Keynote: Adele Vrana & Anasuya Sengupta, Whose Knowledge?
Channel: NDF - National Digital Forum
Date: 2019-12-02

Tuesday November 19th, 4:30pm-5:30pm @ Soundings Theatre

Whose Knowledge? are a global campaign to center the knowledge of marginalised communities (the majority of the world) on the internet.

3/4 of the online population of the world today comes from the global South – from Asia, from Africa, from Latin America. And nearly half those online are women. Yet most public knowledge online has so far been written by white men from Europe and North America.

To address this, Whose Knowledge? work particularly with women, people of colour, LGBTQI communities, indigenous peoples and others from the global South to build and represent more of all of our own knowledge online.

Whose Knowledge? is a radical re-imagining and re-design of the internet, so that together we build and defend an internet of, for and by all.

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Adele Vrana (@AdeleVrana) is Co-Director and Co-founder of Whose Knowledge?. Adele has led business development and partnerships initiatives to help build more plural and diverse communities in her native country of Brazil and globally. She is the former Director of Strategic Partnerships at the Wikimedia Foundation, and a 2015 Erasmus Prize laureate on behalf of her work to expand access to Wikipedia in the Global South.

Adele holds a BA in International Relations and a Master’s Degree in Political Science from the University of Sao Paulo. When not re-imagining what the internet of the future would look like and advocating for that online, Adele spends most of her time raising two feminist boys, reading black feminists from the Global South, and spending time with her friends from close and afar.

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Anasuya Sengupta (@Anasuyashh) is Co-Director and Co-founder of Whose Knowledge?. 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. She is the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and a 2017 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow. She received a 2018 Internet and Society award from the Oxford Internet Institute.

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 (Honors) from Delhi University. When not rabble-rousing online, Anasuya builds and breaks pots, takes long walks by the water and among the trees, and contorts herself into yoga poses.

SPONSORED BY MUSEUM OF NEW ZEALAND TE PAPA TONGAREWA