Keynotes
Biography
Roopika Risam is a scholar of digital humanities and critical data studies whose work examines how data, archives, and technologies shape histories of race, colonialism, and power. She is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College and the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Her research and public projects, including the Pan-African Data Project and Reanimate, explore how digital methods can surface marginalized histories while challenging the epistemic limits of dominant archives. Her forthcoming book, Data Empire (Harper, 2026), traces the global history of data as a tool of governance from ancient recordkeeping to contemporary algorithmic systems. Learn more at https://roopikarisam.com
Keynote
Digital Humanities Under Constraint: Minimal Computing as Postcolonial Digital Humanities
Scholarship on social justice in digital humanities has focused on representation: expanding access to marginalized collections, recovering overlooked histories, and incorporating voices long excluded from the digital record. While these efforts are essential, representation alone is not enough. The political and epistemological commitments of a digital project are shaped both by what it represents and by how it is built. Drawing on more than a decade of work, Risam argues that minimal computing offers a framework for extending the insights of postcolonial digital humanities beyond representation and addressing the many constraints academics and cultural heritage professionals face today. Risam proposes that this approach to digital humanities allows us to ask critical questions about necessity, scale, infrastructure, governance, collaboration, and sustainability. In this way, minimal computing offers a framework for designing digital projects that move beyond representation toward accountable forms of postcolonial praxis.
Biography
Sandra Ponzanesi is Professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies/Graduate Gender Programme at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is founder and director of the PCI (Postcolonial Studies Initiative). Her research interest focuses on postcolonial critique from a feminist, comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. She engages with issues such as the role of postcolonial intellectuals in Europe, the connection between digital media and migration, views on postcolonial cinema and the position of women in conflict zones. She is author of Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture (Suny Press, 2004), The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (Palgrave, 2014) and Gender, Globalization, and Violence (Routledge, 2014). She has also co-edited many volumes such as Postcolonial Theory and Crisis (De Gruyter, 2024), Doing Digital Migration (AUP Press, 2024), Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe (Rowman and Littlefield 2018) and Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge 2014) among others. She is currently leading the project ‘Virtual Reality as Empathy Machine: Media, Migration and the Humanitarian Predicament’ funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). More info: https://www.uu.nl/staff/SPonzanesi
Keynote
Digital Cosmopolitanism: Postcolonial Approaches to the Politics of Connection
This talk proposes rethinking the potential of cosmopolitanism in the light of recent digital innovations. It argues that technology is never either neutral or innocent, generating in some cases an anti-cosmopolitan stance despite the connectivity mantra (Calhoun 2017; Beck 2002). By reviewing what it defines as the “technological assemblage,” consisting of contemporary developments, including platforms, datafication, and biometrics, this talk focuses on the dark side of technology and the need to reposition the ideal of digital cosmopolitanism as the antithesis of fraught infrastructures. Yet, despite its many drawbacks, cosmopolitanism remains an aspiration or ideal worth striving for in the face of increased intolerance, xenophobia, and discrimination (Appiah 2007; Gilroy 1993; Robbins and Horta 2017). Showing how this digital reconfiguration of the concept of cosmopolitanism poses important new challenges and paradoxes, this talk connects science and technology studies together with philosophy, postcolonial theory, and intercultural studies, to reflect on the challenges and opportunities of cosmopolitanism in a digital age (Kurasawa 2004; Zuckerman 2013; Ponzanesi 2026).