Benjamin Latham (KCL) - 2020-21 Students

Indigitized: Digital Transmissions of Indigenous-Australian Eco-Knowledge

If the UK’s decision to withdraw from the EU was the metaphorical ‘last gasp of the British Empire.’ (Tomlinson & Dorling, 2019) then perhaps the climate-change induced wildfires, which recently ravaged swathes of its former colony of Australia, signify the early death-throes of the extractive ideology it exported there. As climate emergency manifests across the continent, this decolonial intervention into Web-Based Studies analyses indigenous Australian- initiated projects which use reality-augmenting digital-technology to transmit eco-knowledge to the subjects of extractive capitalism. The project engages with Capitalism’s implicit promise that evolving technology will always present a solution to environmental apocalypse, asking; to what extent can RADT mediated forms of Indigenous-Australian ecological knowledge, reconfigure relations between late-liberal, postcolonial subjects and the biosphere? It will refract its findings through Elizabeth Povinelli’s theory of Geontopower; extending Foucault’s original Biopower beyond the social and across the natural world. The study contributes to ontological theorisation of the digital domain and hopes to illustrate its potential to deescalate the looming trajectory of environmental breakdown.