CfP 68th ASA Annual Meeting: “Living with Algorithms in Africa: From Digital Intimacies to Algorithmic Sovereignty”

68th ASA Annual Meeting Call for Proposals

Crossing Boundaries and Recovering Intellectual Traditions | Atlanta, GA November 20-22, 2025

Deadline: March 10, 2025.

As African developers and users forge intimate, contested, and creative relationships with algorithmic systems in their daily lives, it is pertinent to understand how different individuals and communities on the continent navigate, transform, and create algorithmic encounters through situated cultural practices. While much scholarship focuses on algorithmic power and technological determinism, this panel emphasizes the intimate connections between algorithms and quotidian life in Africa.

Through everyday interactions, individuals across the continent are developing distinctive forms of digital sociality and resistance, navigating between algorithmic governance and local agency. African developers and users actively interpret, reshape, evade and create algorithmic systems that emerge from or challenge distant technological frameworks, creating hybrid forms of digital practice that transcend simple narratives of technological transfer. The panel aims to recover and center the often-overlooked and marginalized perspectives of human-algorithm relationships, without framing a binary distinction between the two. These encounters point toward alternative futures that transcend the existing frameworks of surveillance capitalism and digital colonialism, offering valuable insights for reimagining global technological futures.

We invite papers that examine what it means to “live with algorithms” in African contexts, where developers and users simultaneously participate in global digital cultures while navigating the particularities of their distinct local contexts. We welcome contributions across multiple dimensions, including, but not limited to: how African developers and users create, adapt, and personalize their relationships with platforms like TikTok, Netflix, or social media algorithms; how indigenous knowledge systems interact with and inform algorithmic decision-making; how communities respond to, resist, and recreate algorithmic governance; how local digital practices and innovations challenge assumptions about technological transfer from North to South; and how algorithmic entanglements shape cultural productions, reception, and public discourses. We are particularly interested in studies that reveal how African communities integrate, develop, and transform these technologies within existing social structures, developing strategies of mutual domestication when algorithmic systems fail to recognize local contexts, languages or priorities.

Please email davide.casciano@kuleuven.be and jyeku@ku.edu with a title and short abstract (no more than 200 words) by March 10, 2025. Kindly include full contact details, institution, and title.

Co-Chairs Information:

Davide Casciano

davide.casciano@kuleuven.be

Research Associate, Marie-Curie Fellow LAGOSTECH,
KU Leuven

James Yékú

jyeku@ku.edu

Associate Professor, African Digital Humanities,
University of Kansas, Lawrence