Information as actor beyond modernity and coloniality in times of climate change

Openresearch editorial board

On Wednesday, January 31, 2024, Juan Carlos Goilo defended his PhD thesis: Information actors beyond modernity and coloniality in times of climate change.


A comparative design ethnography on the making of monitors for sustainable futures in Curaçao and Amsterdam, between 2019-2022.

In his dissertation, Goilo developed a cutting-edge theoretical framework for an Anthropology of Information. This study compares information in the context of modernity in Amsterdam and coloniality in Curaçao through the making process of monitors and develops five ways to understand how information can act towards sustainable futures. The research also discusses how the two contexts, that is modernity and coloniality, have been in informational symbiosis for centuries which is producing negative informational side effects within the age of the Anthropocene. By exploring the modernity-coloniality symbiosis of information, the author explains how scholars, policymakers, and data-analysts can act through historical and structural roots of contemporary global inequities related to the production and distribution of information. Ultimately, the five theses propose conditions towards the collective production of knowledge towards a more sustainable planet.