[Vasundhara Mathur] Our second speaker is going to be the wonderful Anasuya Sengupta. Anasuya is co-director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities online. She has led initiatives across the Global South and internationally for over twenty-five years to collectively create feminist presence and futures of love, justice and liberation. She is committed to unpacking issues of power, privilege and access, including her own as an anti-caste Savarna woman. She’s a co-founder and advisor to the Numun Fund, the first feminist tech fund for and from the Global South, the former chief grantmaking officer of the Wikimedia Foundation and the former regional programme director at the Global Fund for Women. Anasuya is a 2017 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow and received a 2018 Internet and Society Award from the Oxford Internet Institute. She is the, she’s on the Scholars Council for the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and the Advisory Committee for MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship. Anasuya has an honorary doctorate from the University of London and holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She also has a BA in economics from New Delhi University.
[Anasuya Sengupta] Do I press something? When you’re in tech, asking questions like that feels super embarrassing. There we are. [Singing] This is a vachana, or a saying, from the twelfth century from Akka Mahadevi, a mystic philosopher-poet who fought both the oppressions of patriarchy as well as of caste. And I’m invoking Akka this morning with all of you because of two things. Not just because this vachana, or poem in our current vocabulary, tells us that we should keep calm and archive on. And I believe that when Akka says calm, she means integrity of purpose. But also to remind us that our peoples, our communities, remember in extraordinarily resilient ways, that this vachana, transmitted orally for over eight centuries, continues to be with us today and now has digital archives, now has forms of preservation that are both institutionally supported as well as community collected. And so her 400 and more vachanas and the over 20,000 vachanas of the movement against caste in the twelfth century reminds us that we can keep knowledge and memory alive, and while we do this across centuries and continents, we keep alive the discipline of hope, as the abolitionist Mariame Kaba would remind us.
So I’m from the feminist collective Whose Knowledge? You can forget everything that Vasundhara said about me. That’s the most important thing. And we owe our name not just to the obvious and unbounded legacy of Stuart Hall, but also to his notion that we can reimagine our futures through the remembrance of memory. That knowledge is memory, and memory is knowledge. The Argentinian semiotician Walter Mignolo asked the question: Why is it that when some people know, it is called knowledge, and when other people know, it is called culture? And so we do not use the word culture other than very sparingly in the work we do. We are a collective of feminist troublemakers, women and non-binary folks from across every populated continent. A small but mighty group, we believe. And in thinking about the archive, not so much as an institution, but as sites and processes and practices of memory, we hope to confront the violence of what colonial capitalist archives can be for us, and simultaneously offer that hope I was talking about.
I’ll offer some quick context to why we work at this intersection of knowledge and tech justice, why it’s so important for us to know the context we’re in. And you can see if you sort of ask some serious questions about whose knowledge is online, you end up with some very disturbing statistics, which includes the fact that our frenemies at Google estimated a few years ago that of all the published material in the world, there are about 130 million books in only about 480 languages, most of them what I’m calling Euro-lingual, for obvious reasons. There are over 7,000, nearly 8,000, spoken and signed languages in the world, half of which are oral. So whose knowledge do we preserve, especially if we think of language as a proxy for knowledge? When we think about publications in academic journals, in peer-published publications, in books, whose publishing is it? Most of it is monolingual in English, and thereby we could claim monocultural. And yet most of the world’s knowledge is oral. It’s gestural, it’s textural, it’s embodied. When you look at whose internet, most of us are online, most of us are online through the mobile phone. And yet we are not those who are creating the content online, especially if you think of it as public knowledge. Most women are online. Men are likely to be more online than women. Surprise. And if you look at internet users from Africa, you can see how internet penetration is incredibly weak.
I’m taking just an example that I know well of public knowledge online, possibly, as I sometimes say, the best of the internet and not yet the best of humanity, which is Wikipedia. And it is the largest free knowledge repository of its kind. Including in the sort of set of free knowledge repositories and projects. And yet only 10% of its editors are estimated to be women, only 1 in 10, and only about 20% of the public knowledge that it produces is estimated to be produced by and from people in the Global South. This was a very powerful visualisation by geographers, information geographers at the Oxford Internet Institute in 2018. And it’s very obvious where most of the articles on Wikipedia come from.
So whose knowledge? Whose heritage? Whose internet? Whose archive? Whose memory? I’m going to use a dead white man at this point to go deeper into why we do the work we do and to remind us of the many, many deep structural issues at the heart of how we think of knowledge and memory. Michael Polanyi. Michael Polanyi was a very interesting, quirky, Hungarian-British scientist. And other than his lab work he wrote a lot about tacit knowledge. And one of the things Polanyi says is that all of our knowledges are embodied, but what we call formal knowledge is that knowledge which has artefact. And so we produce artefact in very many ways. This talk is going to be recorded. Someone’s going to create metadata. If it’s Rosemary, it’ll actually be interesting. Hopefully she’ll put tactics on it. But without that, all it is is a talk that one human is giving somewhere in the world that is not going to be understood as knowledge because it doesn’t have an artefact. What underlines the power and underwrites the power of artefact is institutional authority. This is the Tate. The metadata of the Tate will be not just discoverable. It has power that many of us as small collectives, small archives, don’t have. So remembering that, I think, is really important for us as we think about the radical knowledge, that radical notion that people are knowledges, that people are memory, that people are archive.
In our work as Whose Knowledge? we enter the, the spheres of knowledge creation and curation and preservation in many different ways, so that people can come in, in ways that matter to them and that they feel at ease with. So we are both simultaneously challenging the status quo and reimagining what we might want to see and be in the world. So as you can see, one obvious space is Wikipedia and its sister projects, because over 10 billion people visit Wikipedia, 4 billion unique visitors every month, 80,000 people across the world create, or curate or bring together, gather the knowledge that’s on Wikipedia. The biases, the deep structural biases and inequities on Wikipedia travel across the internet because many of our searches come from Wikipedia. Similarly, we work on languages because of the deep multilinguality of our world, the multimodality of our world. We work on some of the back-end infrastructures and designs and architecture of the internet. And obviously we therefore also work on archives.
Some of the key principles that we use are, helpfully, four ‘r’s, resistance, reparation, resilience and (re)imagination. And I know these are words we use very often as memory workers. I’m going to offer you some of the specific examples of how we use them and how we think of them. When we think of resistance, we are indeed challenging the status quo in multiple ways, including who is a knowledge creator, who is a knowledge curator or selector, and who can, whose ontologies and epistemologies are at the heart of the way we structure knowledge. So, for instance, with Wikipedia, we say that it’s the encyclopaedia that everyone can edit. But as I’ve just demonstrated, it’s still primarily an encyclopaedia of straight, white, privileged men from the Global North, from Europe and North America. It contains a notion of knowledge that is extremely Western-centric, that is Enlightenment-driven. And I’m not anti-Enlightenment. I just believe, like many of us in this room, that there are multiple systems of knowledge, there are multiple epistemologies, and therefore there are also multiple ontologies, multiple ways of thinking about how to structure what we know. And Wikidata, which is the largest structured data repository in the world, which underlines much of digital technology right now, needs to be examined from that light.
Reparation. One of the things we do is to remind people that tech is not the great disruptor. It’s in fact a clear and very obvious linear path from colonialism to capitalism to tech capital. And to imagine that it’s the innovator without challenging the power inherent in it, and the privilege inherent in it, or at least inherent in Big Tech, is deeply problematic. Just as an example, for those of us who are memory workers, only two companies at the moment control more than half of cloud storage, Amazon and Microsoft. What does it mean for all of us who are working in this space when, despite all of our different forms of resistance and resilience, we are still controlled by two companies? Data is still controlled by two companies.
So how do we then think of resilience? One of the ways we think of resilience is multilinguality, because we think about it as our memories in multiple languages of the world, in multiple modes of the world, in multiple ways of knowing and being. And we, we set out to do a piece of research in action called the State of the Internet’s Languages, which brings together both story and number to tell, to tell us why this is important. And, of course, how do we reimagine the archive on our own terms? What do sites of memory look like for us? We’re doing this in a number of ways, as you can see. But I’m going to say that the most important ways are through people, through creating communities of practice, communities in practice together, because we are bringing together multiple forms of expertise and experience. In the UK we’ve already begun to pull together wonderful people, some of whom are in this room, in these conversations of how do we build not just a community together, but a political agenda for action? We’ve done this both in person and virtually.
And I think I’m going to end with something very important. And Alia will speak to it even more, much more eloquently than I possibly can. But we cannot do this work in isolation, as David said earlier. The people’s archival cloud is about solidarity in practice, not just as communities, but as resistance to the many violences of our world, including online. From the back end of technological infrastructure to the front end of experience. Just three examples, and three very stark and poignant examples, of our time. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has over 7 million people displaced in deeply violent ways because of mining of cobalt, lithium and coltan. These are the minerals at the heart of our digital devices, at the heart of our hardware. Sudan has had the highest, to 2023, has had the highest number of internet shutdowns anywhere in the world, and Sudan lost internet access for over a month in February this year because of its conflict, in which over 25 million people have needed humanitarian support. What does it mean for memory when this is the state of our infrastructure? And again, Palestine, we all know and we will know even more soon. But the genocide of people is the genocide of memory. It’s epistemic genocide. So as archivists, as memory workers, whether we work in physical or digital spaces or increasingly on the continuum of the two – because there’s no real separation anymore – we have to resist and reimagine together. Only liberated people and their liberated memories can create liberatory futures. Thank you.
Anasuya Sengupta is Co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the minoritised majority of the world) online.