Grief and Out The Ashes (with Mimi Onuha)

Nigerian-American artist and researcher, Mimi Onuha, whose work highlights the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection, joins the WBI show. We spend a lot of time in the beginning of this episode exploring Mimi’s undergraduate thesis Death on Facebook to understand how different cultural practices around death and birth are allowed in western society and mediated in the digital. We think together about how these rituals—fundamental to being human—are happening on commercial platforms we know we don’t own or govern. We connect on these *public* forums anyway because we yearn to be seen.

Out of the ashes of this loss, we dream about building alternative sociotechnical systems to further liberation, think about the racial tension between Black Americans and African immigrants in STEM academia, and end with a cypher round on hope and possibility.

Hosts: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Stanley Muñoz and Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

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Links to the episode:
This AI Knows When You'll Die and Its Creators Don't Know How
Can big data save these children? 
When Proof Is Not Enough
White Witness and the Contemporary Lynching
Inside Makoko: danger and ingenuity in the world's biggest floating slum

Recommendations:
Mimi Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, Momtaza Mehri, Better Get It On Your Soul by Charles Mingus
Stanley Kindred by Octavia Butler, Love Death and Robots (Multiversity Episode/Netflix), Papi Pacify by FKA Twigs and Jhene Aiko’s Come On
Ilan Blowback podcast on the Iraq War
Khadijah Epistrophies — Brent Hayes Edwards