with keynotes by Nikita Dhawan and Rosalie Waelen
Topic
Understanding how colonialism continues to shape the world is a central challenge today. Although empires have formally disappeared, their legacies still structure global relations. To assess how these colonial legacies persist, one essential domain to consider is their intricate entanglement with technology.
Our symposium “Decolonizing Technology” examines how technologies sustain global dynamics of extraction, dependency, and uneven development and asks how these technological formations might be decolonized.
By bringing together Nikita Dhawan (TU Dresden) and Rosalie Waelen (Universität Bonn) as keynote speakers, as well as three research initiatives by participating students, the event fosters and deepens the critical debate on technology, colonialism, and their structural entanglements.
Keynote speakers
Nikita Dhawan is the professor at the Chair of Political Science with a focus on Political Theory and History of Ideas at TU Dresden. Her research interests are in the areas of global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonization. Her most recent book is Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: A Critical Theory of Decolonization (2026).
Rosalie Waelen works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn (Germany), where she conducts research on the philosophical and ethical implications of artificial intelligence, social media, and other emerging technologies. She obtained her PhD in 2023 at the University of Twente (The Netherlands), with a dissertation titled The Power of Computer Vision: A Critical Analysis.