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.

In her article, Scharenberg (2023) provides methodological reflections on politically engaged or militant social science research. In one section, she discusses the challenge that social movements act as knowledge producers in their own right, often working independent from or outside of academic institutions (2023, 15). This raises questions about what social scientiss add to the mix. I've had similar questions working with and alongside activists in the global anti-plastics movement. Building on Casa-Cortes, Osterweil, and Powell (2013), Scharenberg points out that one response for scholars is to act as "editors" or "curators" of collective knowledge. This argument resonates with the way that I and other collaborators have thought about the engaged ethnographic archive projects:

Activist ethnographers thus become editors of collective knowledges rather than the sole producers of scientific theory. Like a literary editor, the ethnographer works from a position, which does not create knowledges from scratch, but collects the perspectives of others and assembles them with reference to the given context. In this view, objectivity might be achieved, to borrow an expression from Haraway, by assembling “partial views and halting voices” into what she calls a “collective subject position” (1988: 590). Alternatively, we might think of the editor-ethnographer as Berger’s “clerk of the records” (Scheper-Hughes, 1995: 419) who compiles the history of a group of people. Scheper-Hughes understands this position as a kind of witness. (Scharenberg 2023, 16). 

During my thesis project, Tim has served as a collaborator and mentor while he studied data use among activists opposing Formosa Plastics Group (FPG). In addition to connecting me with activists and interview candidates, he also introduced me to a small network of American and Taiwanese students in Taiwan and the United States studying FPG. This community can share resources and knowledge to further our individual studies. Could this academic network serve as a parallel to the transnational activist alliances I am studying? Are the strengths and barriers of research alliances reminiscent of the strengths and barriers of activist alliances?

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.