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The extractive infrastructures of contact tracing apps

Journal of Environmental Media ◽

10.1386/jem_00030_1 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

pp. 9.1-9.9 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Miriyam Aouragh ◽

Seda Gürses ◽

Helen Pritchard ◽

Femke Snelting

Keyword(s):

Supply Chains ◽

Global South ◽

Contact Tracing ◽

Technological Application ◽

Moral Choice ◽

Economic Implications ◽

Life And Death ◽

Racial Capitalism ◽

The World

The COVID-19 pandemic will go down in history as a major crisis, with calls for debt moratoriums that are expected to have gruesome effects in the Global South. Another tale of this crisis that would come to dominate COVID-19 news across the world was a new technological application: the contact tracing apps. In this article, we argue that both accounts ‐ economic implications for the Global South and the ideology of techno-solutionism ‐ are closely related. We map the phenomenon of the tracing app onto past and present wealth accumulations. To understand these exploitative realities, we focus on the implications of contact tracing apps and their relation with extractive technologies as we build on the notion racial capitalism. By presenting themselves in isolation of capitalism and extractivism, contact tracing apps hide raw realities, concealing the supply chains that allow the production of these technologies and the exploitative conditions of labour that make their computational magic manifest itself. As a result of this artificial separation, the technological solutionism of contract tracing apps is ultimately presented as a moral choice between life and death. We regard our work as requiring continuous undoing ‐ a necessary but unfinished formal dismantling of colonial structures through decolonial resistance.

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Magical Habits

10.1215/9781478021483 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Monica Huerta

Keyword(s):

San Francisco ◽

Fairy Tale ◽

Cook County ◽

Growing Up ◽

Award Recipient ◽

Racial Capitalism ◽

Book Award ◽

Mexican Government ◽

Duke University ◽

Cristero Rebellion

In Magical Habits Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with both the afterlives of history and racial capitalism. Whether dwelling on mundane aspects of everyday life, such as the smell of old kitchen grease, or grappling with the thorny, unsatisfying question of authenticity, Huerta stages a dynamic conversation among genres, voices, and archives: personal and critical essays exist alongside a fairy tale; photographs and restaurant menus complement fictional monologues based on her family's history. Developing a new mode of criticism through storytelling, Huerta takes readers through Cook County courtrooms, the Cristero Rebellion (in which her great-grandfather was martyred by the Mexican government), Japanese baths in San Francisco—and a little bit about Chaucer too. Ultimately, Huerta sketches out habits of living while thinking that allow us to consider what it means to live with and try to peer beyond history even as we are caught up in the middle of it. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

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