Abstract
In this chapter we are concerned with how presupposed ideas of life animate dead educational practices, often through viral racist practices. Notwithstanding the philosophical neglect that ‘life’ has received, today we grapple with new developments in bioinformatics that encourages a rethinking of what constitutes life. Rather than understanding life within humanist traditions (e.g., a contained subject position), we propose a speculative reading of bioinformatics as a particular moment of ‘excess contagion’. We argue that bioinformatics is a scientific and technological force that exceeds enclosures, but one that education will try to harness in order to widen its own limits, particularly through the optimization of human capital. If bioinformatics can simultaneously equalize and exacerbate unequal forms of life, we conclude paradoxically, that accelerating this bioinformatic moment might instantiate a ‘decoloniality of informatics’ through the proliferation of contagious, uncertain, errant, necrotic, and mutant life. Rather than reform education and its anti/racist declarations of vitalist life, we suggest an accelerated use of ‘contagious bioinformatics’ as a way to proliferate unknown becomings for new kinds of intra-connectivity, especially between human and inhuman networks of relationality.
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Notes
- 1.
We have decided to not reprint Kant’s racisms. They can easily be located through our citations.
- 2.
We use the following definitions throughout: artificial intelligence is defined as the theory and development of computer systems that interact and perform human cognitive tasks (e.g., visual perception and speech recognition); and the following two features which can be discrete from, but are increasingly seen as aspects of AI, (a) algorithm is a defined list of steps for solving a problem and a computer program can be viewed as an elaborate algorithm; (b) machine learning occurs when computer systems learn from data, enabling them to make increasingly better predictions. (Luckin et al. 2016)
- 3.
Facial recognition may be the clearest evidence of how racializations and racism are re-circulated through AI (Gulson et al. forthcoming).
- 4.
Disqualified bodies is, of course, a major aspect of Gilroy (1998).
- 5.
Ideas about ‘posthumanism’ contain some of the clearest demarcations of how scale remains largely anthropomorphized and biocentric. See, for instance, Braidotti (2013).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Petar Jandrić, Sarah Hayes, and Liz de Freitas. Their respective ideas, suggestions, and importantly, encouragements were invaluable. This chapter was also initially conceived with the brilliance of Dr. Marcelina Piotrowski. We would also like to acknowledge the organizers and attendees of the New Materialist Informatics Conference, held online during March 2021. We presented our initial ideas ‘there’.
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Webb, P.T., Mikulan, P. (2022). Decolonizing Racial Bioinformatics: Governing Education in Contagion and Dehiscence. In: Peters, M.A., Jandrić, P., Hayes, S. (eds) Bioinformational Philosophy and Postdigital Knowledge Ecologies. Postdigital Science and Education . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95006-4_14
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