In conversation with decolonial ethics, fully informed by Indigenous, Black, LatinX and Asian postcolonial and decolonial studies, this book surveys decolonial approaches to digital and academic practices. Digital spaces and media, we argue, can act as spaces of decolonial intervention within community-based work, historical re-telling, biocultural research projects, educational and historical archives, and museum display.

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Developing new decolonial digital content, whether for climate crisis storytelling, updating outdated colonial histories, environmental conservation efforts, decolonizing museum displays, or cultural revitalization for communities, requires being held accountable to postcolonial and decolonial educators, scholars, thinkers, and advocates. Throughout Decolonial Approaches to Data Ethics and Re-Storying: From Biocultural Landscapes at Risk to Archiving the Dead we hope that we have made clear how digital technologies, climate justice, global biodiversity and conservation, cultural heritage, and decolonial futures are deeply interconnected across biocultural landscapes.

 

Data comes in so many forms that there is no one definition used by all scientific societies or national funding bodies. What has become evident is that data can be wrought with social meaning, often reflecting the values of the people who collected it, through how and why it was collected, what information was collected and what was ignored or left out of a study or collection. Taking a decolonial stance to data is to accept that data might hold multiple truths, and that data should expand past the Western concept of sterile objectivity to take many different forms that respect different ways of knowing. At the core of our argument, digital spaces and platforms are often overlooked as simple mechanisms to display information and organize data.

 

Much to the contrary, digital technologies do not create neutral spaces where information is arranged without implicit meanings built into their structure, social and cultural use, and experience. Digital spaces, like Western academic ways of thinking and doing research, require decolonial approaches to organize and make data available in ways that avoid replicating colonial values, and to tell stories of resistance, resurgence, and survivance.