Technology and Being Human: Building Indigenous and Decolonial Epistemologies

This talk will locate technology as a premise of making that arises out of the entanglement of body-mind-soul-spirit with Earth. A decolonizing indigenous framework allows us to both question the inevitability of exploitative technology predicated on environmental destruction (such as AI research), and, to rise above a naïve faith that technological innovations that have their origin in the military industrial complex have benevolent aims. We will attend to the elemental conversation with the Earth that is seeking to make itself known, and to being human in conversation with the Earth.

Bio: Dr. Monica Mody is a Core Professor in the Pacifica Graduate Institute's Mythological Studies MA/PhD Program. Her areas of specialization include decolonial, indigenous, and women of color paradigms and epistemologies; Anzaldúan frameworks; earth-sourced and feminist spirituality and ritual; poetry, divination, oracular speech, and arts-based research; and nondual embodiment, in conversation with ancestral lineages from South Asia. She is the author…