Abstract:

Social science is an ongoing conversation about human experiences that constantly adapt to the “demands of the day”. In this context, I look at two significant contemporary demands on social science - decolonial social theory and datafied social landscape. Firstly, I will lay out the transformations of human agency in the age of machines and its implications on regimes of historicity. Then, I deliberate on the possibilities of the decolonial approach in understanding the contemporary landscape of distributed agency between humans and machines. The central focus of this engagement, the phenomenology of human agency, will be on the question – what can the decolonial approach offer in understanding the increased entanglement of humans and machines? In doing so, the relevance of decolonial thinking is probed according to the “demands of the day”.