Angela Haas, Illinois State University
\nEmily Legg,\u00a0Purdue University
\nGabriela Rios,\u00a0University of Central Florida (unable to attend)<\/p>\n

The Politics of Our Intellectual Interfaces:\u00a0Revisiting the Technological Metaphors We Live and Think With<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s an update available for your operating system, technorhetors, and Angela Haas said you should download it now. Seriously.<\/p>\n

Working from a decolonial methodological framework (Smith, 1999), Hass argues that the metaphors we use to talk about technorhetorics are fraught with violence and supremacy, and we must first refuse those discourses to interrupt the patriarchy and hegemony of digital humanities. Taking a critical approach to the use of ecological metaphors, Haas seeks to build on Haywisher, Selfe, Morashki, and Person\u2019s (2004) work in accumulated and ecological literacies by bringing our attention back to the relationships, living practices, and contexts that are often erased in techno and ecosystemic rhetorics, asking the question, \u201cWhose ecosystem is this anyway?\u201d<\/p>\n

By theorizing a social justice approach to ecological literacies, Haas contributes to Selber\u2019s taxonomy of multiliteracies, urging us to become more critical of the discourses of progress and ecological metaphors as we can\u2019t \u201cfunction\u201d with technology unless we consider how that technology and its discursive constructs position its users.\u00a0Invoking Powell (2007), she underscores the idea that \u201caccess is contextualized and contingent and profoundly more complex when considered in practice\u201d (17) and technorhetors can begin to understand those discursive constructions through a decolonial feminist operating system (DFOS) built on parameters of relationality, locational accountability, and responsibility.<\/p>\n

Hass\u2019s DFOS fixes many of the \u201cbugs\u201d in the older ecological operating systems by recoding imperialist and hegemonic rhetorics of:<\/p>\n

Exploration<\/strong> Considering how indigenous peoples and places have been victimized through exploration, we should ask who has privilege to explore? Who benefits from exploration? What is impact? What kind of damage is done?<\/p>\n

Exploitation<\/strong>\u00a0Indigenous people\u2019s land has been historically exploited through land grabs; thus, we should ask whose eco-resources are being taken advantage of? Which agents do we privilege? \u00a0Whose indigenous ecosystems are we supplanting or ignoring?<\/p>\n

Environmentalism<\/strong> Non-dominant groups are also victims of land dumps and environmental racism.\u00a0Building on DeVoss’s , McKee\u2019s, and Selfe\u2019s (2009) work with eWaste, we should ask how we are and are not talking about the material violence of technologies. What is the disciplinary landscape of those talking about ecology and how are they grounding discussions in particular environment contexts?<\/p>\n

Frontier\/ Pioneerism<\/strong> Frontiers have been places of both slavery and mass genocide– of rape, pillaging, and sexual assault, and pioneering is always already an act of violence.\u00a0When we use these metaphors for talking about digital humanities, we are reifying heteronormativity, ablism, and \u00a0whiteness. Here, Hass offers no lines of inquiry, just a poignant directive. Stop it. Now.<\/p>\n

Digital Nativism<\/strong> Smacks of agism and invokes the blood quantum laws enacted to measure and divide native people. This metaphor works to create a divide between \u201cus\u201d (those who are techno-savvy) and \u201cthem\u201d (those who aren\u2019t), and it forces the question of who\u2019s native and who\u2019s not? Who gets to decide? What kinds of \u201ctechnology\u201d are privileged and who gets to own technoliteracy?<\/p>\n

Hass\u2019s DFOS prompts us to question the common metaphors we use to talk about digital humanities, to consider their impacts on people\u2019s bodies, and to adopt a way of rhetorically performing ecology that foregrounds geographies of bodies and place.<\/p>\n