Keynote Address: Anasuya Sengupta

Keynote Address:

“It is our dreams that point the way to freedom”:

the idea/lism at the heart of knowledge justice

Wednesday, April 20, 2022 11:15- 12:30

Anasuya Sengupta will explore the ideas and imaginations at the heart of (digital) knowledge justice, the quest to overcome the structural epistemic violence that has denied too many people in the world the freedom to embody many ways of knowing, doing, and being. She will draw upon her own journeys across physical and digital diasporas, and the work of Whose Knowledge? – the feminist anti-colonial collective she co-founded and co-leads – to offer some frames and practices for decolonizing knowledge and the internet. This work affirms Audre Lorde’s words that “it is our dreams that point the way to freedom”, and that we need to reimagine and redesign knowledge and the internet as spaces of shared liberation.

Anasuya Sengupta is Co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the minoritised majority of the world) online. She has led initiatives in India and the USA, across the global South, and internationally for over 20 years, to amplify marginalised voices in virtual and physical worlds, and to uncover the dynamics of structural privilege and dis/privilege (including her own). She is the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the former Regional Program Director at the Global Fund for Women. Anasuya is a 2017 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and received a 2018 Internet and Society award from the Oxford Internet Institute. She is on the Scholars’ Council for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and the advisory committee for MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). Anasuya holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She also has a BA in Economics (Honours) from Delhi University. When not rabble-rousing online, Anasuya makes and breaks pots and poems, takes long walks by the water and in the forest, and contorts herself into yoga poses.