Marisa Duarte

Marisa Duarte will be presenting the 2019 DLF Forum keynote.

Duarte is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She researches problems of information, knowledge, and technology in Native American and Indigenous contexts. For example, her most recent work examines tensions between wearable technologies, privacy, and well-being among marginalized peoples, specifically among Indigenous and Mexican American women. She also investigates Native and Indigenous peoples uses of social media, construction of large-scale digital infrastructures, and interfaces that allow for the circulation of Indigenous ways of knowing. Her work requires understanding of Western and Indigenous philosophies of science and technology, as well as Indigenous concepts of justice. Professor Duarte is also a member of the HSCollab, which is a lab within the Global Security Initiative at Arizona State University. She crafts research projects that advance science, technology, and society studies, and also shape the health and well-being of the many peoples of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, including the well-being of folks in her own tribe, Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and surrounding communities. Duarte earned her Ph.D. in Information Science from University of Washington-Seattle, 2013; her MLIS Library and Information Science from Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., 2003; and her B.A. in Creative Writing, University of Arizona, 2000.

Here is the abstract for her DLF Forum opening plenary talk, “Beautiful Data: Justice, Code, and Architectures of the Sublime”

If library and information science has an aesthetic it might manifest in the precision and orderliness of clean, appropriately labeled data. The more seamless our systems are, the less likely the user is to need us at every turn. She will have the freedom to effectively navigate the systems we build as she searches for the documents that, we hope, will relieve cognitive dissonance, satisfy a need to know, and inspire an unencumbered intellectual drive. Yet social changes in the US relating to race and surveillance, algorithmic discrimination, loss of privacy, and hate speech online is showing us that beautiful data is perhaps more of a mirage than a reality. Understanding the relationship between data and justice also helps us understand the role of digital libraries as institutions for change, and teaches us about the radical serenity of librarianship.