Dalida Maria Benfield, artist, activist, and Berkman Center fellow
… speaking at The Berkman Center Luncheon Series, a weekly series of informal luncheons and other meetings, providing students, fellows, faculty, and anyone who reserves a seat opportunities to discuss issues relevant to their work and to engage other leading thinkers and practitioners.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
ICT4D (Information Communication Technology for Development) powerfully frames women’s grassroots video production in the Global South, much of which is distributed widely through YouTube. Often, these videos reproduce racialized and gendered discourses – legacies of colonialism – in their narratives of economic, social, and technological progress. However, there are also videos by women’s groups that defy both the historical linearity and spatial fragmentation of the ICT4D framework, and instead remix, reclassify, and globally reconnect women’s experiences in the contemporary moment. In this talk Dalida María Benfield — artist, activist, and Berkman Center fellow — discusses how ICT4D videos make compelling claims for other historical narratives and visions for women’s future lives, identities, and uses of information communication technologies.
About Dalida Maria Benfield
Dalida María Benfield’s research addresses artists’ and activists’ creative uses of video and other networked digital media towards social justice projects. Her work is focused on the transformational capacities of media art across different scales. As an artist and activist, she has developed production, education, exhibition, and distribution initiatives focused on youth, women, people of color in the U.S., and local and transnational social movements, including co-founding the media collectiveVideo Machete.
She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of California-Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies with Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, Apparatuses, Globalities, Assemblages: Third Cinema, Now, chaired by Trinh T. Minh-ha, considers contemporary media art theory and practice, including work by Cao Fei, Michelle Dizon, and the Raqs Media Collective, in relation to the Third Cinema movement. As a Fellow at the Berkman Center, she is studying race and gender in the online presence of ICT4D programs, as well as working on collaborative projects with the Networked Cultures Working Group, the Cyberscholars Working Group, and metaLAB(at)Harvard.
Attribution: This post is presented in modified form from the Berkman Center site. It is reprinted here under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
