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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”