ENVISIONING LIBERATORY FUTURES: TECHNOLOGY, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND ARCHIVES
EDITED BY ALI GUNNELLS AND TRENT WINTERMEIER
How do we define technology? If we approach technology as a tool that enables certain actions, how might we reshape the category of technology in ways that expand the possibilities of what technology can be and do? The reviews in this section respond to these questions as they analyze texts that offer a variety of perspectives regarding what counts as technology. On the one hand, each of the texts reviewed in this section addresses popular understandings of technology that range from artificial intelligence to recording devices. On the other hand, these reviewed texts offer radical reinterpretations of what we can consider a technology. What does it mean to view the archive or the canon as a technology? How does this redefinition alter our understanding of what the archive or the canon can do? Furthermore, the texts reviewed in this section ask questions about liberation as it concerns technologies in all of their variety. In what ways can we use technologies as liberatory tools and what possibilities are revealed when technologies are liberated from the oppressive structures that constrain their functions?
This section opens with Kimberlyn Harrison’s review of Jude Brown, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drag, and Kerry McInerney’s edited collection Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Data, Algorithms, and Intelligent Machines. Brown et al.’s collection offers a rich variety of inquiries into the relationship between feminist theory and technology. Harrison draws attention to three key threads in the text: historical developments in the relationship between gender and artificial intelligence, critique of current harmful practices, and reimaginings of our current understandings of technology. Importantly, Harrison highlights the ways in which the texts in Brown et al.’s collection offer feminist thought as a tool for reimagining the transformative potential of artificial intelligence when it is liberated from current sociocultural structures.
Reviewing Andrea Giunta’s The Political Body: Stories on Art, Feminism, and Emancipation in Latin America, Jenna Reynolds focuses on the politics of Latin American feminist art across the variety of historical and archival perspectives that each chapter generates. Focused on emancipation and women artists, Giunta examines the potential for photography, aesthetics, film, manifestos, and other artistic productions to challenge the histories which constantly enforce artistic canons. Reynolds identifies the “historical and critical gap” that Giunta fills as she analyzes the artistic and archival technologies responsible for marginalizing Latin American feminist art(ists) throughout history. In this way, Reynolds makes thorough connections between the tools, histories, and futures that Giunta navigates throughout her important and timely book.
Ali Gunnells closes this section with her review of Robert McKee Irwin’s edited collection Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge: Building A Community Archive. This unique text, in which contributors examine different yet connected aspects of the Humanizing Deportation project, elucidates the significance of the archive as a technology which configures histories and narratives of certain communities. Irwin’s text challenges this influence by focusing on accounts of migration and reparation, all of which Gunnells traverses with care and focus. This review illuminates the potential for digital storytelling to reimagine the construction of history through documentation, cataloging, and recording of personal and communal accounts. Such work illustrates not only how technology and the archive intersect across different experiences, but also how they can work together to develop liberatory futures.
