An Evening with Meryl Shriver-Rice

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This interdisciplinary handbook navigates applying decolonial theories to practices across disciplines.
Decolonial work requires remaining deferent to communities and collaborators while also leveraging resources to support their priorities. Decolonial Approaches to Data Ethics and Re-Storying: From Biocultural Landscapes at Risk to Archiving the Dead provides a roadmap tracing the ways in which digital technologies, global biodiversity, cultural heritage, and decolonial futures are deeply interconnected.
In conversation with Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, and Nordic postcolonial and decolonial studies, this handbook surveys decolonial approaches to digital and academic practices. The authors argue that digital spaces and media can act as spaces of decolonial intervention within community-based work, historical re-telling, biocultural research projects, educational and historical archives, and museum display.
Data comes in so many forms that there is no one definition used by all scientific societies or national funding bodies. What has become evident is that data can be wrought with social meaning, often reflecting the values of the people who collected it, through how and why it was collected, what information was collected and what was ignored or left out of a study or collection.
Taking a decolonial stance to data is to accept that data might hold multiple truths, and that data should expand past the Western concept of sterile objectivity to take many different forms that respect different ways of knowing. At the core of this handbook’s argument, digital spaces and platforms are often overlooked as simple mechanisms to display information and organize data.
Much to the contrary, digital technologies do not create neutral spaces where information is arranged without implicit meanings built into their structure, social and cultural use, and experience. Digital spaces, like Western academic ways of thinking and doing research, require decolonial approaches to organize and make data available in ways that avoid replicating colonial values, and to tell stories of epistemic resistance, resurgence, and survivance.
Developing new decolonial digital content or databases, whether for climate crisis storytelling, updating outdated colonial histories, environmental conservation efforts, or decolonizing museum displays requires being held accountable to postcolonial and decolonial educators, scholars, thinkers, and advocates.

Meryl Shriver-Rice is an environmental social scientist and archaeologist and Director of the Coastal Heritage at Risk Taskforce (CHART). She is Head of Research for the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and an Affiliated Researcher with Florida State University’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies.

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