NCID-0951
Ron Eglash
Professor of Information
School of Information at the University of Michigan (UMSI)
Education/Degree:
1 History of Consciousness (University of California, Santa Cruz)
About
Dr. Ron Eglash is a Professor in the School of Information at University of Michigan. He received his B.S. in Cybernetics, his M.S. in Systems Engineering, and his PhD in History of Consciousness, all from the University of California. His work as Fulbright scholar was published as African Fractals: modern computing and indigenous design. Other work, funded by NSF, HUD, and Department of Education, include the Culturally Situated Design Tools software suite; work with African architecture; US urban sustainability;
technology for generative justice; and decolonial approaches to AI and automation.
Current Work
Dr. Eglash's team examines "generative justice". They start by looking at how value gets generated. That might be ecological value from nature, or labor value from workers, or social value from a community. They then ask how value is unfairly extracted: by exploiting nature, under-paying workers, commodifying our social lives. Finally they explore techniques for preventing extraction. This means putting value generators (nature, workers, communities) in charge of their own production; and circulating value instead of extracting it. For example in education they expolore how "heritage algorithms" found in traditional arts and design can build STEM skills while connecting kids to Black, Native, Latinx and low-income traditions. In economics they work with low-income artisans, training and disseminating digital technologies to help develop grass-roots economies and sustainable lifeways such as urban agriculture and "cyborg" textile fabrication.
Research Area Keyword(s)
extraction, ethnomathematics, heritage algorithms