NAIS 30.23 Making Kin with Machines: Indigenous Technologies and Digital Media
This course draws from Indigenous perpectives to challenge contemporary Western understandings of advanced technology and offer Indigenous futurities and futurisms that connect past, present and future. The texts and digital media presented here blur boundaries between artificial/natural; online/offline, human/nonhuman or other-than-human; and sentient/inert. The course title Making Kin with Machines engages "with" in two ways. The first is how we build connections and relations, or sever them, with nonhuman technologies such as smartphones, algorhythms, and AI. . . and how they connect, monitor, and affect us. The second is how we maintain, build, and/or disrupt human relations in the current pandemic through technology. This class will ask the following questions: what does it mean to be in-relation with human and nonhuman entities? How do genealogies and histories of connection and disruption shape not only what we do now, but the technologies we build and design in the future? Finally, this class asks us to consider what we mean by being a good relation - to what and to whom? - and what Indigenous conceptions of advanced technology and futures-thinking can offer.