Date: Friday 30 October
Time: 14:00-17:00
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)

For the sixth Counter Coloniality study group, we’ll explore the technologies we listen through, starting with reggae sound-system culture. Reading excerpts from Julian Henriques’s Sonic Bodies, we’ll follow the knowledge involved in tuning speakers, selecting records and responding to a crowd. These practices bring thinking, feeling and technical experimentation together. How do they challenge racialised hierarchies of knowledge and ideas about who gets recognised as a technological innovator?

Alongside Henriques, we’ll read Liz Pelly’s The Ghosts in the Machine, an investigation into Spotify’s use of low-cost stock music in its playlists. Pelly raises questions about how platforms value musicians’ work, shape listening habits and organise what reaches our ears.

Bringing these readings together, we’ll discuss who gets to shape the conditions of listening. Whose knowledge and labour sustain our encounters with music? Who benefits from them? And what might sound-system practices help us ask of the digital platforms we use every day?

The Counter Coloniality seed investigates the manifold ways in which colonisation - as attitude, process, knowledge imposition, organisational model, force and output - is deeply embedded into the technologies we use everyday. This is evident in various aspects of technologies we use routinely; from the human and environmental cost of rare-earth element extraction like cobalt or lithium used in device components, to the outsourcing and underpayment of labour in Africa and Asia for annotating artificial intelligence data or moderating disturbing content on commercial social media.

Varia’s Counter Coloniality Seed organises a Study Group in 2026. We (usually) meet on the last Fridays of the month, from 14 - 16/17h, in Varia. We may take notes together and there will be snacks. We would love for participants to join as many sessions as they can, in order to get continuity in our discussions and our group dynamic, however this is not a requirement.

To join, please send a message to info@varia.zone with the subject title [Counter Coloniality Seed Study Group] with your access needs and dietary requirements, if any.

This event falls within Varia’s Counter-Coloniality Seed research thread and is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL.