twisting themselves into pretzels to sound clever and punchy in a peculiarly uniform tone. Few simply tell you exactly what the panel content will be, and one wonders if the public voting feature exacerbates this kind of look-at-me marketing. The contrast between conferences meant to appeal to the general public and academic conferences couldn’t be more pointed, through the prism of this one tiny feature. For example:

Semi-random* sampling of SXSWi proposed panel titles:

The Thousand Wang Challenge: Chatroulette As A Game
Old is the New Black: Content’s Comeback
Boldly Go Where No Ad Has Gone Before
Invade my Privacy, Please!
Curation Is King and Content Is Its Bitch

Semi-random* sampling of academic panel titles (I chose the College Art Association conference from last year):

Dressing the Part: Textiles as Propaganda in the Middle Ages, Part I
Authors of Cultural History from the Ottoman Empire to Nation-States
Innovation, Agency, History: Centering the Italian Fourteenth Century
The Importance of Art in Economic and Social Revitalization: The Creation of Modern Cultural Economies
From Fiction to Archive: Reconstructing Public Memory in South Korea

But I digress (interesting as conference panel titles are). I promised a quick guide, and so here is the guide part. Here’s what you need to know:

Vote thumbs down:

Anything remotely to do with SEO (search engine optimisation, for the uninitiated)
Panels with offensive, inane, and/or punny titles
Panels about the iPad (just because)
Panels that will tell you how to make money on your _______ (insert whatever)

Vote thumbs up:

Anything else that sounds remotely interesting.
For your friends, of course.

Good luck!

Oh, and share your faves please — there’s no way I’ll get through all 2,500 or so panel proposals.

(* – Like any good storyteller, I might notice data that supports my thesis more often than data that doesn’t.)