Reenchantment Technologies: Sci-fi from Abya Yala and Transfeminist Futures

Abstract
This session draws on a range of methodological instruments, artifacts, oracle cards, and writing processes to unleash our political imagination, beginning by deconstructing the colonial view of what technology is. It is important that we be able to move from resistance toward spaces for building alternatives. And before we can create anything, we first need to imagine it. To imagine is a political act. The session points to the process of the historical colonial construction of imaginaries about what shall be considered as technology, evolution, and progress. A process of colonizing technological imaginaries that has unfolded in distinct phases: from European and North American sci-fi magazines, to Hollywood and Silicon Valley. These imaginary-making industries promoted certain visions of what technology is, classifying as backward a range of ancestral technologies—technologies of life that still endure and form the foundation of our practices of collectivity. The session proposes a reclaiming of these ancestral technologies and a moment to make visible our political and situated imaginaries of future-present.
Date
Jun 12, 2026
events

Bio

Joana Varon, Executive Directress and Creative Chaos Catalyst at Coding Rights, a women-run organization working to expose and redress the power imbalances built into technology and its application, particularly those that reinforce gender and North/South inequalities. Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy from Harvard Kennedy School and affiliated to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Former Mozilla Media Fellow, she is co-creator of several creative projects operating in the interplay between activism, arts and technologies, such as transfeministech.org, chupadados.com, #safersisters, Safer Nudes, protestos.org, Net of Rights and freenetfilm.org. She is also part of the groups of researchers who kick-started the working group on Human Rights Considerations for Standards and Protocols at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Brazilian, with Colombian ancestry, she is engaged in several international civil society networks, such as Privacy International Network, the feminist hackers collective DeepLab, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (Ooni), Al Sur, among others, always focused on bringing Latin American perspectives in the search of feminist techno-political frameworks for human rights based development, deployment and usages of technologies.

Webinaire