Why we should be talking about internet inequity in 2026—and not just AI
On this episode: Talking with the editor of the forthcoming book Internet Decolonized, Dr. Henna Zamurd Butt, on why people still get unequal internet service and prices across a city like Chicago—and how communities are fighting back.
For each episode of the Don’t Pretend We’re Dead podcast, I’ll be talking with women doing cool work right now in the fields of advocacy, arts, culture, food, journalism, science and technology. Let’s meet them together. Subscribe for free to learn about new episodes.
Mentioned in this episode with Dr. Henna Zamurd Butt:
Internet Innovation Initiative [https://internetequity.org/] at University of Chicago
Internet Decolonized (forthcoming), Oxford University Press, 2026.
Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin, Wiley, 2019. [https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Race+After+Technology%3A+Abolitionist+Tools+for+the+New+Jim+Code-p-9781509526437]
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow, Duke Law & Technology Review, 2019. [https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dltr/vol18/iss1/2/]
Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics by Nanjala Nyabola, Bloomsbury, 2018. [https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/digital-democracy-analogue-politics-9781786994318/]
Digital Dilemmas: Power, Resistance and the Internet, by M.I. Franklin, Oxford University Press, 2014. [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/digital-dilemmas-9780199982707?cc=gb&lang=en&]
Feminist Principles of the Internet v2 by the Association for Progressive Communications, 2024. [https://www.apc.org/en/pubs/feminist-principles-internet-version-20]
About Dr. Henna Zamurd Butt
Dr. Henna Zamurd Butt is an interdisciplinary scholar-artist and Assistant Professor of Communication & Culture at Columbia College Chicago. Her work brings together ethnographic and participatory methods with a creative research practice that spans curation, digital network-making, printmaking, ceramics, and DJing. She is interested in the cultural politics of sociotechnical systems and the possibilities of feminist and decolonizing praxis.
Technē Studio serves as the hub for Henna’s creative research. In March 2026, the Studio will launch Mehfil, a situated server art gallery inaugurated with everyday marks—an archive of images documenting her personal henna practice. The project unsettles binaries of right/left hand and active/passive, foregrounding embodied and habitual forms of knowledge. In late spring 2026, Henna will open a preparatory installation ahead of her forthcoming solo exhibition, Bodies of Knowledge, which uses ceramic and print works to consider the ethnographer’s body as a technology of knowledge-making.
As co-editor of Internet Decolonized (Oxford University Press, 2026), Henna has worked with her collaborator, Professor Marianne Franklin, to curate a collection that brings activists’ and academics’ writing into conversation, exploring how the internet might be decolonized. Her forthcoming publications include a comparative analysis of internet connectivity projects in Michigan (Digital Culture & Society) and an autoethnographic account of DJ practice as technē (Journal of Cultural Politics).
In 2025, Henna completed a postdoctoral scholarship at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD from the Department of Media & Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, and master’s degrees in Global Politics (Royal Holloway) and Politics and Communication (LSE).
Transcript
Hello there and welcome to the Don’t Pretend We’re Dead podcast. I’m Karina Zappia and every episode I’ll be talking with women who are doing some really interesting work today in the field of advocacy, arts and culture, food, science and technology.
The way I think of it is women who give me a shred of hope in these dark times and who doesn’t need a little bit more of that. Today, I’m talking with Dr. Hannah Zimmer, who is a disciplinary scholar interested in how cultural politics shapes sociotechnical systems, power and Internet governance, civic tech, community media and tech activisms.
Currently, Hannah is a postdoctoral scholar working with the Internet Equity Initiative at the University of Chicago. where she’s examining community-based efforts to expand broadband and connectivity in the upper Midwest of the U.S. They’re also the co-editor and contributor of Internet to Colonized with Professor Marianne Franklin, which is coming out in 2026 by Oxford University Press.
I first got to know Hannah when they were working as the editor and director of Media Diversified, a nonprofit which challenges the homogeneity of voices in UK news media through addressing the underrepresentation of marginalized communities. They also founded Bear Lit, an annual literature festival featuring writers of color in London. Welcome to the podcast, Hannah.
How is Chicago treating you right now?
So today the warm day for Chicago Windsor, it’s like two degrees and we had like snow to my knees, but now it’s snow to my like toes. So it’s pretty temperate.
Nice. Very nice. It is. Warm and damp and wet in London, so you ain’t missing anything. So I wanted to start kind of at the present and work backward a bit. I’d love to learn more about the Internet Equity Initiative. I feel like technology is unperceived as making people’s lives easier and more connected,
but clearly this isn’t the case when not everybody has equal access to the Internet. There’s this quote I read by the sociologist Ruha Benjamin, technology is not creating the problems, It is reflecting and amplifying and often hiding pre-existing forms of inequality and hierarchy, which I thought was really interesting. So I was wondering, yeah,
if you could talk a little bit about University of Chicago’s Internet Equity Initiative a little bit, the goals of the initiative, how they’re carried out, the work you’re doing with them.
Yeah, absolutely. I love Ruha Benjamin’s work, actually. Her book Race After Technology is excellent. And yeah, I think her quote that you just pulled up really goes to the heart of what the Internet Equity Initiative has noticed and is trying to therefore explore through research.
And that is the inequalities and inequities that we see in society are reflected in the way that socio-technological systems work. I’d use that word socio-technological to emphasize something because sometimes when we’re talking about technology, it’s really easy to think of it as tools that are kind of separate and above and apart from society.
But to say the social before the technical is to kind of emphasize that social relations, so humans, make those tools. And therefore, if there are things that affect us as humans, they are going to get in some way transported into whatever technology we produce but it’s also not just
like a teen and tidy one-way relationship in that way that we design something and it exists in the world there’s a constant kind of like cycling so technology then has an impact on society that then impacts technology so their initiative initially started around the covid pandemic i think
As someone who’s been researching internet access for a long time, it had kind of gone out of fashion to think about internet access because it was kind of like a passé problem. In the West and in wealthier nations, internet access had largely been taken care of for people in like urban centers.
And so technology and tech-related research had become more involved with newer and sexier topics like big data and machine learning and AI. Obviously, internet access was still an issue for large swathes of the world, particularly if you don’t count mobile, right?
Because mobile had changed the picture in that it had expanded very quickly from when we only could rely on wireline connection. So what they noticed is in the city of Chicago, over the COVID pandemic, there were neighborhoods and areas where people weren’t able to access online services that were really necessary at the time,
like online education for kids…. Across the United States, it really put a spotlight on the issue of the fact that internet access was not available in all places and for all people. And it suddenly came really high up in the agenda. And so the Internet Equity Initiative started to explore in the city of Chicago, okay, where don’t we have internet and what does that reflect? And they did a study where they measured the quality of the internet on the South side.
And for those who aren’t familiar, the setup in Chicago is... quite a divided city and it’s quite segregated. The north side is a little bit wealthier. The south side has had more neglect and underdevelopment and is also home to middle class and a range of African-American communities and then also a large Latinx community as well.
And so those parts of liberty were experiencing worse internet performance. Through my research, I’ve seen that it’s more expensive to have internet in those parts of liberty. So then that really spurred on the wider project, which you mentioned that I’ve been working on over the last two years.
Why was internet more expensive in those areas?
Great question. There’s not a lot of transparency over ISP pricing protocols for internet packages. And generally what happens is you might sign up initially a package that you kind of understand and is a bit more transparent. And then we all experience these like silent negotiations about like what my upgrade is going to be.
And so I remember a really stark case where I had gone to the west side of Chicago, which is another area that’s experienced some degree of neglect. And there was a person speaking there from an organizing group. And she was saying that she pays $75 for her internet package, which is pretty steep.
And the quality isn’t very good. And she has a daughter that lives on the north side of the city. And the daughter was paying like something like $40. And so that just highlights to you like the real disparities that you have in terms of pricing. And it was with the same company.
Interesting. What kind of data analysis did this initiative kind of look at? When it came to things like that or kind of mapping broadband, I was kind of curious a little bit about that.
So the project is interesting in that it brings together the Data Science Institute at the University of Chicago and the Crown School of Public Policy. And so we’ve got principal investigator from the Data Science Institute, Professor Nick Feimster. And then we have a principal investigator from the Crown School of Public Policy and Nicole Marwell.
And so you’ve got sociologists and a data scientist. And the data scientist in question had created this product, which is called Metrics. And it measures internet performance over time. And then if the internet connectivity drops off at any point, it was reporting that over time. And then sending that data directly back to the research group.
who would then analyze it with geographic information or look at it longitudinally to see, okay, in the last two weeks, this person’s been paying to receive these speeds and they’ve only received those speeds 6% of the time. But they’ve been exploring because there’s certainly variables involved with internet connectivity, right? You’ve got different providers,
different subscriptions that people might pay for, different devices that people have. One thing that they’ve been trying to figure out is when we do the analysis on that data, right? how to kind of bring it together in such a way that we can still take something from it. And that’s, like,
I would say one of the main focuses for my colleagues who are data scientists has been what kind of sampling strategy can we use to, okay, say, like... Do we need to look at the census tract? Do we need to look at a neighborhood level?
And it seems to be like from the research they’ve done so far that disparities exist either at a kind of micro level, like street level, or they exist at a county level. And you worked on some of the community-based efforts. Can you talk a little bit about that? So I am not a data scientist.
I’m an ethnographer, creative researcher, participatory researcher. And so the project that I’ve been doing has involved looking at six sites, three of them in Illinois and three in Michigan, so those neighboring states. And two of those sites have been urban, the city of Detroit and the city of Chicago. And then two of them are suburban counties.
And then two of them are rural areas. And in each of those places over the last couple of years, I’ve been visiting and meeting people essentially who have been, these are all places that have had their own kind of experience of trying to close gaps in internet connectivity over the last couple of years.
And so I visited them. I’ve spent time with them. I’ve interviewed people there. to try and understand what have they done, what have been their experiences, policy initiatives by the federal government, which, you know, I mentioned earlier that COVID created this more attention. It also ended up in legislation that allocated a very large amount of funds towards
broadband-based initiatives. And I’m using high-speed internet and broadband interchangeably here. At the time, they put $42 billion towards the goal of getting everyone in the country connected to the internet, a certain standard. And so the study kind of took this two-year period because it was like when this
policy was kind of unfolding and to see how are these communities that we’ve selected experiencing that period and are they able to kind of make the changes that they want to make.
Okay. I think what was interesting when I was reading your paper on internet featuring was I think something you had said was really interesting to me. You mentioned, although extremely costly, rural broadband expansion is far less politically fraught than addressing urban disparities in internet service,
which are often entangled with race and have been shown to map onto historical patterns of discrimination.
Okay, so there is a thesis out in... internet research land or digital redlining. And it comes up in, I think it’s mentioned in Ruha Benjamin’s book that you mentioned earlier and some other writers. There’s also been kind of counter research to say that digital redlining doesn’t exist, but a history of redlining for us.
so redlining is in the us a process by which financial services were not offered to people in certain parts of cities and essentially they would take a map out and put red lines of areas they weren’t going to be serving and those were generally areas where black communities or other racialized communities were living so essentially
a process of like financial racism which is also geospatially distributed And then that has had, obviously, legacy effects since it’s been happening. I mean, I think it was in the late 60s that it was outlawed as a practice, but it has continued to have persisting effects.
And there’s been a thesis that digital redlining is the kind of result of that when it comes to internet-based services and internet access. there are parts of the urban areas where residents are predominantly from racialized or black communities and those people still have worse quality internet service than other surrounding areas that is potentially more costly or they
actually don’t have access to internet access they don’t have access to internet through certain technologies So I should mention that there’s a kind of hierarchy of good technologies when it comes to connecting to the internet with a fiber optic being the best kind. It’s like very resilient.
It gives you those really like super fast speeds that people advertise that comes from fiber optic. But in a lot of these areas, they’re still relying on wireless internet provision, which is provided by a tower. And obviously anything that comes in a non-wire based way is not as resilient and often doesn’t perform as well.
Gotcha. And you mentioned digital redlining kind of ended in the 60s, but, you know, they’re still kind of feeling these after effects.
Yeah. So the thesis is essentially that because of digital redlining, homes are less valued in those areas. There’s less infrastructure that’s been built in those areas. And then that has a kind of snowball effect. And so when it comes to putting Cables in the ground to connect people to high speed Internet.
It’s a kind of like legacy effects of not having other kinds of infrastructure that leads to that infrastructure not being built as well. And even in my research. So I’ve spoken to ISPs in the city of Chicago. who have said, oh, we don’t want to build in certain parts of the city.
And I’m talking about the South Side in particular, because we don’t think that people will be able to afford subscription or maintain their subscription. And that is... Is that not redlining? And I’ve had similar from my interviews with folks in the city of Detroit as well. Like in Detroit, there’s some very wealthy,
predominantly white suburban locations and they have really good quality internet connectivity. But then as you go towards the city, the picture changes. And actually in Detroit, I think it was about 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, they started to create their own community-based networks to make up for the lack of infrastructure being built there.
So in both cases, I think we do see instances of something that’s related to race playing out when it comes to the building and availability of internet infrastructure.
Are there certain patterns that research-wise have kind of unfolded with some of the rural communities that you’ve noticed when it comes to internet inequity?
The reason why I had written that it’s more politically fraught to talk about internet inequity in cities as against rural areas is also related to race because in cities, particularly the ones that I’m looking at, you know, Chicago and Detroit, there are very large black communities.
To talk about the lack of internet provision, you have to talk about race. And so... The acknowledgement of race playing a role in this, it makes the discussion very politically fraught because even the acknowledgement of race, particularly in the current political climate, but I would say even beach ball, because I was also here last year, is difficult.
And to say, okay, like historical patterns have led to this happening is difficult. Whereas when you’re trying to make the case for building infrastructure in rural areas, I’m not saying that there are not people of color in rural areas, but I’m talking about perception. And so race-based perception is less of an issue in those rural areas,
but also there’s a very kind of like almost bland reasoning for the high cost of building infrastructure in rural areas. And that is the fact that they’re large and sparsely populated. And so, you know, when you’re saying we need to put money into building in those areas, it’s like, okay, well, yeah, makes sense.
The kinds of, so I had two sites, two rural sites. One is right at the southern tip of Illinois. It’s Jackson County and their challenges there are quite interesting. So they have a lot of forest and they have a lot of rocky ground because I think they’re coming up to a mountain range.
Putting fiber under the ground there is kind of difficult. and very expensive. And so they’ve had to live with wireless in rural parts of the county for a long time. At the same time, there’s one university town, Carbondale, that is very well served by fiber-based internet.
And the market-based model for internet provision really relies on a provider being able to weigh up the money they’ll make in a small area that has a lot of people because you have to put a little bit of infrastructure to connect a lot of people.
And the money that they can then they’ll have to spend to put infrastructure into a large area to serve fewer people. And so in that situation where you’ve already got fiber in arguably the more lucrative area, then the case becomes even more difficult to build there.
So in the end, what they did is they got a cooperative provider. And they worked for the cooperative provider to apply for some government funding, which they received. They won the grant to start building fiber, actually aerial fiber. So it will be hanging from like poles around the rural parts of the county. But unfortunately,
It requires them to have permission from landowners to be able to build through their land. And that permission has not been granted by many of the landowners in that part of Illinois. In Illinois, they need to have permission before they can build. And so they tried to write to people.
They’ve tried to have community events where they give pizza and beer and chat to people about the benefits of fiber internet if they can just build over their land but yeah they just haven’t been able to i think the project’s installed for about a year now and
they’ve put money into trying to get these permissions and they haven’t been able to do it i spoke to my one of my interviewees there who it works at an isp and she told me that if someone had said to her if you come on my land or if you send
people on my land i will put a bullet in their head So that is the kind of sentiment they have about people building fiber internet. And so at the moment, it’s just stalled. Hey, guns.
She says, coming from Texas, I’m kind of interested in something you said before. I never thought about, like, internet connectivity. But what you were saying about it being passé, why do you think it has become passé? It was a topic and now is no longer a topic. I’m kind of fascinated by that.
I mean, I know we’re all chasing, you know, we’re all looking at AI, etc. But I am kind of a little bit curious about that.
That’s a really good question. So... The reason why I think it became per se is there’s a researcher of the internet, his name is Gert Loving, and he is from the Netherlands, I believe. And he says that in internet studies, we’re obsessed with now, which is kind of like,
isn’t essentially like a focus on what’s happening right now and like a forgetting of what happened before and just chasing the new, essentially the next big thing, just like you said with AI. And so... When it comes to even like grant funding,
like a lot of the research grants that I’ve been looking at focus on AI now or research positions or postdocs are focusing on AI. And so like the hype cycle of technology really pulls us in that direction. So I think that’s one reason. Another reason is... So here in the US and in many countries around the world,
the predominant model for the proliferation of internet connectivity is through the market. It’s kind of like, how do you hold companies accountable for not wanting to do something? The problem here is that internet connectivity is, or should have been, a utility, just like other utilities like smartphone and water.
But because it is not legislated in that way, companies will go where they can make money. And so, you know, there’s kind of an accountability vacuum there where people who don’t have connectivity available in their area, what are they going to do? Petition AT&T and say, hey, can you build some infrastructure here?
It’s difficult for them to hold that accountability. And so what people have ended up doing is... And also these are areas that are kind of... really experiencing several different kinds of neglect when it comes to infrastructure. And so internet is not always on the top of their list in terms of like trying to advocate for internet connectivity.
Plus they’re used to not getting infrastructure like everybody else around them. That kind of combination of factors means like difficulty for self-advocating, being used to not having things. Finding workarounds with mobile internet and then the hype cycle. And I think all of those things come in.
And then like the market-based model and not being able to get accountability from companies means that it just kind of fell out of public consciousness in some ways. Not for the people that experience it, of course, but even they don’t have a route to like try and get internet.
Interesting. I’m curious, you mentioned open access infrastructure. I’m curious, and you’d said as a model for internet deployment, open access remains at the fringes in the United States. Can you talk a little bit more about that? First of all, what it is and how it could help?
Open access. is a model that essentially at the moment in the United States, what happens is I build a bit of internet infrastructure and then I serve my customers on that internet infrastructure. And so like the cables are mine and then the service is mine. Open access would be a different model. And I think it’s like,
Potentially, like one of the biggest markets for open access is in Sweden. So look to that if you’re interested in finding out more. But essentially, it means that the infrastructure could be publicly built and then different carriers can be using that infrastructure to provide service.
And so I think mobile phones are a good example of actually how this works, where, you know, the towers, the cell phone towers are not like all owned by one company. The cell phone towers are generally owned by either other companies or publicly owned. And then they are shared.
You can have one provider, like all lots of providers using the same infrastructure. The positive thing around that is if it’s publicly owned infrastructure, when it is built, The cost cutting kind of incentive that happens with private providers is kind of curtailed. And that’s important because at the moment, like I said,
$42 billion of public money is going to go into making infrastructure. But who’s going to own that infrastructure at the end? Private companies. They have the guarantee that it works for 10 years, only 10 years. And then after that, it doesn’t really matter too much. They’ll do the cheapest option. It won’t have as much resilience in it.
And then they will be the only ones that can provide service on it. And so even if they’re really terrible, and you know, ISPs have some of the lowest consumer ratings in this country. And also in the UK, there’s not a lot of alternatives often. You can have one or the other.
If you’re lucky, if you’re in a major urban center, you might have a few. But there’ll be some people who don’t really have an option and then they’ll just be stuck with it. And so it gives consumer choice in a model, in an imperfect capitalist model. The least we can do is have market competition, right?
That’s the way it’s supposed to work. If we’re not even going to have that, then it’s not going to work.
Yeah, but clearly it’s less money for them. So they’re, as you said, they’re not quite warming to the idea.
Less money for them. And also they’re used to doing business that way. So I had a research participant in Michigan and they have actually used public money to build their own infrastructure. And they’re now looking for providers that’s going to use the infrastructure to give service to customers. providers have just not been able to compute.
They’re just like, we want to buy your infrastructure. And then say, no, we want to keep the infrastructure, but you provide service on it. And they have said that those conversations have actually gotten quite aggressive because providers are just not willing to move. Because once they,
the fear that they have is that if they give on this point, the market will move in that direction.
I would like to switch and talk about the book you have coming out. You co-edited Internet Decolonized. It’s coming out early next year. For those of us who are unfamiliar, what does it mean to decolonize the Internet? That’s what the book is about.
That’s the question we’re asking. I think... Without summarizing the entire book... We don’t have an answer, so that’s a spoiler alert. But it’s an edited volume and there are 11 different chapters and each of the writers uses different histories and genealogies of thinkers to tackle the question. When the internet was first offered up to us,
It had this kind of image attached to it of equalizing global information and communications in some way that like when we’re on the internet, we can do things we haven’t been able to do before. It closes gaps. It’s a place of opportunity. That is kind of like the early internet was very much cyber libertarianism was the
way of thinking about it. It was all about how it’s a new space. You remember the term cyberspace? It’s like a new space. But what’s come to pass is I think we’ve all realized the internet doesn’t just suddenly erase social inequality. Yeah. What a kind of decolonizing way of looking at the internet.
What it achieves is it connects the internet, which is still, historically speaking, a fairly new technology, with broader histories of European coloniality. And by doing that, it takes away what I mentioned earlier, which is this kind of technological focus that dehistoricizes and says, okay, actually there were existing power relations happening in the world that the
internet emerged from and works within and reproduces in certain ways. And so the question for us in the book is, okay, can those power inequalities be changed? Can the internet be reformed, as it were, so that it serves... everyone’s needs or more people’s needs or changes those power dynamics or actually
because it emerged from that modern and colonial past and military history in fact and because it emerged in the wealthy West Europe and North America and because it is still characterized by inequality when it comes to not the different aspects but control and like profit for sure Can it even be salvaged?
Or maybe like this internet is not a workable internet.
I know you did a lot of working with and talking with kind of youth and feminist activists in Asia and Africa. Was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. And did that kind of feed into your chapter on internet featuring?
Sounds like. For sure. So actually, when I went into the research, I had read about how Facebook, this was back in 2015. Back a long time. Facebook had started to provide internet access for free as part of people’s mobile plan in different parts of the world. This is leading some blowback because it was...
thought to be kind of breaking one of the cardinal rules of the internet, which is that all data on the internet should be treated the same. It’s a principle of net neutrality. And so there were, in India in particular, a discourse kind of emerged in counter to that, which was saying, this is digital colonialism.
We have an American corporation coming here and controlling our internet. And obviously this discourse really landed like something that was, you know, net neutrality became like a movement across the country where, and obviously it landed in India because it is a post-colonial nation. And so I read about that and I was really struck by, okay, actually,
at the time I was a journalist and I was running Media Diversified, this online publication for writers of colour. And I was also thinking like, okay, we’re putting all this stuff into the world, but really when it comes to power... When it comes to controlling who gained value from a lot of this material,
it’s definitely not the writers. I don’t see a distribution of power coming from publishing these things or being on the internet. Actually, I see a movement towards more centralization of power in certain ways in a new form on the internet. And so I went into my research with youth and feminist activists with that in mind,
very much like a domination kind of narrative. But then that research really changed how I looked at it because that perspective doesn’t give agency to all of the people that are using the internet or trying to rethink the internet or trying to do the internet their own way. And that’s what I found with those activists is
They have their own agendas of what works for them and their communities, and they are pursuing them. Sometimes that is in line with this kind of like dominant, market-based, Western-controlled view of the internet, but sometimes it’s not. I’m very interested by what it means to do the internet your way,
which is what I was alluding to earlier when I said those communities in the United States, which are finding their own ways to connect. Gotcha.
Looking at their own different possibilities of futures, different futures. Yeah, for sure. Are there any books you could, I mean, we’ve talked about Race After Technology by Ruva Benjamin. Are there any other books you could recommend for people who are interested in this area,
want to learn a little bit more and kind of what’s going on right now?
So on... Internet kind of governance at the global level. I really recommend the work of my co-editor, Professor Marianne Franklin. She wrote a book, which is honestly like fairly prophetic back in 2013 for Digital Dilemmas. And it’s one that I go back to a lot. And then I think out in the kind of on the Internet,
there are some really interesting tech that are not necessarily like published books, but I really recommend because When I was talking about cyber libertarianism, there is John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Independent Fiberspace. which is a foundational document for how the early internet was envisaged. And then since then,
other entities have tried to create their own principles for what the internet should be, which are in line with different kinds of politics. And so there’s the feminist principles of the internet, which was created by a coalition of activists, and they work with the Association for Progressive Communication.
And so I like looking at those kind of values documents because I think They show what people want the internet to be in the future. Books that I cite a lot for ideas around like colonialism and the internet is Nanjala Nyabola’s book. What is it? Digital Analog Politics, Digital Democracy.
Those words are all in the title, but I can’t remember in what order. I was just going to say, but that book is great because it’s located in Kenya. And the argument she makes is that there are things that are happening in parts of the world where people are not paying enough attention.
And that’s where places where, like, these power plays get practiced. So Cambridge Analytica did stuff in Nigeria and Kenya before it did anything in Europe and North America. And so she said, like, these are kind of practice zones. And that’s a similar argument to the one made by an academic called Miriam Raghu.
who wrote a book in 2012 called Palestine Online. And again, talks about this kind of like experimentation in parts of the majority world that ends up affecting people everywhere.
Yeah, I read a little bit about that with, what is it, how to stand up to a dictator and the things that were done in the Philippines. I was kind of curious what you have coming up in the future. I know you have an art exhibit in Oregon. Tell us a little bit about that.
yeah so that’s going to be an installation and the whole kind of like the idea behind the work is it’s an exhibition called bodies of knowledge and so i do work as an ethnographer and that involves going to places spending time with people and essentially like getting to know something that is of interest for research and um
I’m also very interested in the idea of technology as we’ve discussed. And so in that exhibition, I’m exploring my body as a technology of knowledge creation. And so like the ways in which the kind of functions that I have to have as an ethnographer to be able to produce knowledge and the kinds of works that I have
I have a series of sound vessels which are made from clay. They’re ceramic. And they are essentially objects that you put to your ear. And the resonance from the air around you produces some noise. Think of a seashell. And the idea is that it reflects whatever’s in the room at the time.
And so if there’s a lot of people in the room, it’s going to produce a resonance of the sounds that they’re producing, but also they’re going to change the air quality and the humidity and everything in the room. And also the shape of the object itself, the vessel,
and all the things that the vessel has been through also shapes what you hear. And so that’s about how things pass through me. when i’m doing the research and then we also have different clay objects that have cyanotype on them which is a type of ink that when you expose it to sunlight areas
that are exposed change color and areas that are covered do not and so it gives you kind of like a what people call a sun print and I’d use those as part of the process. And actually during firing, that colour burns out. But that’s really about like... When I’m going through the research process and I’m then analyzing,
I don’t know, some transcription or some field notes, like the initial images often burned out, but it’s what comes on top of it that ends up being what’s seen by people. It’s obviously been through a process during that time. And then there’s some objects about indexing, which are stacks of tiles, essentially.
They have different things on the edges and different things on the tops. And that helps you think about indexing. So it’s basically like bodies of knowledge really is a... It takes you through the entire ethnographic process and shows different aspects of that knowledge making through the body and tries to help reflect on what that involves.
Cool. I wish I could see. Where is it in Portland?
It’s going to be at the University of Oregon in Portland.
Nice. There’s this last question that I ask everybody. So this podcast is basically just born of my desire to talk to a cool girl and I meet them and find out what they’re doing. And it’s because it’s a joy in my life. So one question I always ask people at the end is,
if there was a woman you could meet, you know, talk to, living or dead, basically, who would it be and what would you ask them about?
That’s a big question. That’s a big question, right? Yeah. But I think that I, in terms of my family history, so my family’s been displaced a few times by British colonialism, essentially. And so I didn’t get to learn a lot about my own family history because of that. And my grandparents all died when I was,
either before I was born or when I was very, very small. So even being able to talk to a great grandparent A great grandmother would be amazing because like, I don’t know anything about these people. And yeah, that’s a bit of me. And I don’t know.
I wish I could go back and talk to, yeah, my aunt, my grandmother, a lot of different people. Oh, thanks a lot. Yeah. Thank you so much for talking with me today. I think that’s it for today’s episode. I am Karina Zappia, and you’ve been listening to the Don’t Pretend We’re Dead podcast today with myself and Dr.
Hannah Zimmerd-Butt. Links to what we were talking about today are going to be available on my Substack page for this podcast. at don’tpretendweredead.substack.com. You can also subscribe there to learn about new podcast episodes coming up. And we’ve got some really cool people I’m super psyched to talk to in the new year. Thanks for listening.
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