Invited speaker: Iginio Gagliardone
Infrastructures of Belonging: Experimentation, Activism, and Futures from the African Continent
For the Digital Humanities to thrive in Africa, they should move beyond narrow concerns with digitisation and preservation, and cultivate infrastructures—material, methodological, and intellectual—that foster belonging. This speech explores strategies for developing spaces where computational methods and decolonial critique intersect, creating opportunities for training, collaboration, and innovation. It emphasizes the importance of reflexive methodologies that interrogate both the promises and the limits of digital tools, as well as partnerships that connect universities, research institutes, policy actors, and communities. By framing infrastructures not only as technical systems but also as social and epistemic networks, the speech highlights how Digital Humanities can support broader processes of higher education transformation, contribute to inclusive digital innovation, and help reimagine futures in Africa and globally.
Iginio Gagliardone is the inaugural SA-UK Bilateral Chair in the Digital Humanities at Wits University, and a fellow of Wits’ Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute. He is the author of The Politics of Technology in Africa (2016) and China, Africa, and the Future of the Internet (2019). His most recent work examines the international politics of Artificial Intelligence and the emergence of new imageries of technological evolution in Africa.