sing into twelve minutes so bear with me and so but clubs have been around for centuries but they've been transformed in recent years by pop especially in the last couple of decades by popular media phenomena such as oprah's book club so social technologies have extended the popularity of book clubs in the digital digital age encouraging engagement through reading on a global scale i'll be calling it through so the growing popularity of oss and i've provided some starts here and it's just really another illustration of how technology can help with community building critical  and challenging established social and cultural norms and the development of social movements oss members are connected by their shared interest in reading books that challenge the patriarchy and while the former's focus is feminism the it members is membership is not limited to women according to watson everyone is welcome this reflects what since he for she campaign which invades men to participate in conversations about gender feminists celebrities are often characterized by their weight class cisgender sexual orientation able bodied privilege and this has garnered this has garnered criticism from many people including intersection influences popular culture and cultural open however normative whiteness has been central to feminist celebrities and this type of feminism can extend this narrative it's also it's also incredibly clubs can be political in their nature and long and i've provided the court here argues that reading can never be divorced from questions of power privilege exclusion and social distinction of particular relevant to this research are the power structures and hierarchies associated with boot clubs and which can inform the group andor generate informal processes of social control so oss is a forum where an established authority figure wat describes as a trusted other which is a term normally ascribed friends and family but can also be assigned to cultural em cultural tastemakers whose recommendations have been satisfactory to the readers so today oh that's a terrible color apologies so it doesn't look like that my screen and so today we're gonna look specifically at and demographic information and analysis of a random sample of oss members women they are now comprised of a more diverse group of individuals online book clubs have supported this increase in inclusivity readers can participate in online forums regardless of  cultural or social economic background gender reading level or geography and can choose to participate or anonymously however as you can see from the stats goodreads and oss in general are they're from north america and europe and the majority of the majority of the sample were from countries that were majority english and native english speaking however this actually varied with the age bracket and the eighteen to twenty five range the millennials the avocado eating millennials is the most diverse in terms of number of different countries but it's also the only bracket where the majority of readers are from countries where english is not the native number of people joining the good join in goodreads four hundred and fifteen joined in the month in year the watson launched oss this group of people where were younger included more men and users from users from countries where english was not the native language than the overall sample and the male readers in this grouping were particularly diverse from thirty four different countries and although we cannot determine whether watson's affiliation  so fifteen books written by sixteen authors were chosen for oss as the reading choices in this time period watson contends that she is and this is a quote trying to choose works that cover as much grain as possible american focus and you probably the right insert amy you probably can't really see it and but they're dominated by titles that were originally published in the english language several of the books were written by blockbuster feminists such wave feminism time periods the north american focus is unsurprising giving the americans for the most represented nationality in the sample however this can be problematic for non non native english speakers is an international one so having such a western english language focus does not reflect the diversity of perspectives in the group and this is just an aside and incidentally the best rated books on the list are by authors of color so to help understand the motivations for joining oss and again a better understanding of the oss membership an analysis of the introductions thread was undertaken and the main feminism engaging in social media can be a performative act users can construct an identity while engaging with social issues reading can also be a source of identity formation so members of oss are explicitly or implicitly by being a part of the group identifying themselves as someone who is interested in reading feminist books well users expressed an interest in gender equality the majority did not explicitly identify as feminist therefore users were keen to develop their understanding of feminism through their engagement with the books authors and the oss community even long standing feminists expressed a desire to understand the current conversations as the demographics of the overall sample show and oh s s is an intergenerational group and in the introduction fourteen self declared feminists and actually it was it was the older generation that were quicker to identify feminists and so these fourteen self declared feminists who were over fifty years of age vocalize their interest in connecting with learning from and supporting younger feminists so the second most popular reason to join and yeah i'm a huge fire poster fund and i give no apologies for that and the second most popular reason to join was the influence of celebrity which we saw for the number of users joining goodreads in january two thousand and sixteen harry potter was mentioned often and as we can see and early harry potter readers and so therefore people who read harry potter a middle grade readers and with actually felt really neatly into the demographic of the oss like the average age and the same age as emma watson as well so there can be an indirect dissociation influence and encouraging young people to join the feminist movement the third main reason people joined was to be part of a like minded community particularly if they felt isolated in the community where they lived or felt their opinions had been attacked in the past however users from country where english is not the dominant language highlighted some of the issues of being part of such an anglo american centric community as we can see here additionally most of the introduced introductions were written in english irrespective of the readers mother tongue which led to thirty nine members either apologizing for or expressing the difficulties in communicating in english so just to sum up the oss community has grown to be the largest thousand and sixteen the grippers has an international intergenerational membership but is particularly influential in attracting a younger generation of readers although this introduces feminism to wider audience there is a risk that cultural culture although there are clear thoughts about how to diversify the big choices there does seem to be a different preference towards english language books written by cisgendered middle class able bodied white women therefore the reading list does not represent the international nature of the group something several members voice concerned about and so just to just to conclude the publication and promotion of these celebrity blockbusters ensure that some feminism's come to receive cultural legitimacy over others education with decreasing state appropriations and the approach of the tuition limit the key becomes optimization work smarter not harder faculty must be accountable to those who help them do their work by demonstrating results and the neoliberalism results are dictated by the market meanwhile academic analytics which provides university systems with objective data that administrators can use for strategic decision making seems to be producing lots of results in addition to its ten million dollar annual revenue faculty scholarly productivity database has been adopted as a membership indicator by the american association of universities which designates research one schools here in the us every year i give my university and accounting of my productivity italian e papers i've written presentations i've given exhibitions i've done and so on it feels oddly like giving the accounting of my sins on yom kippur it's like i'm begging the institution to let me have another year to prove i can do even more than i did this year there investment in me their human capital will provide growing returns my belief that i am human capital is but one illustration of the way in which reality is structured by capitalist realism meaning that we accept there being no realistic alternative to capitalism within this framework the only way to make universities better is to optimize their human and physical capital and maximize return on investment these returns include rankings citations publications grant dollars and so on in the capitalist traces the relationships between cybernetics and capitalist realism that makes advanced analytics an attractive prospect in the age of neoliberal austerity this relationship is not a coincidence the modern citation index itself was invented by eugene garfield during the cold war a mere decade after norbert wiener coined the term cybernetics garfield was influenced by vannevar bush and the early technologies that emerged from the very military academic industrial complex in which weiner was working for bush time and insofar as readers were concerned the probability for texts to be read it's a direct quote hence for exerting their action on society eventually in one thousand nine hundred and fifty five garfield proposes his science citation index and in good capitalist fashion he starts a company the institute for scientific information which began publishing the index in one thousand nine hundred and sixty four interestingly the original mission of the sc i was not citation counting but improving literature searches in the mid s garfield introduced the journal impact factor as a way to help select sources for the science citation index but it turned into a widely misused shortcut for attaching a crude score to journals and authors is i was eventually purchase by thompson reuters and in  ninety two the sei and sister indexes were merged into the web of science hosted on the web of knowledge platform which then became property of clara veit analytics okay a number of other indexes followed and bibliometrics went from being used in the sociology of science to a tool for administrative control from helping scientists search for literature to determining the value of a scholar soon the web as a metaphor for scholarship led to social indicator mining and altmetrics within which social media and networked interactions present a more granular picture of impact a few other observations are pertinent here one scholarly metrics since their inception have been widely understood by experts as inadequate for assessing faculty performance two there is a consensus that there is no one size fits all metric three bibliometric critiques of bibliometrics seem to emerge from the belief that there might be a better metric out there somewhere if only we had the right data a quest for more granular metrics indicates a shared commitment to the idea that the inadequacies of current metrics does not mean that the project of metra fication itself is faulty but only suggests the need for more metrics this consensus that the pandora's box of scholarly metrics has been opened as a concession to capitalist realism okay part two computationalism in the capitalist realist society and beyond computationalism according to david columbia is the idea that a great deal perhaps all of human and social experience can be explained via computational processes it completes the argument that the inadequacy of current bibliometric systems should be get more bibliometrics these metrics support and encourage faculty to pursue biographical solutions to systemic problems a neoliberal conception of the scholar self in general we might suggest here that metrics are bad in that they on the whole serve to support the very systems that perpetuate inequality while promoting a meritocratic ante politics but i would like for us to engage in a brief thought experiment what if advanced analytics cybernetic systems of prediction and control were used in the service of a more just society what if in what if in embracing computationalis individuals have very little freedom and in which everyone works on the service of the one state it might be read as an attempt at articulating the problems with a leninism that assumed the fortis factory to be the production model par excellence or taylorism as a way towards improved standards of living for all after reading we i thought about how my concerns with metrics are maybe not my concern my same concerns as mine with neoliberalism companies at the forefront of analytics fitbit alphabet ibm all say they make life better through optimization well what if these companies were nationalized i mean cybernetics wasn't unique to the villain flu sir suggests that in a world of floating signifiers and total relativism it's impossible to even believe that the doubt you feel about anything comes from something that legitimately itself cannot be doubted flu sir argues that the resulting n d authenticates the intellect producing an ontological instability that must be soothed this soothing comes through the seeking of read of an objective reality in numbers which seem reliable and stable demonstrating the intellect as computational can achieve this soothing and colombia suggest this is precisely the consequence of chomskyan linguistics for chomsky language identified with syntax can be applied both to logical formalisms like those used by computers and also to so called natural languages all human language then is computational at its core soothing our ontological instability through computational theories of language or mind produces what flutes are calls an inversion of the vector of signification instead of numbers representing certain aspects of people people themselves come to represent numbers in such a society to know is above all to enumerate we become computational instruments of one another and the possibility for the social production of inhumanity increases the realization of the cybernetic of ideal of optimization is not then and can never be the kind of utopia that neoliberals or left acceleration is would have us imagine it is instead inhuman programmed world of we okay part three the value of the suboptimal if the dangers of computationalism have nothing to do with whether or not we live in capitalism then the question of alternatives becomes tricky i believe that an alternative project hinges on the value of the sub optimal the inefficient the unnecessary friction slowness and delay which create fissures in the hegemony of optimization i also wonder if ironically the last hope for the sub optimal is in the academy when the exploration of the unknown must be optimized that's good i didn't expect that when the exploration of the unknown must be optimized we left with an atrophied and anemic version of knowledge itself we must resist this tendency at all costs before i go on i'd like to introduce an important concept to my work hyper station is basically about when fiction makes its way into reality taking the temp l form of will have been so to create a suboptimal future requires one producing fissures in computational its hegemony today and to producing high personal visions that not only combat capitalist realism but that do so without romanticizing computationalism in order to produce a small fissure in computational as to germany in the academy this slide is super blown out and i apologize i recently made a piece of software called citation bomb into which you enter a paper you've cited and it finds the top ten related papers on google scholar throws them into a four point text word doc which is white and then asks you to copy and paste this into the references section of the paper you're writing when your paper is published google will index all aspects of this paper finding all the citations including the hundreds in white the idea is to flood the citation market and devalue it as a commodity i'm aiming to create a crisis of academic accountability but this project is more symbolic than tactical who knows if he would even do what i think it would do and even if it does it would require thousands of people to use it this project echoes elements of the work of others who have been much more successful than me in a variety of arenas folks like the critical art ensemble the electronic disturbance theatre and the writings of legacy russell on glitch feminism now the idea for the citation bomb originated from a film i made in which all faculty have stock tickers outside their offices that display real time metrics about their value to society like other dystopias though i found the kind of hyper station in which i was attempting to engage somewhat problematic i'm now instead seeking complex heterotopia x that function as new orienting narratives such that their hyper capacity can nudge us towards an anti dystopian ism the auto lift groups auto lift films do precisely this carrying out what has been called a creative sabotage of the future these documentary fictions put time out of in space who is attempting to stitch together a history of how humans went from them to us footage from the past paired with a narration from the future cast a new light on how the present might play out what other documents re fictions might we create and what kinds of historical inspiration expedition and institute described as an experimental community college the institute provided free courses to detroit residents in cartography geography community activism and urban planning by one thousand nine hundred and seventy the institute enrolled five hundred students in eleven courses at which point its funding was terminated the counter maps produced by this coalition of academics and inner city residents were urgent angry indictments of a form of capitalism they called interior colonialism what an incredible use of institutional resources for extra institutional imperatives that clearly did not align with the institution strategy of optimization i have no idea how to connect these dots just yet but the lost past of the dge i and what my school or world might look like if it had continued combined with documentary fiction like that of the auto luth group as well as with tactical interventions like my citation bomb might somehow point towards new directions for knowledge production that celebrate the sub optimal in all parts of life including the academy th by and for africa so i've been in the states well north america for five years now so i'm technically what you would call an afro australian so the reason we're giving you this background is so you understand where we come to in the context of effort  n yeah yeah and i am well i also identify as what the kids call a third culture kid so i grew up in east africa between uganda and kenya i'm currently working in in london uk as well as toronto canada the insecure non poor phenomenon public health through conservation and the ballooning populations within the continent especially with regards to moving into the urban spaces a verb expresses the many characters of the metropole on the uganda of an intersection that is really busy this intersection millions of people go through it every day so every every month and every year like clockwork it floods it floods during so uganda has two seasons the rainy season and the dry season and when the rainy season happens there's a lot of torrential rain this intersection floods every single year and everyone is surprised by it but we're kind of used to it now this is due to the fact that uganda's drainage system was built to mimic london london where it snows london where there's ice london where people are using sidewalks and streets alike kampala is was built and other colonized cities bit and you know how did i'll colonize this yes to start off with so they came in without any sort of respect for any sort of urbanism that existed before so because they saw us as uncivilized requiring religion and underdeveloped the way we try to emulate european standards and of beauty and dress and speech there's a sort of soft cringe and a pride in being westernized or europeanized so this comes from the idea that we are underdeveloped and this came from western like a lot of western countries justification for controlling us because they had to have a reason to come over right why you here because we're trying to help you but at the same time political resources the premise if you think about this this is this was the premise of apartheid africans cannot be trusted to govern themselves or make decisions for themselves so here we have an image i'm an architect so there are a few buildings in this  here we have an image of the parliament the south african parliament in cape town this could be anywhere in europe and this has a lot to do with the fact that there was an emphasis of building a european stage on the african continent so who are we now how do we see ourselves often so african countries became independent after the second world war except for ethiopia ethiopia was never really colonized and socialist policy was a big part of post independent ideals because we needed we felt well a lot of people felt that they needed to be a redistribution of resources and for people to become self empowered unfortunately due to western meddling and intervention sort of there was division australian recently our minister of home affairs made a comment about white south africans and them needing to be given refuge ins are in in australia without understanding the history of why there needs to be redistribution of resources in south africa agenda so we should start off with the with the posts in the post colonial nations there was a big emphasis on nation building at that stage and you can see that this is a kenyatta conference centre in nairobi modern because it was after the second world war modernism was a big part of what was happening at that stage but you can see there is definitely like an african accent to this modernism in a similar way to when he walks through new york streets the pre war buildings were built with a heavy european influence but you can definitely when a photograph is taken you know that it's in new york and it's american the economic issues from the dividing of all the progressive movements resulted in stalling of nation building and a brain drain to the west i guess i'm part of that brain drain so self determination in the st century is happening at a micro scale through fashion for example said to grow to one billion users by two thousand and twenty three that's a growth rate of six percent each year and there will be the growth rate of urbanized africans will go from thirty six percent to fifty percent by two thousand and thirty so it's inevitable that there will be this idea of the post colonial image and we picked up this image in particular from the art exhibit that we ran just to show you that there's there's sort of a pride in being african and of course i will remittances are a big part of what's happening in africa and diasporic conversation between the diaspora and local people is what's sort of what sort of being used to leverage the internet so i brought this up the national money in kenya so mobile money it's called m pesa in kenya and it's across various african countries have played a really key role in helping financial inclusion as well as financial just helping now basically money on your phone so for example when i lived in kenya i do not have a bank account i used my phone for everything rent paying for like a something at the pub next door sending friends pp payments and this is all done with via a phone and you can something called chama groups which are informal savings and investments groups that are not regulated but are actually helping people participate in the economy in ways that are very little reimagining finance so things like  insane if you think about it so the having leapfrog technology within finance that helps helping people in urban centers actually participate and engage in the economy is really helpful so i'm also going to talk about technology that is used to in place of public services in cities as well as in rural areas so rwanda is currently using drone technology and drones to deliver medical supplies to remote areas this is mostly due to the fact clip about movie halls so this is a social aspect of city living so in uganda movie theaters are there's like a one i think in kampala and it's very expensive the average you ganna cannot afford to go to it so in uganda there's these movie halls that have come in to come into being and they're basically they look exactly like what this looks like right now it's a bunch of people sitting and a screen and the screen is playing die hard but you know or whatever and and there's someone the th of january so that happened in new york and we're sort of moving forward now with the narratives and further art exhibits and we're just gonna run the nurses video quickly and then that's that's it just a little preface to  this this collective grew out of people we're all like minded wanting to tell and share african urbanist stories a group of architects urban planners all kinds of great people artists as well and this is kind of propelling we're hoping to this into a movement and then it will be propelled into a movement that is  matata drivers designed there's no like uniform design for the vans they design whatever there there's one i think in a famous tv show called sensei the guy was driving the rod van damme van and he like designed it off  so this was he was actually in the new york times recently that's the next phase of where we're going with this we're trying to just have these conversations defined by africans and not sort of like in a national geographic type way exactly so removing the the colonial white gaze and actually building and telling stories that are bias for us thank you this is a question for the last speakers how do you parlay around the difference between like when you talked about redistribution of wealth reparations versus now and a neoliberal world they call like publicprivate developing partnerships it's kind of needed resources and making up for past colonial and present a colonial relations yeah how do you navigate between that subversive like neo colonial institutions of development world versus like reparations or more explicitly anti colonial funds yeah so that that ties in to what we talked about about self determination so figuring out ways for people within these communities to actually like build their own solutions that are so free even with like the idea of using like design thinking to do that taking the colonial aspect of it out cuz even design think he's pretty colonial like thinking of a problem coming up with a solution and like planting that solution in a place you know so i don't know if that answers your question do you have anything else  here yeah i think it's it's really hard and it's the reality is as africans we need people to step back and let us make those mistakes but it's a process that needs to happen and unfortunately it hasn't been allowed to happen because there's always meddling and interference and i understand we live in a global world but the meddling doesn't come from a place of trying to guide the the the process in a way that's productive and that's the issue that so i don't know what the answer is i think we just have to keep trying until we get it right but also with focus on like actually building solutions and and practices and theory that is like removes the colonial western developer development world ga you any research about that or anything to add on to that like the importance of it or so and with regards to os can you hear me yep with regards to oss with them in terms change is happening at the moment so em yes and no is the answer to that question i'm looking at i'm extending this looking at and read a response and reader connections so i'll see if anything like that comes up but there are it's the same things happening in the uk there's lots of little groups that are kind of making change really site for this kind of subversion thanks for the question yeah so i would say that there's two maybe components of my interest in higher education one is to kind of resist this narrative that's about navel gazing because so many people experience higher education in one form or another today it i think operates in part as a sort of compass for the rest of society and second the sort of sub like point b  that is that like the the neoliberalism that we're experiencing right now emerges directly out of the academy the academy is not experiencing it like it comes from where we are so so that's the sort of the  interest in specifically dealing with the educational institutions the citation bomb came out of just sort of trying to figure out okay like is there anything i can do is there anything i can do to basically take what has become a market eyes commodity and just torpedo the value of it and basically the the problem is i have no idea how google scholars algorithms actually work there's only been like two studies that have reversed it reverse engineered them other organizations have slightly more sophisticated citation tracking algorithms so they might be taking things that are specifically visible as opposed to anything that resembles text on the page so you know it i don't know if it will actually do anything but it's live it's online you can feel free to download it it's on the college art associations website and you know the more people that use it who knows you give a shot or at least you know telling i think maybe more important is the symbolic component of it is to be able to have a conversation about why we feel the need to track our citations in the first place was that tell us about the sort of game of academia that we're all trying to play my questions for the last two speakers can you speak more about the reclaiming of the narratives and how your own personal backgrounds might help fuel that  yeah absolutely thank you that's a really good question anyone here seen what's it called black panther okay that's everyone you should all see it so that's a really good example of african narratives that are being told in a really interesting way but are also slightly void of of african voices so actually culture so you talked we talked about fashion and culture and and film is i think the first frontier that that is gonna reclaim our own stories in our own voices so for example nollywood in nigeria is a really great example and even bollywood in india they are able to tell their own stories like they have their own like directors from these places with these experiences and not it's not being developed for international consumption as being if it is consumed internationally that's cool dollars are nice but it's initially it's it the main goal is for it to be consumed locally and from that more stories to be told and more imaginings can be had oh yeah so we ran out of time that i was gonna talk that was gonna say something about the exhibit so one of the most powerful points in the exhibit for me personally was there was a black american lady who came in and she was looking at the pictures and i've lived in new york now for this is my third year and there's a lot of enim there's not a lot of cohesiveness between the african the caribbean and the black american communities and she came in and she said oh i've never seen but she lived in such housing just down the street she's like i've never seen images of africa that don't show children with the you know flies or something negative and this is the first time and our images weren't all like non excuse my language non shithole places there were just real images of how people were living life and that was really powerful to me because this is this is dangerous because she's a black person and if she sees africa is that that's where she's from so what message is she being told about who she is  so this is for the this is for the last two folks who went and you brought up a i'm sorry i don't know if you can see me but you brought up a very interesting point  that's something that i've been like grappling with like tension across the diaspora how do you suggest and maybe like this is the point is that like folks who are african need to like create this space for themselves by themselves so like this could be just like a silly question but how do you suggest that particularly black americans work with african folks to like to foster this sense of like community that you speak of like to foster that like self determination if that's like i can thank you that's a great question um i think listening is a really important thing and while you know it is great like i think i'm a huge fan of the dashboard like various like black individuals or black black folks like seeing some kind of marcus garvey esque like future in africa but i think it's important to first listen and document the the past and and and like histories and understand where that is coming from like you know i wear chenge like which is what i'm wearing right now that this is not like a of course a fashion like decision but there is history behind this and there's there's history behind like a lot of  lot of these things so like it's kind of like understanding where it's coming from and even like since black panther came out i saw someone tweet about i think it was a kenyan person tweet about like being angry at the fact that america now it's cool to be africa n you know having grown i think she actually saw on youtube everyone from the internet she grew up in in the states and she talked about how she was made fun of by black americans and austria's for being african and now it's cool and that's that's one way of people are thinking in that way and like it's it's you know really unfortunate but yeah i think it starts off with listening and understand understanding i think i think we have to sort of i totally agree with that i think we have to give credence to the fact that we have been working together subconsciously it's just now because of the way the world is so connected we're actually interacting with each other the civil rights movement actually was a big part of what thrust forward african countries  their drive towards independence because it happened before a lot of african countries were independent and so i think we just have to find ways like listening and understanding ways to work together for a common cause a very quick question just like the theme of book clubs keeps coming up and i'm curious like if you um any of you were to design a book club or like had a you know maybe you have a group of white people who populate book clubs  wishing to interrogate their participation in colonial systems or imperialist systems what would be titles you throw like if you're not doing the mass market feminism but you're like oh you're interested you actually have an honest conversation does anything come to mind and so what's really interesting i a really easy way to help people understand and i don't know what your thoughts are absolutely uh i think books that are written for white people are good but also books that are not written for people are good and like understanding one's space that they take up within those space those like  intersectional spaces i guess so i think the issue that we have globally at the moment is that the world is written in a way that sort of and i know it's written in a way that sort of tells the story of a white person so because we are third culture people there's no place that i can go that will tell my story fully so everywhere i go i'm other but i'm also a part of the story so it's kind of it's good for people who grew up in  and this is for africans as well to read outside where they grow up so they understand that theirs is not the only way of being and i was just gonna add as well and i completely agree with what you say and i think him especially in terms of what i was talking about with them the lack of international representation and the author's it was very anglo american so reading works in of really being the catalyst for that so yes stories were m other nurse is incidental rather than the the main focus of the story i think her incredibly important that it's just one fact you know it's just not the defining factor little anecdotal thing about that is so of growing up i read the famous five anyone know like enid blyton yeah anyone familiar okay i guess only people in colonized countries cool so enid blyton is like a british author who wrote about like the rolling hills and mores of like storage or something like that and like i was like a kid in east africa i was like what like talking about like like key lime pie and like cordial and i was like what the hell is this stuff  but like that for me like reading that i was like this is a whole world that i don't know anything about and like i was lucky i guess i a lot of people will be like doesn't you know people now like want their children's reading things about like like their own cultures which is great but i think for me was really interesting because i got a chance to imagine and understand another world so i guess like maybe even children is well like young people reading stories that are from cultures that are not their own which i don't think happens in north america or like the western world people read harry potter which is great and i love harry potter but like you know it's it's reading stories with people whose names are different to the names you know and like of names of places that you don't know and you never heard of that yeah so is it's a contradiction isn't it because on the one hand i think you know like i said there were lots of people lots of young people lots of male readers from different countries who might not have engaged because it it does she does such a great job of attracting people to em engage in discussions that they might not have done otherwise but at the same time the discussions are very much colored by white feminism so yeah it's that really difficult thank you all this was super interesting my question actually kind of builds on the the things you were just saying because one thread i was kind of noticing throughout was the  the complicating aspect of n challenges of the kind of western capitalist mass media and i think like in the way that you were talking about it with the book club but then also kind of for the projects and trying to build attention for your projects we in a system that kind of validates attention individuals and you know kind of like hierarchical idea so i was wondering if any and all of you could speak more to that rate yeah i i think that there's definitely a tension there between the need to operate within the system i guess this is this is part of what what i think is important to have a discussion about i think it relates maybe to all of our work is the question that that tension raises which is is the way out through i'm not sure like is the way to emerge from neoliberalism like are we are we doomed to be acceleration since some way whatever that becomes is the tendency towards surplus value zero and should we just push it as hard as we possibly can and then that's where the to me the question of orienting narratives comes in so like do we look to the films of the auto birth group or do we look to afrofuturism do we look to nayla hopkins novels do we read ursula le guin like who can tell us what that's going to look like iii think that's a huge question you know it's clear the question you guys are asking i mean with us that's a little bit yes it's totally about that but with us a little bit different because the people were trying to reach aren't really in the mainstream like a lot of these things happen in networks so i was born in zimbabwe and recently we had a long term president removed but so when i was speaking to people who still live in zimbabwe they didn't get their news from the maine from the mainstream news it was from facebook and what's happened that's kind of the way the networks operate and i found even with the exhibit we really had to rely on people talking to other people and those are the people who came because if there's an interest within the community that's actually i think that's a good way to gauge the real interest if there's an interest within the community it will spread further jumping off of that definitely like while it is tempting to think that to move forward you have to basically walk through the will trudged through like this neoliberal capitalist cesspool in which we exist it's also important to look at like the smaller communities in which this happens like control crowds and communities whereas they the other way around the americans taught the israeli different sources how to surveil their own people so there's there's definitely exchanges that are happening and like these really small like small spaces that are actually making really big impacts a really bad example i'm so sorry but like just but like if you under some what i'm saying like there's these things are happening in like really small like very radical groups and maybe it will become mainstream but a lot of the artists that we had on exhibit were people who were just doing what they were doing like people who are just taking really amazing photographs and posting them to instagram they weren't like no one was looking to be famous so it's sort of that incidental for me it's the incidental documentation the sort of documentation that it's not like me going out and taking photos of buildings this person just happened to be taking a photograph and they happen to be buildings in the city and in in the scenery inclusive is marginalized groups are putting in a lot of labor to do so and however the problem with things like independent media etc is that and they don't have a massive reach and secondly they still to some extent on who uphold the structures of inequality you know they replicate the structures of inequality so sadly i think we do have to work with the