Digital Democracies Institute

Kick off 2023 with CBC/Radio-Canada in Vancouver
2023-01-17 11:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Joseph & Rosalie Segal Center, Simon Fraser University, 515 West Hastings, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Join CBC/Radio-Canada President Catherine Tait and guest panelists for a conversation about building trust and protecting our democracy. This important discussion will touch on journalism and reporting, building relationships with the audience, online safety and public policy.
CBC/Radio-Canada and partners University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University invite interested members of the public to join them for a light lunch, followed by the panel discussion and a brief question and answer period.
Moderated by:
Anita Bathe, CBC Vancouver News at 6 pm
Panelists:
Catherine Tait, President and CEO, CBC/Radio-Canada
Jeanette Ageson, Publisher, The Tyee
Jeremy Kinsman, Distinguished Fellow, The Canadian International Council
Linda Solomon Wood, Publisher, National Observer
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair / Professor, Simon Fraser University
Registration and proof of identification is required. We also ask that you be prepared to check any large bags in our complimentary secure bag check. Please note that this is an in-person event and no live stream will be available.

Angelica Lim presents to the DDI
2022-11-23 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Dr. Angelica Lim is an Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. She builds artificial intelligence software for robots to interact in a smart, but fun, way.
She has a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Kyoto University, Japan, specializing in AI applied to Robotics, and a B.Sc. in Computing Science (specializing in Artificial Intelligence) from Simon Fraser University in Canada. She is also a writer for the robotics online magazine IEEE Spectrum Automaton.

Susan Benesch presents to the DDI
2022-11-02 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Susan Benesch is an Adjunct Associate Professor, School of International Service, at the American Univeristy. She founded and directs the Dangerous Speech Project (dangerousspeech.org), to study speech that can inspire violence – and to find ways to prevent this, without infringing on freedom of expression. She conducts research on methods to diminish harmful speech online, or the harm itself. Trained as a human rights lawyer at Yale, Susan has worked for NGOs including Amnesty International and Human Rights First. She is also Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
To join the presentation email ddi_comms@sfu.ca.

Wendy Chun keynote at NYU's Neil Postman Graduate Student Conference
2022-10-27 08:00 - 2022-10-28 17:00 (America/Vancouver) | Online
The Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University is pleased to announce the Neil Postman Graduate Student Conference to be held on October 27-28, 2022 in a hybrid format (in person at NYU, with support for remote contributions).
Keynote speaker is Professor Wendy Chun and the theme this year is ‘Hinterlands of Media and Technology.’ The CFP is attached below. There will also be a virtual CFP launch event on March 24, 2022 at 12.30pm –1.30pm (EST). More details below; Register here.)
Hinterlands of Media and Technology
October 27-28, 2022
Keynote: Professor Wendy Chun, Simon Fraser University.
Format: Hybrid (in person at NYU, with support for remote contributions)
What is peripheral and yet indispensable to media and technology production? What networks and relations may be obscured or revealed if we interrogate the constitution of the center? This year, we focus on the centrality of the ‘elsewhere’ and the ‘otherwise’ in the production of media experiences and media technologies. To consider the many historical, geographic, economic, and material dynamics at play, we center our inquiry around the notion of the hinterlands, and invite contributions to the question: What and where are the hinterlands of media and technology?
The full CFP is attached below; applicants are required to send a 300-350 word abstract, bio, and any supporting media via this application form by May 1st, 2022.
Information is also available at www.postmanconference.org and questions can be directed to postman.nyu@gmail.com. We will also be posting regular updates on Twitter
In addition, we are hosting a virtual CFP launch event on March 24, 2022, at 12:30 PM EST, with a discussion of the theme’s relevance for work in different areas and sites, featuring:
Lily Chumley – Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU
Martin Scherzinger – Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU
Philipp Seuferling – Visiting Researcher at the Dept. of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU; PhD, Södertörn University, Stockholm (2021)
Ayesha Omer – Postdoctoral Fellow, UPenn Annenberg School of Communications, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication; PhD, Dept. of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU (2020)
We invite all prospective applicants and those interested in the theme in general to join this conversation. Opportunities for networking and socializing for graduate students have been limited during the past few years, and we hope this event will allow participants to build an intellectual community and engage in conversations in advance of meeting in person this fall.

Nanditha Narayanamoorthy presents to the DDI
2022-10-12 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Nanditha Narayanamoorthy is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her work draws from a Humanities-based framework to understand the relationship between technology and democracy and rethink digital infrastructure and platform design, particularly for marginalized communities in the Global South.
As an interdisciplinary scholar at the intersection of Critical Digital Studies, Gender Studies, and Social Justice, she investigates the role digital infrastructures play in centering vulnerable groups online. She studies digital protest to examine how religious, gendered, and ethnic minorities employ social media platforms in the Indian context to create and perform their political identities and create safe spaces for their digital assembly. She also examines how these marginalized communities are targeted by state-sponsored digital hate campaigns that undermine democracy.

How Are You? Sentiment, Surveillance, and Anti-Asian Racism
2022-10-01 14:00 - 15:30 (America/Vancouver) | BC
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
University of Toronto
Critical Digital Humanities Initiative
In-Person: Saturday, October 1
Campbell Conference Facility
5:00-6:30 pm EST

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at the Simon Fraser University School of Communication. Dr. Chun is the author of Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), and Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), as well as numerous articles and edited collections. She has received fellowships from various foundations and institutes, including the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She was Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades.

Currently, Dr. Chun leads SFU’s Digital Democracies Institute which was launched in 2019. The Institute aims to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation by fostering critical and creative user practices and alternative paradigms for connection. It has four distinct research streams all led by Dr. Chun: Beyond Verification which looks at authenticity and the spread of disinformation; From Hate to Agonism, focusing on fostering democratic exchange online; Desegregating Network Neighbourhoods, combatting homophily across platforms; and Discriminating Data: Neighbourhoods, Individuals and Proxies, investigating the centrality of race, gender, class and sexuality to big data and network analytics.

Thinking With | Wendy Hui Kyong Chun | Discriminating Data & the New Politics of Recognition
2022-09-26 16:30 - 17:00 (Europe/Amsterdam) | Online
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, who leads the Digital Democracies Institute, will be in conversation with respondents Alexander R. Galloway, Hannah Turner,​​​​​​​ and Evelyn Wan, moderated by Wayne Modest on MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 | 16.30-18 hours CET.
On the event of the publication of Chun’s most recent book Discriminating Data – Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press), as part of our Thinking With conversation series, we consider how “big data and predictive machine learning currently encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage.” As a museum, with extensive histories collecting ‘ethnographically,’ we are interested in how notions of “discriminating data” in the contexts of the digital, which Chun works with, can inform our own collection practices—past, present, and affect how we do so in the future. More generally, in our conversation, we also engage Chun’s overarching question, “How can we release ourselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data?”, in order to also ask the same question of ourselves at the museum?
This event takes place virtually, at the Research Centre for Material Culture. More information and registration here.

Charlton McIlwain presents to the DDI
2022-09-21 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | BC
Charlton McIlwain – Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development; Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication
Media, Culture, and Communication
Charlton McIlwain’s recent work focuses on the intersections of race, digital media, and racial justice activism. He recently wrote Racial Formation, Inequality & the Political Economy of Web Traffic, in the journal Information, Communication & Society, and I co-authored, with Deen Freelon and Meredith Clark, the recent report Beyond the Hashtags: Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice, published by the Center for Media & Social Impact, and supported by the Spencer Foundation. He is currently working on a book Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca to join the presentation.

Maria Ressa - How to Stand Up to a Dictator
2022-09-13 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Vancouver) | SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre
Nobel Peace Prize laureate, SFU Honorary Degree recipient and renowned journalist Maria Ressa on how democracy dies by a thousand cuts.
Renowned investigative journalist Maria Ressa received the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her fearless defense of press freedom and democracy in the Philippines as CEO and co-founder of Rappler, an online news site. For her critical reporting of former President Rodrigo Duterte’s government and policies, she faces multiple lawsuits and potentially over 100 years in prison yet remains resolved in her fight to speak truth to power.
Now, in her forthcoming book How to Stand up to a Dictator, Maria Ressa maps out a global network of disinformation from Duterte’s drug wars, to America’s Capitol Hill, to Britain’s Brexit, to Russian cyberwarfare to Silicon Valley and beyond.
“How to Stand Up to a Dictator is the story of how democracy dies by a thousand cuts, and how an invisible atom bomb has exploded online that is killing our freedoms.”
Join us at this SFU Vancouver Speaker Series event where Maria Ressa will discuss the threat disinformation campaigns pose to our increasingly polarized democracies. Ressa will also be formally presented with her honorary Doctor of Laws from Simon Fraser University by SFU President Joy Johnson.
Peter Klein, Professor with the UBC School of Journalism, Writing, and Media and Executive Director of the Global Reporting Centre will provide opening remarks. Santa Ono, President of the University of British Columbia will give closing remarks. Wade Grant (Musqueam First Nation) will begin this event and offer a welcome.
This SFU Vancouver Speaker Series event is presented in partnership by SFU Vancouver, SFU Public Square, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, the Digital Democracies Institute, Ouano Foundation, the University of British Columbia and the Global Reporting Centre.

SFU Vancouver Speaker Series
The SFU Vancouver Speaker Series brings global experts to a local audience. Launched in 2012, the series builds on SFU’s rich history of community engagement by exploring critical issues to contribute to better understanding among Vancouver’s citizens through an intellectually enriching experience.

Register here. Note that there are reserved tickets for DDI affiliates, so contact ddi_comms@sfu.ca to reserve your space if you are affiliated.

This event is in person at the SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, and there is a livestream option.
This event is organized in partnership with SFU Vancouver, SFU Public Square, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, the Digital Democracies Institute, Ouano Foundation, the University of British Columbia and the Global Reporting Centre.

Moya Bailey presents to the DDI
2022-08-03 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Dr. Moya Bailey is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on Black women’s use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine.

She also coined the term misogynoir which describes the unique anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience.

#HashtagActivism Book Cover

She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice and is the author of the forthcoming, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance.

Mellon in-person team meetings
2022-07-27 09:00 - 2022-07-29 17:00 (America/Vancouver) | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Schedule is currently bring drafted.

DDI Retreat
2022-07-20 10:00 - 16:00 (America/Vancouver) | BC
Members of the Digital Democracies Institute will attend a one-day retreat at SFU downtown from 10-4. More details TBD.

Debora Nozza presents to the DDI
2022-07-19 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Debora Nozza, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Bocconi University and member of an NLP group in Milan, will be joining us for an in-person presentation with a Q & A.
She’ll be, in part, talking about this project: The interdisciplinary MONICA project will create a digital barometer of Italians’ attitudes towards the government measures implemented in response to COVID-19. The pandemic has plunged millions of vulnerable people into abject poverty. The government created financial measures to improve the economic situation and social inclusion. However, it is unclear whether these measures reach those who need them most. To find out, we will uncover the public perception of these measures and provide concrete metrics for three related dimensions: 1) coverage of the potential beneficiaries, 2) attitudes of the Italian population stratified by different demographic factors, and 3) accessibility of the information. MONICA will provide citizens with a tool to automatically rank and simplify articles about requirements and steps to access these initiatives. MONICA will enable policymakers to understand which segments of the vulnerable population are not accessing these initiatives and why.

Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca to participate.

Matthew Fuller presents to the DDI
2022-07-06 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Matthew Fuller is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Goldsmiths London. With Usman Haque, he is co-author of ‘Urban Versioning System v1.0’ (ALNY) and with Andrew Goffey, of ‘Evil Media’ (MIT), Editor of ‘Software Studies, a lexicon’ (MIT) and co-editor of the journal Computational Culture. He is involved in a number of projects in art, media and software and is the author of the forthcoming, ‘How to Sleep, in art, biology and culture’ (Bloomsbury).
To join this presentation email ddi_comms@sfu.ca.

Eleanor Drage & Kerry Mackereth present to the DDI
2022-06-29 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Eleanor Drage is a Christina Gaw Post-doctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Gender Studies and a member of the Gender & Technology Research Project team at the University of Cambridge. Her publications focus on how humanity defines and constitutes itself both through unstable socio-cultural processes such as race and gender and through fallible technological systems. Eleanor is particularly interested in how technology can prompt and develop certain kinds of behavioural skills, and how anti-racist and anti-sexist critical theory can be implemented at industry-level to develop ethical and socially transformative technological products.
Kerry Mackereth is a Christina Gaw Post-doctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Gender Studies and a member of the Gender & Technology Research Project team at the University of Cambridge. She is also a Research Associate at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Kerry’s work broadly explores how histories of gendered and racialised violence shape new technologies. Kerry’s PhD thesis examined how women’s violent protests, specifically, their hunger strikes in the contexts of women’s prisons and immigration detention centres, complicate theories of political violence.
To join this presentation email ddi_comms@sfu.ca.

Sean Cubitt presents to the DDI
2022-06-22 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Sean Cubitt is a Professor of Screen Studies, Culture and Communication, at the University of Melbourne. His research links film and media studies with ecocriticism, technological, aesthetic, economic and political history, and the media arts and aesthetics. He is series editor of Leonardo Books (MIT Press) and serves on the boards of the Media Art History network, Goldsmiths Press, Media Art 21 (CAFA Beijing / SFMOMA / He Foundation), Delocating Mountains (Austrian Science Fund) and a number of journal and books series including Screen, Cultural Politics, Visual Art Practice and the Journal of Environmental Media. He is currently working on the latest of nine funded research projects, this dealing with social media and photography.
To join the presentation email ddi_comms@sfu.ca.

Cindy Ma presents to the DDI
2022-06-08 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Streaming to transgress: the racial politics of reactionary YouTubers and their audiences
Cindy Ma is a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute doing work on the discourse of white racial resentment, with a focus on YouTube personalities and their audiences. Her research examines the interactions between online ecosystems, political discourse, and racial inequity. Prior to starting her PhD, she completed an MSc in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and worked in the nonprofit sector. She is a 2019 Trudeau Scholar and SSHRC Doctoral Fellow.
To join the presentation email ddi_comms@sfu.ca.

Lorena Jaume-Palasí presents to the DDI
2022-06-01 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Lorena Jaume-Palasí – Normative solutionism: Commonalities and frictions between European law and algorithmic systems
Rescheduled from March 16

Lorena Jaume-Palasí is the founder of The Ethical Tech Society, a non-profit organization researching processes of automation and digitization with regards to their social relevance. Lorena researches the ethics of digitization and automation. In this context, she also deals with questions of legal philosophy. She is a Fellow of the Bucerius Foundation and a member of the Advisory Board on Education and Discourse of the Goethe Institute. She additionally heads the secretariat of the German National Section of the IGF as well as projects on Internet Governance in Asia and Africa. She has co-authored and edited various publications on internet governance and regularly writes on data protection, privacy and publicity, public goods and discrimination.

To virtually join: email ddi_comms@sfu.ca

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun & Giorgia Aiello at École universitaire de recherche ArTeC
2022-05-25 14:00 - 18:00 (Europe/Paris) | By zoom
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun & Giorgia Aiello
Event is in English
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun est l’une des plus importantes théoriciennes de la digitalité, de la programmation, du contrôle algorithmique, de l’utilisation des big data et des plateformes, reconnue internationalement mais encore très peu traduite en français. Elle dirige le Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University au Canada, après avoir enseigné à Brown University et avoir été invitée dans de nombreuses universités à l’international. Elle parle à partir d’une double formation en Systems Design Engineering et en Littérature. Elle a publié une trilogie pionnière avec Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT Press, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT Press, 2011) et Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT Press, 2016). Son plus récent ouvrage s’intitule Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (MIT Press, 2021).
Giorgia Aiello est professeure de culture et de communication à l’université de Leeds (Royaume-Uni), et professeure associée en sociologie de la culture et de la communication à l’université de Bologne (Italie). Après avoir obtenu son diplôme du programme d’études en communication fondé par Umberto Eco à Bologne, elle a obtenu son doctorat à l’université de Washington à Seattle, aux États‑Unis. Ses recherches visent à découvrir comment se forment les identités, comment la différence et la diversité sont négociées et comment les inégalités sont maintenues ou surmontées grâce à la communication visuelle. Elle a été chercheuse invitée, conférencière invitée et conférencière principale dans des universités, des conférences et des ateliers dans douze pays différents. Giorgia est co-autrice du livre Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture (avec K. Parry, SAGE, 2020) et directrice de l’ouvrage Communicating the City: Meanings, Practices, Interactions (avec M. Tarantino and K. Oakley, Peter Lang, 2017). Une traduction française de quatre de ses articles vient de paraître dans la Petite Collection de l’EUR ArTeC en co-édition avec Les presses du réel : Communication, espace, image, préfacée par Marta Severo et postfacée par Maria Giulia Dondero.
Wendy Chun présentera les enjeux politiques actuels de l’utilisation des big data en régime de capitalisme de plateforme, en mettant la lumière sur ce qui fait des algorithmes et IA d’aujourd’hui la continuation de théories eugénistes et de statistiques discriminatoires (racistes, sexistes) héritées du XXe siècle.
Giorgia Aiello présentera son travail autour du rôle des “visuels génériques” dans la culture publique. Elle prend au sérieux l’abondance de la photographie de stock dans la vie quotidienne, en faisant valoir que ce que nous considérons souvent comme une imagerie banale et de “seconde classe” est au contraire devenu l’épine dorsale visuelle de notre imagination culturelle et sociale.
Join Zoom Meeting :
https://univ-paris8.zoom.us/j/99178198467?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 991 7819 8467
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Wendy at Alliance Program Symposium
2022-05-23 10:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Paris) | BC
Reshaping our Digital Interactions: Subjectivity in the Post-Cinema Age
Colloque en traduction simultanée anglais / français | Simultaneous French / English translation available at symposium
ENQUÊTES SUR LA SURVEILLANCE ET LES LOGIQUES ALGORITHMIQUES, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Keynote), Antonio Somaini, Félix Tréguer
À propos de cet évènement
REMODELER NOS INTERACTIONS NUMERIQUES : La subjectivité à l’ère du post-cinéma
À l’ère de ce que Gilles Deleuze a appelé les « sociétés de contrôle » – gouvernées aujourd’hui à la fois par la prédictibilité algorithmique, les nouvelles formes de travail numérique ou l’« économie de l’attention » – quelles stratégies sont explorées par des artistes, des chercheurs et des usagers, pour produire de nouvelles relations aux dispositifs numériques, réflexives et émancipatrices, plutôt qu’addictives, compulsives et conspirationnistes ?
Ce colloque souhaite questionner des enjeux esthétiques, psychiques et politiques de la transformation rapide des technologies et des plateformes numériques, en confrontant différents diagnostiques critiques et en examinant des expérimentations artistiques à l’ère du « post-cinéma » (celle des reconfigurations du médium cinématographique à l’époque des médias connectés).
Projet Alliance porté par Nico Baumbach (Columbia University)et Judith Michalet (Université Paris 1)avec la participation de Aline Caillet (Université Paris 1), Yves Citton (Université Paris 8), Jane M. Gaines (Columbia University), Gwenola Wagon (Université Paris 8) et Damon R. Young (UC Berkeley), comme membres du comité scientifique.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.fr/e/billets-colloque-international-remodeler-nos-interactions-numeriques-337204938047

Caroline Running Wolf presents to the DDI
2022-04-20 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | BC
Caroline Running Wolf (Crow Nation), nee Old Coyote, is an enrolled member of the Apsáalooke Nation (Crow) in Montana, with a Swabian (German) mother and also Pikuni, Oglala, and Ho-Chunk heritage. As the daughter of nomadic parents, she grew up between USA, Canada, and Germany. Thanks to her genuine interest in people and their stories, she is a multilingual Cultural Acclimation Artist dedicated to supporting Indigenous language and culture vitality. After working for over 15 years as a professional nerd herder and business consultant in various fields, Running Wolf co-founded a nonprofit, Buffalo Tongue, with her husband, Michael Running Wolf. Together they create virtual and augmented reality experiences to advocate for Native American voices, languages, and cultures. Running Wolf has a Master’s degree in Native American Studies from Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Jason Lewis presents to the DDI
2022-04-13 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Jason Edward Lewis is Full Professor of Design and Computation Arts. He is a digital media artist, poet and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he directs research/ creation projects using virtual environments to assist Aboriginal communities in preserving, interpreting and communicating cultural histories, devising new means of creating and reading digital texts, developing systems for creative use of mobile technology. He is the director of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, a seven-year SSHRC-funded Partnership focused on how Indigenous communities imaging themselves seven generations hence. Lewis co-founded and co-directs the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research network that is investigating how Aboriginal people can participate in the shaping of our digital media future, and co-directs workshop combining traditional stories and game design at the Kahnawake First Nations’ high school. He is deeply committed to developing intriguing new forms of expression by working on conceptual, creative and technical levels simultaneously. Lewis’ creative work has been featured at the Ars Electronica Center, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Urban Screens and Mobilefest, among other venues, his writing about new media has been presented at conferences, festivals and exhibitions on four continents and his work with Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace has won multiple awards.
He received his MPhil from the Royal College of Art for Dynamic Poetry: Introductory Remarks to a New Medium.

Wendy Chun's keynote address at UC Berkeley's Science Ethics and Policy Symposium
2022-04-09 17:00 - 18:00 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Beyond Ethical Tech: Understanding the Sociocultural History of Our Technological Defaults
Before we can talk about science policy issues, we need to talk about trust. How can we make sure science and its applications serve every community? Register to see the #SEPS2022 keynote with Wendy Chun on Saturday, April 9: http://seps2022.com.

Dylan Mulvin presents to the DDI
2022-04-06 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Dr Dylan Mulvin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where he also serves as Programme Director for the MSc Media and Communications.
Dr Mulvin is a historian of media and technology. Drawing on methods from media studies, Science and Technology Studies, gender studies, and disability studies, Dr Mulvin investigates how standards, infrastructures, and defaults encode and crystallise assumptions about human perception and behavior. In other words, he studies the ways people make the stuff that we take for granted. He is the author of Proxies: the Cultural Work of Standing In (published open access with MIT Press).
Prior to joining the Department, Dr Mulvin was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, where he was a member of the Social Media Collective. He earned his MA and PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University.

Tung-Hui Hu presents to the DDI
2022-03-30 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Tung-Hui Hu is associate professor at the University of Michigan in the department of English Language and Literature. He is the author of three books of poetry, The Book of Motion (2003), Mine (2007), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), a chapbook, On the Kepel Fruit (Albion Books, 2017), and a study of digital culture, A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015), which was described by The New Yorker as “mesmerizing… absorbing [in] its playful speculations”. His new book, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass, is Digital Lethargy, forthcoming from MIT Press.
His research has been featured on CBS News, BBC Radio 4, Boston Globe, New Scientist, Art in America, and Rhizome.org, among other venues. Hu has received awards from Yaddo, MacDowell, the NEA, the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, and the San Francisco Foundation, and his poems have appeared in places such as Boston Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, the Academy of American Poets’s Poem-a-Day, and the anthology Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Hybrid Literary Genres. He is a member of the editorial board of Afterimage.

Wendy Chun at Latent Spaces - Performing Ambiguous Data
2022-03-22 11:00 - 12:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
The value of ambiguity.
Data, Proxies and the limits of the computable via YouTube Stream
with Mireille Hildebrandt & Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, moderated by Felix Stalder
Mireille Hildebrandt:
The politics of ambiguity and the issue of proxies
In my talk, I will argue that what matters is not computable. However, it can be made computable, and in different ways. This difference in turn matters, it makes a difference for those who will suffer or enjoy the consequences. To make things computable developers need proxies, as computing systems cannot deal with the ambiguity of the languages we live in. Decisions on disambiguation and the choice of proxies have far-reaching implications, There is a politics in these design decisions that requires our keen attention. This is where transparency and agonistic debate are pertinent.
Mireille Hildebrandt is a lawyer and philosopher who works at the intersection of law and computer science. She is the Research Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel[1] and at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is also the principal investigator of the ‘Counting as a Human Being in the Era of Computational Law’ project (2019–2024). The research targets two forms of computational law: machine learning and blockchain technology.
Among her many publications, the most relevant for this series is:
Hildebrandt, Mireille. 2019. “Privacy as Protection of the Incomputable Self: From Agnostic to Agonistic Machine Learning.” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 20 (1): 83–121.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun:
The Politics of Proxies
Data proxies spell trouble and they are everywhere. They are the interfaces where the unknowable is translated into the known. They provide a measure for that which cannot be measured. As such, they are full of political assumptions, troubling the clean separation between data and model. The inherent ambivalence of proxies can open the space for a critique that is less about whether the models “get it right”, but about which models we want.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Since its launch in 2019, she leads the Digital Democracies Institute which aims to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms, and mis/disinformation by fostering critical and creative user practices and alternative paradigms for connection.
Among her many publications, the most relevant for this series is
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2021. Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (in particular, the section on “proxies”).
This is the first event of a three-part series of talks and workshops that explore ambiguity and data.

Lorena Jaume-Palasí presents to the DDI
2022-03-16 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Lorena Jaume-Palasí is the founder of The Ethical Tech Society, a non-profit organization researching processes of automation and digitization with regards to their social relevance. Lorena researches the ethics of digitization and automation. In this context, she also deals with questions of legal philosophy. In 2017 she was appointed by the Spanish government to the High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence and Data Policy. She is one of the 100 experts of the Cotec Foundation for her work on automation and ethics. She is a Fellow of the Bucerius Foundation and a member of the Advisory Board on Education and Discourse of the Goethe Institute. Lorena has testified before the European Parliament and the European Commission on Artificial Intelligence and Ethics on several occasions. She additionally heads the secretariat of the German National Section of the IGF as well as projects on Internet Governance in Asia and Africa. Lorena is regularly consulted by international organizations, associations and governments. She has co-authored and edited various publications on internet governance and regularly writes on data protection, privacy and publicity, public goods and discrimination. In 2018 she was awarded the Theodor Heuss Medal for “her contribution to a differentiated view of algorithms and their mechanisms” for AlgorithmWatch initiative.

Discriminating Data: Wendy Chun in dialogue with Yuk Hui
2022-03-10 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Book Conversation: Discriminating Data by Wendy Chun
In dialogue with Yuk Hui
Thu 10 March 2022, 5pm PST / Fri 11 March 2022, 9am HKT
Online Event: Register to join via Zoom
Facebook Event: https://fb.me/e/304BhrtRH
In this event, Wendy Chun will discuss her latest book Discriminating Data (2021, MIT Press) in conversation with Yuk Hui.
In Discriminating Data, Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.
Chun, who has a background in systems design engineering as well as media studies and cultural theory, explains that although machine learning algorithms may not officially include race as a category, they embed whiteness as a default. Facial recognition technology, for example, relies on the faces of Hollywood celebrities and university undergraduates—groups not famous for their diversity. Homophily emerged as a concept to describe white U.S. resident attitudes to living in biracial yet segregated public housing. Predictive policing technology deploys models trained on studies of predominantly underserved neighbourhoods. Trained on selected and often discriminatory or dirty data, these algorithms are only validated if they mirror this data.
How can we release ourselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data? Chun calls for alternative algorithms, defaults, and interdisciplinary coalitions in order to desegregate networks and foster a more democratic big data.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication, and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data (2021, MIT Press), and co-author of Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota + Meson Press 2019). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and where she’s currently a Visiting Professor.

Jonathan Beller presents to the DDI
2022-03-09 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Jonathan Beller is a Professor of Humanities & Media Studies at the Pratt Institute.
One of the foremost theorists of the visual turn and the attention economy; works on the history of cinema and the way in which the screen-image has altered all aspects of social life; books and edited volumes include: The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World-Media System, and Feminist Media Theory (a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online); serves on the Editorial Collective of the internationally recognized journal Social Text.

Yuan Stevens presents to the DDI
2022-03-02 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Markets, Architectures, Norms, or Law? Regulating Automated Face Recognition in Canada
Yuan (“You-anne”) Stevens is a legal and policy expert focused on information integrity, data protection and human rights. She works towards a world where powerful actors—and the systems they build—are held accountable to the public, especially when it comes to equality-seeking communities. She brings years of international experience to her work, having examined the impacts of technology on marginalized populations in Canada, the US, and Germany. Yuan is a collaborator at the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University and research fellow at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at uOttawa. She previously worked at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society during her studies in joint degree in civil and common law at McGill University.
