Dalida Maria Benfield

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 Dalida Maria Benfield	
 Dalida Maria Benfield
 	
Born 	N/A
Relevant Work	"Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonization: Introductory Notes"
Pages 	
Link (The text for class is in the gray box on the right side)
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== Biography ==
* Dalida Benfield is a media artist, researcher, and writer.
* She was a Research Fellow and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. 
* She is currently a faculty member at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in the Visual Arts program. http://vcfa.edu/visual-art/faculty/dalida-maria-benfield 
== Introductory Notes from "Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonization" ==
=== Background and Historical Context ===
=== Key Words and Terms ===
Digital Divide: "refers to the gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas at different socio-economic levels with regard both to their opportunities to access information and communication technologies (ICTs) and to their use of the Internet for a wide variety of activities." Understanding the Digital Divide. OECD, 2001.
Colonization: the action of appropriating a place or domain for one's own use (Google).
Globalization: the process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale (Google).
=== Key Quotations ===
"The coloniality of power is digital." Benfield, Dalida Maria. "Introductory Notes." Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise, vol. 3, no. 1, 2009. Duke University. https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/volume-31-decolonizing-the-digitaldigital-decolonization
"in diverse geopolitical sites, defined by objectives other than those of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system, communication tools are continually being repurposed and rethought by symbolic practices, local/global histories and political imperatives driven by commitment and struggle." 
"The theorization of the “information” or 'knowledge society,' popularized through scholarship and repurposed as policies of transnational non-governmental organizations, layers another order on the already stratified 'developed' and 'developing' world, creating caricatures of digital, or knowledge, haves and have-nots." 
"In many instances, this supposed boundary of the digital and the non-digital is an analogue of the geo-political map of colonialism; in other instances, it creates new boundaries around diasporic, indigenous or racialized communities within and across cities, regions and nation-states. This divide, like others, assumes finite borders with no seepage." 
"The digital is a fluid site. At multiple sites of criss-crossing colonial wounds, film, video and new media producers, including artists, scholars, community organizers and popular educators, are creating inter-textual and inter-cultural works that reorganize the geopolitics of knowledge." 
=== Discussion ===
==== Benfield's Foci ====
"Her research and writing address 'decolonial media aesthetics,' contemporary Third Cinemas, and how artists, globally, engage video and information technologies for gender, racial, environmental, and media justice." 
=== Major Criticism and Reception ===
=== Related Works ===
* Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 1975 by Laura Mulvey
* A Cyborg Manifesto 1984 by Donna Haraway
== References ==