Digital Democracies Institute

Reading Group - Black and Indigenous Bodies
2020-10-28 15:00 - 17:00, 2020-12-09 15:00 - 17:00 UTC | By zoom
Black and Indigenous Bodies: Resistance and Surveillance
Led by Karrmen Crey and Adjua Akinwumi.
If you are interested in joining the reading group, contact Dr. Karrmen Crey at kcrey@sfu.ca with a very brief (one or two sentence) explanation of why you would like to join the group by Friday, September 25th. Participants must be able to attend all meetings. You will receive an email to confirm your spot in the group.

The 2020 US Election, A View from Canada
2020-10-29 13:00 - 15:00 | By zoom
Dr. Jaime Lee Kirtz speaks at this panel:
Wondering how to make sense of this historic American presidential election? You’re not alone. Join us for a panel featuring historians, political scientists, and media experts as they weigh in on the significance of the 2020 election for the United States, Canada, and the world. Panelists will discuss the current state of American politics and society, where the 2020 election fits into the long history of American politics, and answer audience questions.
Featuring:
Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, Historian, McGill University
Regina Bateson, Political Scientist, University of Ottawa
Jason Opal, Historian, McGill University
Jaime Lee Kirtz, Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University
Moderated by:
Melissa J. Gismondi, Writer & Journalist, University of Toronto
Shira Lurie, Historian, University of Toronto

Workshop @ Cornell Tech - Understanding and Combating Online Manipulation: Setting an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda
2020-10-30 08:00 - 2020-10-31 12:00 | By zoom
Understanding & Combating Online Manipulation: Setting an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda
Public concern is coalescing around the problem of online influence—especially, the ability of data collectors to use information about individuals to influence their decision-making and shape their behaviors. Once confined to the realm of commercial advertising, post 2016, these worries have extended to the political sphere, where campaigns increasingly engage in sophisticated voter profiling and microtargeting, using information about voters to frame political pitches and appeals. Media manipulation and the problem of so-called “fake news”, for example, have attracted enormous attention in academic research from the social sciences to technical fields, such as machine learning, where efforts are underway to develop tools for distinguishing fake from genuine news.
Workshop Overview
This workshop takes up pressing questions about processes and mechanisms characterizing some of the stages that precede the altered behaviors and the impacts of targeting and fake news. It will focus on the nature of the efforts to influence, manipulate, and shape human thinking and human behavior, raising and investigating critical questions that require conceptual, ethical, empirical, technical, and policy attention. For example:

Ethical/Philosophical: What distinguishes persuasive appeals from manipulative ones? How are targeting technologies related to other worrying practices, such as “dark patterns”? Given the information collection required for individual targeting, how are these concerns related to concerns about privacy? What (if any) are the harms of online targeting and manipulation? Should they be weighed against certain goods? Are the differences between “nudging,” persuasive technologies, and recent manipulative practices ethical in nature?

Social Science: How effective are targeting technologies? On average, how well do people understand the ways they are being targeted? Does awareness of targeting mitigate its effects? How do these issues relate to prior art, including “nudging” and “persuasive technologies”?

Technical: What mechanisms and systems enable, deliver, and enhance manipulative practices? What mechanisms can be brought to bear to detect the pipeline of manipulative practices? What mechanisms exist (or could be developed) for inducing accountability in both collaborative and adversarial settings?

Policy/Regulation: How could policymakers address these concerns? Should policies intervene ex ante or ex post? Are new regulations needed to constrain certain targeting practices, and if so, how would they interact with free speech considerations? What successes and failures have policymakers encountered when responding to related issues of illegitimate influence in other contexts in the past?

This event brings together leading scholars working on diverse dimensions of the problem in computer and information sciences, social sciences, humanities, law, and policy, to coordinate and cohere these efforts, mapping an interdisciplinary research agenda that encourages, and against which to benchmark, further progress.
The workshop will take place via Zoom. We envision it as the first of two events; we will convene an in-person workshop at Cornell Tech in New York City when conditions allow.

Canadian Science Policy Conference 2020
2020-11-17 05:30 - 07:00 | By zoom
Due to the unprecedented circumstances generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the 12th
Canadian Science Policy Conference, CSPC 2020, will be held completely online! The conference will be held virtually through the week of November 16th – 20th, 2020.
In the time of social distancing and with abundance of caution, we are excited to bring this year’s conference right to your offices and homes! CSPC has a rich history of hosting exciting in-person conferences. Expect no less from the virtual conference experience!
What to expect from a virtual conference:
CSPC 2020 will feature a week-long variety of engaging and informative online sessions including panel discussions, workshops, live interviews, online networking opportunities, and even virtual exhibitions. Registered participants will have the opportunity to watch sessions live and on-demand. Live sessions will be held throughout the day, such that participants across time zones will be able to attend them. Lower registration fees will permit much bigger and geographically diverse participation, including many from around the globe. We look forward to bringing the Canadian and global science and innovation policy communities together in these pivotal times and continue the crucial and insightful conversation on the world post-pandemic.
In order to accommodate this new conference format and acknowledging that individuals and organizations have been adapting to new realities, the panel proposal submission deadline,
as well as the individual short-talks submission deadline has been extended further by 1 month, to Friday, June 12th, 2020. Please review the revised criteria for panel proposal submissions and access the submission forms by clicking on the link below.

Reading Group - Black and Indigenous Bodies
2020-11-18 15:00 - 17:00 | By zoom
Black and Indigenous Bodies: Resistance and Surveillance
If you are interested in joining the reading group, contact Dr. Karrmen Crey at kcrey@sfu.ca with a very brief (one or two sentence) explanation of why you would like to join the group by Friday, September 25th. Participants must be able to attend all meetings. You will receive an email to confirm your spot in the group.

Ganaele Langlois speak to the Lab
2020-12-02 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Ganaele will be presenting on Research Persona methods

UC Irvine: Michael and Stacy Koehn Public Lecture in Critical Theory
2020-12-03 12:00 - 13:30 | British Columbia
Authenticating Figures: Algorithms and the New Politics of Recognition
Originally planned for March 2020, but canceled due to the COVID-19 outbreak, UCI Critical Theory is proud to now present this event virtually.
What does recognition mean in an era of pervasive data capture and automatic pattern detection? Tracing the historical move from “pattern discrimination” to “pattern recognition,” this talk unpacks the logic and politics of recognition at the core of systems designed to automatically identify and classify users. It argues for the centrality of the humanities in understanding how we have become characters in a drama called “Big Data.”

Wendy speaks at the CIGI - Special Round Table Discussion: Digital Platform Governance
2020-12-07 09:00 - 12:00 | Online
The Centre for International Governance Innovations’s Global Platform Governance Network and the McGill Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy are pleased to invite you to a special virtual round table discussion on digital platform governance on December 7, 2020, from 12 to 3 p.m. (EST, UTC-5).

Governments around the world continue to grapple with how best to safeguard their citizens’ privacy, safety and security online, while maintaining the economic and social benefits of our unprecedented ability to connect. This tension has been exacerbated by the current COVID-19 environment, as worldwide lockdowns have increased our collective reliance on the online world for our work, education and social interactions. This situation has, however, also revealed an exponential growth in the negative aspects of digital platforms, including the spread of dis/misinformation and hate speech, increased risks to privacy and personal security, the concentration of market power among a few private companies, and the continued erosion of local newsrooms and democratic norms.

Canada has signalled its commitment to “create new regulations for social media platforms, starting with a requirement that all platforms remove illegal content, including hate speech.” As the federal government prepares legislation to address this commitment, it can benefit from the experiences of its allies and external experts who are tackling these same challenges.

The goal of this meeting is to foster an honest, open conversation between a small group of experts and senior government representatives at a strategic moment of government decision making. Through three 50-minute deliberative dialogues, the group will work collectively through key questions facing the government as it moves toward a legislative package regulating digital platforms:

What information should be included in a mandatory transparency requirement for platforms?
How should disputes about Canadian content moderation on digital platforms be adjudicated?
What powers should be given to a new regulator, and how should this regulator be structured?

We are pleased to welcome the minister of Canadian heritage, The Honourable Steven Guilbeault, and parliamentary secretary to the minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, Arif Virani, to join the round table discussion. The session will be supported by leading Canadian and international experts, who will join in conversation with government experts and decision makers to examine the issues underlying each question and come to a collective position.

The meeting will be held under CIGI Rule, a variation of the Chatham House Rule.

Meeting Street Podcast: Conversations in the Humanities
2020-12-18 10:00 - 11:30 | Online
Wendy is being interviewed for the Meeting Street Podcast, Two episodes have been published thus far and the podcast presents a wonderful opportunity for Wendy to talk about the work the Institute is doing, and to present an informed discussion of digital democracies, responsible AI, and the humanities contribution to work on digital cultures and practices. The larger aim of the podcast is to explore topics of vital societal interest through conversations with scholars and writers whose voices have helped define issues and shape debates. Through the show, we’re hoping to present ideas and issues in such a way that they are appealing to the general public as well as other academics. The show is getting significant attention, and a transcript of the second episode is being published by the Chronicle.

Wendy presides on panel at MLA Convention 2021
2021-01-07 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
Panel 106 – Literary Intelligence, Artificial Learning: Language, Media, and Machines
AI is changing the way we inhabit the world, but we cannot understand how without exploring the intersection of computation with language and culture. Experts working on the languages, histories, and materialities of AI consider the language and media through which we understand our machines and through which they understand us.
Presider
Wendy Chun
Simon Fraser U
Speakers
Evan Donahue
Duke U
Rita Raley
U of California, Santa Barbara
Théo Lepage-Richer
Brown U
Colin Milburn
U of California, Davis
Jennifer Rhee
Virginia Commonwealth U

Wendy speaks on panel at MLA Convention 2021
2021-01-08 10:30 - 12:00 | British Columbia
Panel 294 – Data Privacy Now: A Public Conversation about Private Information
During the COVID-19 global pandemic, institutions have turned to technology-driven solutions to alleviate public health risk. From the classroom to committee meetings, “remote” work and school required the rapid introduction of new technologies with little time to consider issues of data privacy for ourselves or our students. This wide-ranging moderated discussion considers what we should know about data privacy in the light of this recent online transition.

Presider

Lisa Marie Rhody

Graduate Center, City U of New York

Speakers

Safiya Umoja Noble

U of California, Los Angeles

Wendy Chun

Simon Fraser U

Jacqueline D. Wernimont

Dartmouth C

Maite Taboada talks to the Institute on Natural Language Processing to manage harmful content online
2021-01-13 12:30 - 13:30 | British Columbia
Maite Taboada is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at SFU. Her research combines discourse analysis and computational linguistics, with an emphasis on discourse relations and sentiment analysis. Current work focuses on the analysis of online comments, drawing insights from corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and big data. Other projects include a study of fake news online and the Gender Gap Tracker. She is the director of the Discourse Processing Lab at SFU.

Cierra Robson talks to the Institute
2021-01-20 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Cierra Robson is the Associate Director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab at Princeton University where she guides research teams in partnership with community organizations to explore how data can be retooled for racial justice. Additionally, Cierra is a doctoral student in the Sociology and Social Policy program at Harvard University where she is a Malcolm Hewitt Wiener PhD Research Fellow in Poverty and Justice. Broadly, her research explores the ways in which technological advancements both reinforce and revolutionize racial inequality in the United States, particularly within the criminal justice system.

Christine Tomlinson talks to the Institute
2021-01-27 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Christine Tomlinson is a social science lecturer and researcher at the University of California, Irvine and a research assistant with the Digital Democracies Institute. Christine’s work is primarily focused on video games and considers player experiences, interests, and backgrounds as well as hostilities both in gaming spaces and online cultures more broadly.

Monthly Institute Team Meeting
2021-02-03 12:00 - 13:00 | British Columbia
The Institute meets monthly to exchange updates on projects and share ideas.

Alberto Toscano Reading Group 1
2021-02-03 15:00 - 17:00 | British Columbia
More details tbd
Group takes place February 3 and 17.

André Brock talks to the Institute
2021-02-10 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, Black technoculture, and digital media. His scholarship examines Black and white representations in social media, videogames, weblogs, and other digital media. He has also published influential research on digital research methods. His first book, titled Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, was published with NYU Press in 2020 and theorizes Black everyday lives mediated by networked technologies.

Alberto Toscano Reading Group 2
2021-02-10 15:00 - 17:00 | British Columbia
More details tbd
Reading Group takes place February 3 and 10.

Left and Right, or Being who/where you are - Performances
2021-02-10 19:00 - 2021-02-14 12:00 | Online
Performance Dates & Registration
Feb 10, 7pm EST
Feb 11, 7pm EST
Feb 12, 7pm EST
Feb 13, 12pm EST
Feb 14, 12pm EST
Please note: Participants will need Chrome and a laptop or desktop to be able to access the performance (no mobile or iPad access possible). For the best experience, we also recommend the use of headphones throughout the performance.
Description
In this time of intense divisions, a left partisan and a right partisan speaking with each other seems like an impossible conversation – or, at least, a conversation that is impossible to have meaningfully on certain so-called “hot-button” topics and complex realities, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or immigration.
This devised, interactive online multimedia performance stages scenes that feature such conversations … performed by both human actors and bots. The human and machinic actors play different characters that embody, complicate, and deconstruct different types of performative, prescribed political identities on the left-right spectrum (approached with a US-focus but through a transnational lens). These political identities are shown to be not static or unalterable, rather, the result of relational, performative processes that occur over time and with technology. Theatrically playing with(in) these processes, Left and Right aims to call forth more capacious ways of being – and being political.
Presented by Brown Arts Initiative. Free and open to the public. Registration required.
Credits
Concept & Directing: Ioana B. Jucan
Text: Patrick Elizalde, Andra Jurj, Marcela Mancino, Fabiola Petri, Ioana B. Jucan, Melody Devries
Actors: Marcela Mancino, Patrick Elizalde, Andra Jurj, Fabiola Petri
Digital Design and Development: Tong Wu, Nuntinee Tansrisakul & Yuguang Zhang
Theatrical Design: Marcela Mancino
Bot Design: Roopa Vasudevan
Bot Concept: Roopa Vasudevan, Anthony Burton
Choreography: Adriana Barza
Sound Design: Peter Bussigel
Production Manager: Madeline Greenberg
Dramaturgy: Melody Devries
Performance Consultants: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Alex Juhasz, and the Beyond Verification Team associated with the Digital Democracies Institute (SFU)

Reading Week
2021-02-15 08:00 - 2021-02-19 17:00 | British Columbia

Alberto Toscano talks to the Institute
2021-02-24 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory. He studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research, University College Dublin and the University of Warwick, from which he received his PhD in 2003.
He is the author of three monographs: The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (2006), Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2010), and (with Jeff Kinkle) Cartographies of the Absolute (2015). He edited The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics with Lorenzo Chiesa, and has translated several works by Alain Badiou, as well as Antonio Negri, Furio Jesi and Franco Fortini. He is currently working on two book projects, the first on tragedy as a political form, the second on philosophy, capitalism and ‘real abstraction’. He is also preparing two multi-volume edited collections, a Handbook of Marxism (with Bev Skeggs and Sara Farris) and Alain Badiou: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers (with Ray Brassier).
He has sat on the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory since 2004, and is series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books.

Monthly Institute Team Meeting
2021-03-03 12:00 - 12:30 | Online

Sarah T. Roberts presents to the Institute
2021-03-03 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Judging Themselves: Facebook as Extrastate Sovereign (and Why We Should Worry).
In this brief and nascent talk (followed by lively collective discussion), Professor Sarah T. Roberts (UCLA) will offer an analysis of what Facebook is _really_ up to with its Oversight Board, and what the activation of that body reveals about Facebook’s vision of itself in the world. Spoiler alert: the vision is nothing short of a combination of soft power (Nye) _and_ extrastate sovereignty (Ong; Easterling), and _that_ is nothing short of ominous.

Kishonna Gray talks to the Institute
2021-03-10 12:30 - 14:00 | By zoom
Title for Kishonna’s talk is her new book: Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming

Left and Right, or Being who/where you are - Performances
2021-03-13 13:00 - 2021-03-17 00:00 | Online
Performance Dates & Registration
March 13 – tickets and registration here
Please note: Participants will need Chrome and a laptop or desktop to be able to access the performance (no mobile or iPad access possible). For the best experience, we also recommend the use of headphones throughout the performance.
Description
In this time of intense divisions, a left partisan and a right partisan speaking with each other seems like an impossible conversation – or, at least, a conversation that is impossible to have meaningfully on certain so-called “hot-button” topics and complex realities, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or immigration.
This devised, interactive online multimedia performance stages scenes that feature such conversations … performed by both human actors and bots. The human and machinic actors play different characters that embody, complicate, and deconstruct different types of performative, prescribed political identities on the left-right spectrum (approached with a US-focus but through a transnational lens). These political identities are shown to be not static or unalterable, rather, the result of relational, performative processes that occur over time and with technology. Theatrically playing with(in) these processes, Left and Right aims to call forth more capacious ways of being – and being political.
Presented by Brown Arts Initiative. Free and open to the public. Registration required.
Credits
Concept & Directing: Ioana B. Jucan
Text: Patrick Elizalde, Andra Jurj, Marcela Mancino, Fabiola Petri, Ioana B. Jucan, Melody Devries
Actors: Marcela Mancino, Patrick Elizalde, Andra Jurj, Fabiola Petri
Digital Design and Development: Tong Wu, Nuntinee Tansrisakul & Yuguang Zhang
Theatrical Design: Marcela Mancino
Bot Design: Roopa Vasudevan
Bot Concept: Roopa Vasudevan, Anthony Burton
Choreography: Adriana Barza
Sound Design: Peter Bussigel
Production Manager: Madeline Greenberg
Dramaturgy: Melody Devries
Performance Consultants: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Alex Juhasz, and the Beyond Verification Team associated with the Digital Democracies Institute (SFU)

Wendy presents at Brown University - Terranova and Ahmed
2021-03-15 09:00 - 10:00 | By zoom
Wendy will be presenting to Ariella Azoulay & Bonnie Honig’s class on Modern Culture & Media on Terranova and Ahmed at Brown.
Closed to class members only.

Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference 2021
2021-03-17 - 2021-03-21 | Online
The Society’s annual conference provides a forum for scholars and teachers of film and media studies to present and hear new research; to provide a supportive environment for networking, mentoring, and collaboration among scholars otherwise separated by distance, language, or disciplinary boundaries; and to promote the field of cinema and media studies among its practitioners, to other disciplines, and to the public at large, in part through public recognition of award worthy achievements and other significant milestones within the field.
Each Spring the Society announces the location of the next conference and calls for proposals for open call papers, panels, workshops, and screenings. Members and registered website users can post calls for papers and panel and workshop announcements to the Conference Bulletin Board to solicit presenters. Online submission forms are available in June for paper, panel and workshop abstracts, bios, and bibliographies and film synopses.

Ani Maitra talks to the Institute
2021-03-17 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Ani Maitra is associate professor of Film and Media Studies at Colgate University. His teaching and research interests span the fields of postcolonial and diaspora media cultures and gender and sexuality studies. His essays have appeared in edited volumes and journals like Camera Obscura, Continuum, differences, Film Quarterly, Jindal Global Law Review and World Records. Maitra is the author of Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital (Northwestern University Press, 2020).
Maitra’s talk will be based on his book Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital (Northwestern University Press, 2020). In this book, Maitra calls for an urgent reevaluation of identity politics as an aesthetic maneuver regulated by capitalism. A dominant critical trend in the humanities, Maitra argues, is to dismiss or embrace identity through the formal properties of a privileged aesthetic medium like literature, film, or even the performative body. In contrast, he demonstrates that identity politics becomes unavoidably real and material only because the minoritized subject is split between multiple sites of mediation—linguistic, visual, and digital—while remaining firmly tethered to capitalism’s hierarchical logic of value production. Only in the interstices of media can we track the aesthetic conversion of identitarian difference into value, marked by the inequities of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Wendy presents at Indiana as CAHI Distinguished Scholar Series
2021-03-18 15:30 - 17:00 | Online
Wendy will be presenting on ‘Roadblocks as Opportunities: Working Across Disciplines to Counter Polarization and Mis-Information’
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun will join CAHI’s Distinguished Scholar series. Her work in Critical Data Studies is timely and crucial: she pushes us to heed the power of algorithms and big data in fostering discrimination and misinformation, and offers tools for countering these trends.
Chun’s talk will outline projects led by Simon Fraser University’s Digital Democracies Institutes that analyze and counter the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” and mis/disinformation by integrating research in the humanities, social and data sciences. In particular, the talk will discuss how moving from factuality to authenticity opens avenues into understanding the spread of “fake news.”
