Global Media & Policy Seminar Series: Nicola Bidwell - 'Community Networks and the Identity of African Innovation'
Speaker bio:
Nic Bidwell’s research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has15-year’s success in community-based tech design in the global south. This comprises work with rural inhabitants of Argentina, Australia, India, Kenya, Indonesia, Mexico, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia and Uganda, including indigenous groups, that is sensitive to local meanings in relation to resourcefulness, innovation, inclusion, identity etc. She is known for catalysing new directions in HCI e.g. initiating the first indigenous-led digital design panel (2008), first publications about decolonalism (2015) in the ACM and co-founded AfriCHI, the African ACM conference on computer-human interaction.
The Global Media & Policy Seminar Series is an online seminar series jointly organised between the University of Oxford’s Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies) and the University of Johannesburg’s School of Communication. The series fosters an international dialogue about pressing issues affecting new media and human rights, particularly at the margins. The speakers in this series tackle issues related to technology and policy across different contexts, including (among others) algorithmic bias and inequalities; misinformation and elections; social media and migration; extreme speech online; community-driven internet access solutions; autonomous and feminist infrastructure; and privacy. This innovative global seminar series uses the power of technology to bridge the geographic and epistemic distance between the global north and the global south – to bring together critical perspectives on new media in context and facilitate a diverse dialogue on the most important questions of human rights, internet governance and our technologically mediated lives.