Dear Colleagues,

The Critical Computing Seminar for the academic year 2022-2023 starts online next week. Our first speaker is Dr. David Nemer from the University of Virginia, who will discuss his newly published book, "Technology of the Oppressed." We cordially invite you to this seminar.

Please find below the details for attending the seminar. Also, please feel free to forward this invitation to the people in your network who might be interested in this topic.

Best Regards, Ishtiaque

== Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science Faculty Fellow, Schwartz Reisman Institute https://www.torontosri.ca/ The University of Toronto Program Committee Chair, ICTD 2022 https://ictd.org/ictd2022/

Bahen Centre for Information Technology, Room 5262 Saint George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 2E4, Canada Ph: +1 647 220 3482 web: https://www.ishtiaque.net/ My Availability: Google Calendar Link https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ishtiaque.uoft%40gmail.com&ctz=America%2FToronto&mode=WEEK ==

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Priyank Chandra priyank.chandra@utoronto.ca Date: Tue, Sep 20, 2022 at 3:40 PM Subject: Critical Computing Seminar (Sep 28): "Technology of the Oppressed" by David Nemer To: ISCHOOL-FAC-REG-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA < ISCHOOL-FAC-REG-L@listserv.utoronto.ca> Cc: Ishtiaque Ahmed ishtiaque@cs.toronto.edu, Robert Soden < robert.soden@utoronto.ca>, Shion Guha shion.guha@utoronto.ca, Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat rifat@cs.toronto.edu, Azhagu Meena Solai Azhagu Konar Paramanathan meena.paramanathan@mail.utoronto.ca, Adrian Petterson < a.petterson@mail.utoronto.ca>

Dear All,

We are happy to announce the *September* edition of the Critical Computing seminar series. This month Dr. David Nemer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, will present a book talk “*Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil*”, on *Wednesday, September 28, 11am to 12:30pm*. The book is Open Access and available for download https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5266/Technology-of-the-OppressedInequity-and-the .

We invite you all to join the seminar. Please check the following link for more details about the seminar: https://sites.google.com/view/uoft-critical-computing/seminar-series/david-n.... The registration link is at: http://bit.ly/CCS_DavidNemer

I have appended the seminar details at the bottom of this email. Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone interested (within and outside UofT).

The Critical Computing Seminar Series is a monthly online seminar where we invite scholars to discuss topics in critical computing. The objective of the seminar is to create a broader understanding of computing from different ethical, social, and cultural perspectives. You will find more information about this seminar series and past and upcoming speakers by following the link: https://sites.google.com/view/uoft-critical-computing/seminar-series.

We look forward to seeing you all at the seminar.

Best Regards,

Priyank Chandra (On behalf of the Organizers)

Assistant Professor

Faculty of Information

University of Toronto

*Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil *

*David Nemer*, Assistant Professor, Department of Media Studies, University of Virginia, USA

*Website:* https://www.dnemer.com/

*Twitter:* @davidnemer

*Time:* 28 September, 2022 from 11AM - 12.30 PM, EST

*Abstract:* In this seminar, David Nemer discusses how Brazilian favela residents engage with and appropriate technologies, both to fight the oppression in their lives and to represent themselves in the world. Brazilian favelas are impoverished settlements usually located on hillsides or the outskirts of a city. In his latest book, Technology of the Oppressed, David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don't just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish. Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom.

*Bio:* David Nemer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He is a Faculty Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center, a Visiting Scholar in The Institute for Rebooting Social Media, and an Affiliated Scholar at Princeton University's Brazil Lab. Nemer is the author of Technology of the Oppressed (MIT Press, 2022) and Favela Digital: The other side of technology (Editora GSA, 2013). He holds a MA in Anthropology from the University of Virginia, an MS in Computer Science from Saarland University, and a Ph.D. in Computing, Culture, and Society from Indiana University. Nemer has written for The Guardian, El País, The Huffington Post (HuffPost), Salon, and The Intercept_.