Analyze

At the height of the West African Ebola epidemic, West African governments and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) were barraged with requests from international humanitarian and Western data analytics agencies to provide Call Detail Record data. This data could furnish the large-scale ambitions of data modelling to track and predict contagion. Despite its utility in tracking mobility and, as such, disease, CDR’s use raises many privacy concerns. In addition, embedded within a turn towards datafication, CDR technologies for surveillance embed specific ontologies of the data-focused society they emerge from. There is a false equivalence embedded in the relationship between humans and technology. The predominantly Western idea that one phone equals one person underlines the claim that CDR data accurately tracks distinct user movements, encoding a Western “phone self-subjectivity” (Erikson 2018). However, the refusal by some African actors to hand over sensitive mobile data to international agencies was met with forceful rhetoric of Africa’s moral obligation to comply—to forgo privacy rights in the name of ‘safety.’ The Ebola context reflects an emergent digitization of emergencies in the Global South, which is reshaping the way societies understand and manage emergencies, risk, data, and technology. The big data frenzy has seen a rising demand to test novel methods of epidemic/pandemic surveillance, prediction, and containment in some of the most vulnerable communities. These communities lack the regulatory and infrastructural capacity to mitigate harmful ramifications. With this emergence is a pivot towards 'humanitarian innovation,' where technological advancements and corporate industry collaboration are foregrounded as means to enhance aid delivery. In many ways, these narratives of innovation and scale replicate the language of Silicon Valley’s start-up culture. Surveillance of the poor and disempowered is carried out under the guise and rhetoric of care. In this scenario, market ideals and data technologies (re)construe social good as dependent on the “imposition of certain unfreedoms” as the cost of protection (Magalhaes and Couldry 2021). As big data technologies, they foreground a convergence of market logistics and global networks with existing and already problematic international humanitarian infrastructures (Madianou 2019). These convergences create new power arrangements that further perpetuate an unequal and complex dependency of developing countries on foreign organizations and corporations. Pushback against these data demands showcases competing notions of where risk truly lies. While resistance to data demands was at the state level, community responses to imposed epidemic regulations ranged from non-compliance to riots. These resistances demonstrated how the questions of ‘who and what is a threat?’ or ‘who and what is risky?’ and ‘to whom?’ experience shifting definitions in relation to these technologies as global, national, and community imaginaries are reinforced and reproduced as cultural, political, as well as biological units. 

Source

Akinwumi, Adjua. 2023. "Technological care vs Fugitive care: Exploring Power, Risk, and Resistance in AI and Big Data During the Ebola Epidemic." 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.

(MNOs) were barraged with requests from international humanitarian and Western data analytics agencies to provide Call Detail Record data. This data could furnish the large-scale ambitions of data modelling to track and predict contagion. Despite its utility in tracking mobility and, as such, disease, CDR’s use raises many privacy concerns. In addition, embedded within a turn towards datafication, CDR technologies for surveillance embed specific ontologies of the data-focused society they emerge from. There is a false equivalence embedded in the relationship between humans and technology. The predominantly Western idea that one phone equals one person underlines the claim that CDR data accurately tracks distinct user movements, encoding a Western “phone self-subjectivity” (Erikson 2018). However, the refusal by some African actors to hand over sensitive mobile data to international agencies was met with forceful rhetoric of Africa’s moral obligation to comply—to forgo privacy rights in the name of ‘safety.’ The Ebola context reflects an emergent digitization of emergencies in the Global South, which is reshaping the way societies understand and manage emergencies, risk, data, and technology. The big data frenzy has seen a rising demand to test novel methods of epidemic/pandemic surveillance, prediction, and containment in some of the most vulnerable communities. These communities lack the regulatory and infrastructural capacity to mitigate harmful ramifications. With this emergence is a pivot towards 'humanitarian innovation,' where technological advancements and corporate industry collaboration are foregrounded as means to enhance aid delivery. In many ways, these narratives of innovation and scale replicate the language of Silicon Valley’s start-up culture. Surveillance of the poor and disempowered is carried out under the guise and rhetoric of care. In this scenario, market ideals and data technologies (re)construe social good as dependent on the “imposition of certain unfreedoms” as the cost of protection (Magalhaes and Couldry 2021). As big data technologies, they foreground a convergence of market logistics and global networks with existing and already problematic international humanitarian infrastructures (Madianou 2019). These convergences create new power arrangements that further perpetuate an unequal and complex dependency of developing countries on foreign organizations and corporations. Pushback against these data demands showcases competing notions of where risk truly lies. While resistance to data demands was at the state level, community responses to imposed epidemic regulations ranged from non-compliance to riots. These resistances demonstrated how the questions of ‘who and what is a threat?’ or ‘who and what is risky?’ and ‘to whom?’ experience shifting definitions in relation to these technologies as global, national, and community imaginaries are reinforced and reproduced as cultural, political, as well as biological units. 

Akinwumi, Adjua. 2023. "Technological care vs Fugitive care: Exploring Power, Risk, and Resistance in AI and Big Data During the Ebola Epidemic." 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.

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.

Ebola Response Anthropology Platform is anthropologists from all over the world to providing advice by email, calls and web-based dialogues by those working for NGOs, government and international agencies. The platform help to engage with socio-cultural and political dimensions of the Ebola outbreak and build locally-appropriate interventions. There are some resistances of local culture and external health system to control the Ebola outbreak. 

Individual who care about the Ebola, organisations, and government might use the website platform. It could be doctors, academic, emergency staff, governmental agents and so on. 

The Ebola Response Anthropology Platform is funded by a grant which is from Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises (R2HC) Programme. It is overseeing, executed and managed by the Wellcome Trust and DFIF. As well as the platform is collaborate with other Ebola response anthropology initiatives, within Emergency Ebola Anthropology Network and francophone SHS Ebola Network. 

The platform offer many functions to audiences. The platform offer different ways to help organisations to solve propblem, such as email, calling and website-based dialogues. They will give suggestions by following the actual case. This website platform offer a space for people to put more news and opnions for helping Ebola outbreak. There are lots of case and papers can be read on website, comments and opinion can be posted, and also ask a rapid response question. There are also six sub-heading are sorted as Identifying and Diagnosing Cases, Management of the Dead, Caring for Sick, Clinical Trials/Research, Preparedness and Communication and Engagement. There are also tag on each resources to help reading. On the left side, there are five symbols can easily link to Facebook, Twitter, Printing, email or share in other ways. In addition, there is a column on the right side showing the latest resource, opinion and news. 

The platform is designed with several areas and different elements to offer audience a good visualized. It is within text, photos and symbols. Text are applied different fonts, colours, and size, which created a visualized information to audience. 

User can see six areas included Briefings and Guides, Background and Field Notes. When click into one of these sub-headings, you can see there are some case or news. Each title is obviously and the beginning of the papers, and user can see more information about it when click ‘Continue reading’. There are also tag under each case, and folders that the case sorted into. When click into the paper for more information, user also can download it as PDF. Besides, user can leave their information and comments under the reading.  In addition, there are also latest, opinion, news and tag could be read on the right side area. 

Different areas and sub-headings are linked to a new page, and show more information.  Resources are sorted to subtitle and tag. All the subtitle are work as a system, and linked together.