Ololade Faniyi

“Technologies Beyond Man” centers African women's positioning within digital structures to answer the question: "What kind of humans does technology produce?" This project focuses on women data workers, feminist tech policy advocates, and women tech builders across Nairobi, Abuja, Lusaka and Cape Town, as they exist within, against, and beyond Euro-American-Chinese tech empires. Through this multi-site collaborative ethnography and scholar-practitioner co-theorizing, this project explores how these women narrate their structural locations, build technologies from different "raw ingredients," and create relational networks of care and refusal. “Technologies Beyond Man” argues that centering African women's situational reasoning is necessary for understanding both the logics of absolute difference, harm, invisibilization and mimetic desires that characterize Big Tech’s mediation of the human, as well as how African women reconstitute the human beyond the injunctions of colonial-capitalist-patriarchal techno-modernity.