Analyze

Sylvia Wynter (2003) suggests that our current struggles in Western colonized society regarding racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ethnicism, climate change, environmental destruction, and the unequal distribution of resources are rooted in what she argues is the overrepresentation of the descriptive statement of Man as human, which only recognizes white, wealthy, able-bodied, heterosexual men as "human." As such, just as I argue Black feminist writers and scholars have drawn on speculative methods and Afrofuturism, the use of twentieth-century technology and speculative imagination to address issues within Black and African diasporic communities (see Dery & Dery, 1994), to insist on and explore the full humanity of Black girls, women, and femmes, so too have Black and African diasporic scholars called on Afrofuturism to imagine new ways technology and traditional knowledge practices can address environmental injustice. Suékama (2018) argues that as a form of resistant knowledge building and theorizing, an Afrofuturist approach to environmentalism “integrates speculation with the ecological and scientific, and the spiritual or metaphysical'' to make our environmental justice less European, male, human, (and I would add capitalist) centered. Thus, an Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice asks us to think about our collective struggle for environmental justice as a part of and connected to other forms of systemic oppression rooted in the rejection of African diasporic and Indigenous people and their knowledge practices through the overrepresentation of Man as human in Western society. In this way, a speculative and Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice draws on African diasporic knowledge practices in conjunction with modern and traditional technologies to imagine new solutions to environmental injustice that center the needs, values, and traditional practices of African diasporic people. 

Image source: Still from "Pumzi" Directed by Wanuri Kahiu

Peterson-Salahuddin, Chelsea. 2023. "An Afrofuturist Approach to Unsettling Environmental injustice." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

For me it seems like the Internet Archive gives the possibility to participate to everybody - so if you think this webpage should be archived, you can just do it by yourself, everybody who has a free account on the internet archive, can add something to the archive - but besides this, they are having a lot of partnerships with libraries and other institutions to be always behind important web pages that should be archived.  

The most interesting part of this archive (which helped me to find information about the chemical accident that happened 1993 in Höchst AG) was the wayback machine: The “internet archived” saves a very huge amount of webpages (475 billion web pages) in different moments in time, so that even if information are not available on websites anymore or the websites/ companies do not exist anymore, in the archive they can still be found. Extending the idea of “archiving the internet itself” from 1996, the “internet archive” also started to build up a library, where books, audios and videos which are running on free licenses can be found.

It is not designed to remember data related to a certain topic, but more generally an archive where especially websites of different institutions, NGOs, companies etc. are saved (“Wayback Machine”). It is strongly related to a question of archiving digital text-data, for example websites.