Neema Githere on ‘data healing’ and digital diasporas
REPORT
26 May 2023
Neema Githere on ‘data healing’ and digital diasporas

Artificial intelligence is developing at a rapid speed, leaving many people scrambling to understand what this means for them as they navigate an increasingly digital reality. Canvas8 spoke to Neema Githere about our relationships with algorithms and the changing nature of connection-making online.

Neema Githere

Neema Githere is a guerrilla theorist and artist whose work explores love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris. Having dreamt themselves into the world via the internet from an early age, Neema's work is curated around their coming-of-age online. Githere’s concept of Afropresentism – a term they coined in 2017 to explore diasporic embodiment in the age of Big Data – has influenced conferences and exhibitions on four continents. Githere is a 2023-24 Practitioner Fellow at Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab, where she is working on a project entitled ‘Data Healing: A Call for Repair’ that employs Indigenous value systems to develop a digital rehabilitation clinic.

Yaa Addae

Yaa is a Senior Behavioral Analyst at Canvas8. Growing up across three continents, they are always looking for the bigger picture and cross-cultural meaning-making. In their spare time, you can find them studying herbal medicine or by the ocean, possibly surfing if it's warm enough.