Digital Democracies Institute

Kara Keeling talks to the Institute
2021-04-21 12:30 - 14:00 UTC | Online
Details tbd

Wendy at National Humanities Center at AI and the Humanities Conference
2021-04-14 10:30 - 14:00 | Online
Wendy will be presenting a keynote at the conference on “How Has Artificial Intelligence Challenged the Boundaries of Humanistic Thinking,”

Kate Crawford talks to the Institute
2021-04-07 15:30 - 17:00 | Online
Prof. Kate Crawford is a leading scholar who has spent the last decade studying the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She holds the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, is a senior principal researcher at MSR, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. Her new book, The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (available here for pre-order) explores the hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from natural resources and energy to labor and data, and reveals how AI systems have saturated political life and depleted the planet.
She will be discussing the themes of her book with Wendy Chun. Wendy is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, and leads the Digital Democracies Institute where researchers investigate themes of mis- and disinformation, authenticity, and counterspeech, amongst many others. The conversation will be a wonderful opportunity to hear two leading academics discuss issues that are crucial to our time, with repercussions pertinent to our lives, both online and in our communities. Don’t miss it.
Click here to register [Attendees will also receive a flyer for 25% off when they order the book on registration]

Monthly Institute Team Meeting
2021-04-07 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-03-03 12:00 - 12:30 | Online
The Institute meets monthly to exchange updates on projects and share ideas.

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup speaks to the Institute
2021-03-31 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
The politics of data (re)use

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. Her research is concerned with the politics of digital infrastructures and her current interests include the ethics of data reuse, content moderation and digital sustainability. She is the author of The Politics of Mass Digitization, published with MIT Press in 2018, and co-editor of the book Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (MIT Press 2021) and (W)archives (Sternberg Press 2021).

Wendy at the New Materialist Informatics Conference at University of Kassel, Germany
2021-03-25 09:00 - 10:30 | Online
Wendy will be presenting a keynote at the conference entitled “Authenticating Figures: Algorithms and the New Politics of Recognition”
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”.

Solveig Suess & Asia Bazdriyeva talk to the Institute
2021-03-24 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Environmental Machines, Datified Earths
The presentation will depart from the method of Geocinema, which is to examine infrastructures of earth-sensing data as forms of cinema. Drawing on their recent fieldwork on the Digital Belt and Road Initiative in China and their subsequent documentary, Making of Earths (2020), Solveig Suess and Asia Bazdyrieva will speak on the techniques of earth sensing, vast resource extraction, and present day demands aimed towards battling a future of climate change. While simple sets of data are accrued from geological to techno-political formations, they translate into the many versions of Earths. These large-scale imaging operations feed back and circulate across scales of the body, the apparatus, the landscape.

Geocinema (Asia Bazdyrieva (UA), Solveig Qu Suess (CH/CN)) is a collective that explores the possibilities of a “planetary” notion of cinema. Based in Berlin and Kyiv, their practice has been concerned with the understanding and sensing of the earth while being on the ground, enmeshed within vastly distributed processes of image and meaning making. Their work has been shown internationally, including their first solo show Making of Earths at Kunsthall Trondheim Norway (2020) and group shows such as Critical Zones at ZKM Karlsruhe (2020-21) and Re-thinking Collectivity at Guangzhou Image Triennale (2021). They have given lecture-performances at the Ashkal Alwan Beirut, ICA London, HKW Berlin, NYU Shanghai, Matadero Madrid and have taught at the Berlin University of the Arts, FAMU Prague, Central Saint Martins London among others. They were 2018–19 Digital Earth Fellows and have been nominated for the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2020).

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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.

Reading Week
2021-02-15 08:00 - 2021-02-19 17:00

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)

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

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 1
2021-02-03 15:00 - 17:00
More details tbd
Group takes place February 3 and 17.

Monthly Institute Team Meeting
2021-02-03 12:00 - 13:00

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.

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.

Maite Taboada talks to the Institute on Natural Language Processing to manage harmful content online
2021-01-13 12:30 - 13:30
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.

Wendy speaks on panel at MLA Convention 2021
2021-01-08 10:30 - 12:00
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

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

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.

Reading Group - Black and Indigenous Bodies
2020-12-09 15:00 - 17:00 | 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.

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.
