the Whose Knowledge?

“ We have a crisis of knowledge production in the entire world because most knowledge production is centered around the English language, and Arabic is not an exception to that. So whatever is online, there is a lot of content, but I wouldn't call that knowledge. There's a model of understanding content. That content evolves from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. There's a lot of data in Arabic on the internet, a huge corpus of language. A lot of people have noticed that the dialects of Arabic have benefited a lot from the internet because they are starting to become written. ”

“ But yeah, coming back to many other indigenous communities, they also lack sort of understanding of what really is required. So for many communities, entertainment media is sort of a priority, and I don't get that at times. For me, it's important that the language has all kinds of stuff from scientific literature to, to literature about anything else. And not, not particularly only the entertainment media, and I won't disregard that is, you know, people's own languages and they have to decide what they want. ”

“ So one example that I'm very inspired by is the Wiki Gender, which is a wiki created by a group of feminists from Egypt and Palestine and Syria and Lebanon, and Tunis. And they've been creating new content and compiling material about feminism in the Arabic-speaking world and doing all of that in Arabic first instead of writing it in English and then translating it. So that's a very successful experiment, but I see a lot of unsuccessful experiments such as, I don't want to name names, but there are experiments where people are putting archives online, but they're all on Facebook, for example. ”

“ So, all the messages we are receiving are only bad messages, and I think that it has created a negative impact on the communities and in the population of speakers. So, I think that one of the things, or one of the most important things that are blocking the creation of more content, it's all these negative impacts that people think about their own language. So, they are not speaking the language anymore. They are not transmitting the language to the kids. So yeah, it's more the language attitude that it's blocking [us] to work with the language or to preserve the language. ”

“ So, I'm here because, obviously, working across the African region means that we work across multiple languages, but also, languages of struggle. And this question of being able to really, interact with and engage with the internet as a space for political consciousness, raising, mobilization, sharing information, documenting, and archive. Archiving is a live one for African feminists in our diversities. ”

“ So many minority languages are not necessarily spoken by communities that are, you know, financially unstable. So it's a very different thing for many other communities. For example, in India there is the Parsi community. The Parsi community is generally financially very stable. They're mostly business people, so they have enough resources financially to support if they want to do anything in their language and culture. ”

“ Well, I think it's amazing to find people who share some collective passions or, like, intersecting passions. You know, I think the most valuable aspect of this space is the fact that it's interdisciplinary and very diverse in terms of where people are coming from with their own knowledge bases, their own political analysis situations, geographically, linguistically, culturally, et cetera. ”

“ And all of that is related to the production of knowledge in the Arabic language because the Arabic content of the internet is such a minuscule amount compared to the knowledge that is present on the internet. And it's very disproportional to the number of Arabic language speakers. And that doesn't include the many other languages that are present in our communities but are not represented in our online forms. So in Syria, we have a lot of Syrians and Kurds and Cherkess and many different languages that have online presences, but they're still marginalized even more than Arabic is. ”

“ So I think the first part, what I could do to support these languages, I think my first, you know, contribution would be to create resources that are educational in nature so that people that are developers or are technically competent could make use of those resources and do something for their own language, because they're the best people to do anything for their own language. And a language community has to take the lead in reviving languages or making a language thriving on the internet. ”

“ I'd actually say that a lot of the, like I said, the African feminist work that's been done is offline when it comes to the question of non-colonial languages. When it comes to the question of trying to put African feminisms online and to articulate the way that feminisms happen and the languages we use to describe our work, there have been some efforts there, certainly, but in terms of the workaround language, not so much. ”

“ Well, I work with an organization, a community-based organization, and we are creating content for the internet, basically the social media, and on that platform, we are raising awareness about the language, about our culture. ”

“ I'm a documentary filmmaker, and in the past, I've worked with several organizations like Wikimedia Foundation and Mozilla, the Internet Society, and the Center for Internet Society in Bangalore, India, as part of the community development programs for the respective communities. So I've mostly worked as a community manager and supporting the volunteer communities to grow and also providing them with different kinds of resources so that they could do the things that they do to contribute to the open internet. ”

“ I think that if we think about regional African feminisms and African feminisms that happen transnationally, most of it happens in English and, to some extent, in French and a little bit in Portuguese. Although the Angolans and Mozambicans would always say that because nobody's bothering to learn their languages, they deal a lot with Brazil. And so, so I mean, we are there online but largely discussing and debating in colonial languages.
And it also means that the internet has been a space where actually African feminism in new generations is flourishing. ”

“ A huge part of what's missing is the technical tools and epistemic frameworks that will allow us to take our archives and make them accessible and allow greater engagement in them that will then create positive change in our societies. And to me, being able to involve a large segment of people in one archival creation and to activating those archives is a crucial step in building a democratic society. ”

“ Yes, there are people who are in solidarity with me, who will help me out in my process of discovering my way or my community's way of doing decolonization. Meeting those people in person has been invaluable. ”

“ But what's also interesting is that already as we're identifying the kind of visions or the ethical basis upon which we think a decolonized internet would exist, what's interesting to me is for people who've never met each other, we're coming up with a lot of common points, which means that actually, we share a broad sense of direction in terms of where we think this should go. ”

“ I think people here are working on really important issues and a wide range of different issues. For me, coming here and even just interacting and listening to so many people or sharing my work that's linked to many opportunities, many collaborations, and those collaborations as they have worked really well in the past, I'm sure they're gonna work really well this time as well with so many people. ”

“ So, I'm very happy to see that it's actually this very diverse set of feminists who are actually pushing this question for all of us and creating a space where such a diversity of people can come together to really think again about a vision, but also really concrete ways that we might be able to see it happen. ”

“ And that's something that we need right now because historically, there has been, in the past half a century, there has been a very systematic process of destroying democratic institutions in the region. And our mission in creating new archives and documenting whatever is missing is that we are engaging a larger public in the democratic process of building new archives and activating those archives in order to understand ourselves better. ”

“ So I think I could contribute towards the technical educational resource building, training communities, training leaders, mentoring them, and once they are competent or they have enough know-how, then they can take off and, and take lead in many activities. ”

“ And there are documented cases of Syrian revolution Facebook pages that have recently, very recently actually, been taken down because of the changes in Facebook's policies without informing the original authors of the page, without any consultation with the Syrian community. ”

“ This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, which allows free use, distribution, and creation of derivatives, so long as the license is unchanged and clearly noted, and the original author is attributed. ”

“ So, again, there has been some movement in terms of some of the dominant languages, but there's still definitely a need to, I think, empower people who speak those languages to be the people shaping and creating the platforms. ”

“ And meeting someone just makes it easier. I mean, there is a lot of resources available online, but sometimes we don't really have an aggregation of that to go look at things that we really are looking for. So sometimes this, this kind of conferences help a lot. ”

“ And I think it's an area that we need to, again, invest a bit more, in particularly, as I said, because now the new generations of African feminists are very vibrantly active online, but as I said, it's largely in, in colonial languages. ”