Book Talk | Mirca Madianou | Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on September 18th at 5:30 PM for a book talk with Mirca Madianou. She will discuss her new book Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful with Erica Robles-Anderson and Simone Zhang.

Mirca Madianou is Professor in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies and co-Director of the Migrant Futures Institute at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on the social consequences of communication technologies, infrastructures and artificial intelligence (AI) in a global south context especially in relation to migration and humanitarian emergencies. She is the author of Mediating the Nation: news, audiences and the politics of identity, and Migration and New Media: transnational families and polymedia.

Erica Robles-Anderson is an Associate Professor at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. She focuses on the role media technologies play in the production of space. In particular, Robles-Anderson concentrates on configurations that enable a sense of public, collective, or shared experience, especially through the structuring of visibility and gaze. Trained as both an experimental psychologist and a cultural historian, she has employed a range of methodologies to explore the definition of media-space. She is writing a book about the 20th-century transformation of Protestant worship space into a highly mediated, spectacular “mega-church” (under contract, Yale University Press). Prior to her position at Steinhardt, she was a Research Fellow in New Media and Architecture in joint affiliation with the Department of Culture and Media and the Humanities and Technology Laboratory (HUMlab) at the University of Umeå, in Sweden.

Simone Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at New York University. Her research examines the social implications of how organizations make decisions and allocate scarce resources, with a focus on the role of predictive models and AI in public policy. She received a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University. For more on her research, please see https://www.simonezhang.com/