It has been a busy month of October already …

I have just returned from a three-city tour of Ontario, Canada, for the annual conference of the society for the social studies of science (4S) in Toronto; and then some family time in Ottawa and Hamilton.

4S is one of the two academic conferences I like attending. I also get to meet a lot of academic friends and relatives. It was in Toronto this year. I spoke on a plenary panel, spoke some more at a paper presentation, and exhibited a new ‘making and doing’ project with Polina Syadeskaya of AIVAN.

And then, as I landed back in London, I went straight to Ibraaz for another talky-talk event. Ibraaz is a beautiful, new, year-old cultural venue in central London re-launching their re-invigorated publishing platform on the Global Majority, 011. My contribution was an essay on AI, of course, responding to non-aligned AI geopolitics, and thinking with ruptures in the notion of the majority. In my view there is not, and has never been, a majority. It is a symbolically rich and valuable concept though, the global South, or majority. Our panel event ended up agreeing with this, in fact, resisting the flattening that happens with ‘majority world’ and ‘South’; we ended on the note of wanting more specificity and more naming of injustices, inequalities, and power.

Till next time !

-M