Thursday, September 4th, 2025 at 12:00pm
Coble Hall, Room 306
and on Zoom
Description: Claudia Grisales will present her dissertation research that explores the role of digital technologies in struggles for land and recognition of a campesino, or small-farmer, community, in the northwestern Colombian Amazon. While dealing with discontinuities, breakdowns, and exclusions that configure multiple digital divides, campesinos face systems of technological surveillance and management constitutive of national and international arrangements to govern the global environmental crisis. In this talk, she focuses on how technologies of forest governance configure the forest as an asset and campesinos as mere beneficiaries of international cooperation projects. While analyzing the structural and historical aspects underpinning the power differential between the environmental bureaucracy and the campesino community, the talk highlights brief moments of odd connection in which technologies of forest governance are grass-rooted to make new, and perhaps more just, understandings of the forest and its politics possible amid an uncertain landscape.
Bio: Claudia Grisales is a doctoral candidate in Informatics in the School of Information Science at UIUC. She is also an affiliated researcher at the Center of Alternatives to Development in Colombia, an organization that seeks to collaboratively build alternatives to socio-environmental conflicts characteristic of the dominant development model. Claudia is an interdisciplinary scholar of technology and community, bringing critical sociotechnical perspectives to diverse scenarios of marginalization, collaboration, and activism influenced by research in Community Informatics, Feminist Science & Technology Studies, and Participatory Design. She is interested in reflexive and transformative work with communities and social movements that can make new forms of politics and imagination visible in a troubled world.
Recording