Society. Spaces. Screens
Abstract
What do Indigenous, Black, and migrant futures look like? Feel like? Dream like? How can interactive media play a role in imagining these futures? Dr. Alexandrina Agloro will discuss opportunities and challenges of critical making, justice, and participatory design and will anchor this work in ancestral technologies across aquatic borderlands/ boarder-lands. She will share some of her co-design projects including MANA, a video game about Latinx migration to Hawaiʻi, made through participatory research with oral history participants and their communities. This project offers a framework for how to blend game design and community-based research from Indigenous-informed and anticolonial standpoints. Additionally, she will share interdisciplinary work from the HEART CoLAB (Honoring Equity in Applied Research and Technology): digital tool development with system engineers and artists co-designed with birthworkers of color. Dr. Agloro will introduce some of her more recent work weaving together health futures, digital trust and safety, and what we can learn from Indigenous ancestral markings and midwives. These projects offer practice-based examples of how we can enact sacredness as a reciprocal relationship between researcher, participants, and community, and how values of consent, relationality, and gifting can create methodological possibilities across academic, industry, and community-based contexts.
Alexandrina Agloro is a futurist, a media maker, and a full spectrum birthworker who leverages the power of community knowledges and ancestral technologies towards a future where liberation is the anchor. She is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Innovation in the Borderlands at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, a Senior Global Futures Scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, and Affiliate Faculty with The Design School at Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Alexandrina co-directs Situated Critical Race and Media (SCRAM), a multiverse collaborative feminist technology organization. She is the Futurist for the Latinx Pacific Archive, a digital resource for documenting Latinx migration to Oceania and collecting the disappearing cultures of aquatic borderlands in the face of climate change. She is the research advisor to the Birthworkers of Color Collective, and sits on the advisory circles of Indigenous Birth and Parteras de Maíz, organizations for birth justice and traditional community birth. She was named an Emerging Scholar by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education Magazine and in their words, she is a “futuristic scholar looking to change the world.” She lives between the desert and oceans, raising 2 wildlings and a french bulldog along the way.
11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Wednesday 11th December, 2024