Digital Democracies Institute

Susan Schuppli presents to the DDI
2022-02-02 12:30 - 13:30 UTC | Online
Susan Schuppli, Goldsmiths University of London, is an artist-researcher and writer. She is currently Director & Reader of the Centre for Research Architecture. Through investigative processes that involve an engagement with scientific and technical modes of inquiry, her work aims to open up new conceptual pathways into the material strata of our world.
While many projects have examined media artefacts—photographs, film, video, and audio transmissions—that have emerged out of sites of contemporary conflict and state violence, current work explores the ways in which toxic ecologies from nuclear accidents and oil spills to the dark snow of the arctic are producing an “extreme image” archive of material wrongs. Creative projects have been exhibited throughout Europe as well as in Canada, Asia and the US.
She has published widely within the context of media and politics and am author of the forthcoming book, Material Witness (MIT Press), which is also the subject of an experimental documentary.
She is an affiliate artist-researcher and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture. Previously she was Senior Research Fellow and Project Co-ordinator of Forensic Architecture. In 2016 she received the ICP Infinity Award for Research and Critical Writing.

Wendy Chun at University of Notre Dame
2022-01-26 16:00 - 18:00
Life in Pixels hosts an ongoing series of transdisciplinary conversations thinking about how we can make sense of, and live with, our computational social condition today. Considering sociocultural, aesthetic, politicoeconomic, environmental, racial, and historical registers of technology together, the series will bring together people who think and do technology beyond disciplinary boundaries. The events are all designed as an ongoing series of conversations between scholars and practitioners in Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Critical Digital Studies, and Literary Cultural Studies.
Life in Pixels is generously sponsored by the Ruth and Paul Idzik College Chair in Digital Scholarship, the Program in History and Philosophy of Science, the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship, and the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame.
Wednesday, January 26th, 4:00 pm PST (zoom book talk)
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication where she leads the Digital Democracies Institute. 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.
Registration required for this event must take place prior to the virtual book talk.

Timnit Gebru presents to the DDI
2022-01-26 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Prior to that she was fired by Google in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace, where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team. She received her PhD from Stanford University, and did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New York City in the FATE (Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in AI) group, where she studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying projects aiming to gain insights from data. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian highschool students, free of charge.
Email ddi_lab@sfu.ca for a Zoom link.

Discriminating Data: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun in Conversation with Sarah Banet-Weiser
2022-01-19 09:30 - 10:30 | Online
In Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, Wendy Hui Kyong 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 neighborhoods. Trained on selected and often discriminatory or dirty data, these algorithms are only validated if they mirror this data.
Join the online event at the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication here.

How to re-claim digital platforms for democracy in Canada
2022-01-18 13:00 - 14:30 | Online
Taming Big Tech: Exploring the Alternatives – How to re-claim digital platforms for democracy in Canada
Wendy Chun in conversation with Andrew Clement.
Wendy Chun is Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University. She leads the Digital Democracies Institute which aims to develop methods for creating effective online counterspeech and alternative models for connection to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation. Join Wendy in conversation with Andrew Clement, host of the CFE Taming Big Tech series and Professor Emeritus at University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. This event is #7 in CFE Series.
Co-sponsors: Edmonton Public Library, Milton Public Library, Thunder Bay Public Library, Toronto Public Library, Vancouver Public Library.
Zoom link to event ryerson.zoom.us/j/91941276567
This is a free event and no registration is required.
Please contact cfe@ryerson.ca if you require accommodation to ensure inclusion in this event.

Sheelagh Carpendale presents to the DDI
2022-01-12 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
Sheelagh Carpendale from Simon Fraser University’s School of Computing Science presents to the DDI. Her research interests include: information visualization, interaction design, large display interaction, visual analytics, personal visualization, human computer interaction, interactive technologies, collaborative interaction, open data, data empowerment.
More details TBD. Email ddi_lab@sfu.ca for Zoom link.

Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein present at DDI
2021-12-15 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
What does feminist data science look like?
What is feminist data science? How is feminist thinking being incorporated into data-driven work? And how are scholars in the humanities and social sciences, in particular, bringing together data science and feminist theory in their research? Drawing from our recent book, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), we will present a set of principles for doing data science that are informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. In order to illustrate these principles, as well as some of the ways that scholars and designers have begun to put them into action, we will discuss a range of recent research projects including several of our own: 1) A participatory design project about feminicide that uses machine learning to reduce the labor of feminist data activists 2) a thematic analysis of a large corpus of nineteenth-century newspapers that reveals the invisible labor of women newspaper editors; and 3) the development of a model of lexical semantic change that, when combined with network analysis, tells a new story about Black activism in the nineteenth-century United States. Taken together, these examples demonstrate how feminist thinking can be operationalized into more ethical, more intentional, and more capacious data practices, in the digital humanities, computational social science, human-computer interaction and beyond.
Catherine D’Ignazio is Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.
Lauren F. Klein is Associate Professor of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University.

Discriminating Data with Wendy Chun and Hito Steyerl
2021-12-15 11:15 - 12:30 | Online
In her book ‘Discriminating Data‘ (2021), Wendy 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. Hito Steyerl and Wendy Chun will discuss how can people release themselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data and consider alternative algorithms, defaults, and interdisciplinary coalitions in order to desegregate networks.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, and leads the Digital Democracies Institute which was launched in 2019. She studied Systems Design Engineering and English Literature and is author of Control and Freedom (2006), Programmed Visions (2011), and Updating to Remain the Same (2016).
Hito Steyerl works as a filmmaker, philosopher, and cultural critic. Her work takes the form of essays, lectures, installations, video, and photography. She is professor for experimental film and video and the co-founder of the Research Center for Proxy Politics at the Berlin University of the Arts.
In English
Organized by: Stanford-Leuphana Winter Academy on Humanities and Media and the Centre for Digital Cultures of Leuphana University Lüneburg in cooperation with the ICI Berlin.
How to attend: Video-meeting with the possibility of audiovisual participation (please register, using this form). Public livestream on this page with the possibility to ask questions via chat (no registration required).

Wendy at DISCO Network
2021-12-06 09:00 - 10:30 | Online
DSI & DISCO Network Book Talk | “Discriminating Data” with Wendy Chun in Conversation with Lisa Nakamura
Register for the event here.
In “Discriminating Data,” Wendy Hui Kyong 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.
DISCO Network is a new network of researchers, artists, technologists, policymakers, and practitioners that challenges digital social and racial inequalities. Racism and ableism are at the heart of digital industries and are taken for granted all through its development, implementation, and user culture.

Dara Kelly presents to the lab
2021-12-01 12:30 - 13:30
Dr Dara Kelly is from the Leq’á:mel First Nation, part of the Stó:lō Coast Salish. She is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Business at the Beedie School of Business, SFU. She teaches in the Executive MBA in Indigenous Business and Leadership program, and on Indigenous business environments within full-time and part-time MBA programs.
Dr Kelly is a recipient of the 2020 Early in Career Award for CUFA BC Distinguished Academic Awards. Her research helps fill in gaps in the literature on the economic concepts and practices of the Coast Salish and other Indigenous nations. She has presented in numerous conferences and public spaces in an effort to challenge conventional economical practices and inform positive change by drawing on knowledge of Indigenous economics. She is Co-Chair of the Indigenous Caucus at the Academy of Management and serves on the board of the Association for Economic Research of Indigenous Peoples.
She conducts research using research methodology emerging from Coast Salish philosophy, protocols and worldview. A paper stemming from her thesis won the Best Paper in Sustainability Award at the Sustainability, Ethics and Entrepreneurship (SEE) Conference in Puerto Rico in February 2017.

Wendy at McGill's Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy
2021-11-30 09:00 - 10:00
Join Centre for Media, Technology & Democracy Research Director, Sonja Solomun for a discussion with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun about her newly published book Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (MIT Press). Register for the event here.

Wendy at Infoscape Research Lab
2021-11-19 10:00 - 12:00 | By zoom
Please join us for a book launch and talk for Discriminating Data (MIT Press) by Wendy Chun (Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Simon Fraser University). Respondent: Ganaele Langlois (York University). Register here to attend.
In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong 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.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media and Professor of Communication and Director of the SFU Digital Democracies Institute. She is the author of Control and Freedom, Programmed Visions, and Updating to Remain the Same, all published by the MIT Press.
A Zoom link will be sent to registered participants the morning of the event.

Talk at UConn Humanities Institute
2021-11-18 10:00 - 11:30
Wendy is giving a talk at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute on her new book, Discriminating Data. The talk would be part of their Digital Humanities & Media Studies initiative’s speaker series.
More details tbd.

Karrmen Crey presents to the lab
2021-11-17 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Karrmen Crey is Sto:lo and a member of the Cheam Band. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, where her research examines the rise of Indigenous media in Canada, and the institutions of media culture that Indigenous media practitioners have historically engaged and navigated to produce their work. Her current research examines Indigenous film festivals and Indigenous digital media, particularly Indigenous virtual reality and augmented reality.

Wendy at SFU School of Communication Book and Speaker Series
2021-11-05 10:00 - 11:30 | Online
The SFU School of Communication’s Book and Speaker Series is a space in which the School engages with recently published books by faculty and other members of the community. Experience an engaging conversation with the author about our featured publication of the month. Our goal is to encourage fluid conversations between faculty and students and to celebrate the achievements of our scholarly community, think critically, pose questions and search for new avenues for research and activism.
Wendy Chun (SFU School of Communication) and Alex Barnett (Flatiron Institute, Simons Foundation) will be in conversation with Mercedes Bunz (King’s College London). The new book Discriminating Data Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, 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.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/the-school-of-communication-book-speaker-series-tickets-200368636987

Wendy is a panelist as part of the exhibition »BarabásiLab. Hidden Patterns« at ZKM
2021-11-04 10:00 - 12:00 | Online
Details tbd

Alissa Antle presents to the lab
2021-11-03 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Alissa Antle is an innovator and scholar, whose research pushes the boundaries of computation to augment the ways we think and learn. As a designer and builder of interactive technologies, her goal is to explore the ways in which these innovations can improve, augment, and support children’s cognitive and emotional development. Her interactive systems have been deployed to facilitate collaborative learning about aboriginal heritage, sustainability and social justice; improve learning outcomes for dyslexic children; and teach emotion-regulation to disadvantaged children. In 2015, Alissa was one of 48 scholars inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, acknowledging her as one of Canada’s intellectual leaders.

To see a descriptions of complete and current research projects, please view Alissa Antle’s research site.

Laura Marks presents to the lab
2021-10-27 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Laura Marks works on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus, and on small-footprint media. Her most recent books are Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT, 2015) and Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT, 2010). She programs experimental media for venues around the world. As Grant Strate University Professor, she teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, on unceded Coast Salish territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) nations.

Wendy at Gray Area Festival 2021: Worlding Protocol
2021-10-23 14:00 - 14:40 | Online
About the Gray Area Festival 2021: Join us for our annual survey of culture through the lens of creative practice with artist presentations, conversations, workshops, and an exhibition — now freely accessible online around the world.
How do we negotiate the balance between our individual freedom and communal dependencies; and what practical reality can we build together?
As we take stock from within a still uncontained global pandemic, it is clear that the entangled web of ecological, economic, and social crises we face demands planetary scale cooperation. Even with the promise of new technologies enabling real-time simulation, distributed financial systems, and geoengineering, exclusionary and extractive power structures persist — rendering purely technical solutions ineffective. Anything is possible, yet nothing seems to change.
For our 7th edition, Gray Area Festival presents Worlding Protocol — a survey of interdisciplinary creators drawing upon indigenous knowledge, transhumanist philosophies, regenerative ecologies, and autonomous organizations to imagine new relational ontologies beyond utopian and fatalist worldviews.
Register here.

Iginio Gagliardone presents to the lab
2021-10-20 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
Iginio Gagliardone is Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and Associate Research Fellow in New Media and Human Rights in the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP), University of Oxford. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has been living between Italy, Ethiopia, the UK, and South Africa, researching the relationship between new media, political change, and human development, and exploring the emergence of distinctive models of the information society in the Global South. His most recent publications include “China, Africa, and the future of the Internet” (ZED), “The Politics of Technology in Africa” (Cambridge University Press), and “World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development” (UNESCO). His study “Countering Online Hate Speech”, supported by UNESCO, has rapidly become one of the most cited publications in the field, highlighting the need to develop bottom-up and contextually informed responses to the emergence of online hatred.

Wendy gives Keynote at Critical Borders Conference, Cambridge
2021-10-19 08:00 - 09:30
Wendy will be giving the keynote address at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies ‘Critical Borders: Radical (Re)visions of AI’ Conference.
The aim of this conference is to critically interrogate issues of bordering in artificial intelligence (AI). This conference examines both how AI operates at material borders, including national and bodily borders, and how AI produces or transgresses imagined, theoretical and ideological borders, such as categories of race, gender, age and class. Compelled by Gayatri Spivak’s insistence that we attend to borders (Spivak 2016), taking into account when border crossings are a violation and when they are pleasurable, we ask: what kinds of border-crossing are induced by AI, and what kinds are prohibited? Which borders does AI reinforce, and which borders does it render obsolete? We aim to explore the tension between the possibilities of transgressing boundaries, especially in the context of binary categorisation, and the risks of equating boundary subversion with emancipatory political practices. In particular, we are interested in scholarship that examines how AI’s transgression of boundaries can unintentionally entrench, rather than challenge, gendered and racialised norms.

Wendy at Arebyte Gallery
2021-10-14 00:00 | Online
Wendy will be taking part in a panel discussion based on visual artist Ben Grosser’s show Software For Less, which you can see more about here.
The event will aim to discuss software as culture, the politics of interface, and the power (im)balance between user and corporation within today’s digital technologies and social media platforms.
More details to be added once confirmed.

Zack McCune presents to the lab
2021-10-13 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
Zack McCune presents ‘Conflict, Consensus, and Creativity: Wikipedia at 20’.
Zack McCune is Director of Brand at the Wikimedia Foundation. He draws on a background in sociology and creative marketing. As a Master’s student at the University of Cambridge, he authored the first academic study of Instagram. McCune directed social media for MasterCard and Mountain Dew before returning to his roots in ‘free culture.’ Today he leads the Brand Studio at Wikipedia, a team of 9 creative staff and dozens of filmmakers, artists, and design agencies to inspire global participation in open knowledge.

Global Disinformation Index - Public Launch of Report & Results for Canada
2021-10-12 10:00 - 11:30 | Online
1-2.30pm EST / 10-11.30am PST
Register here for the launch event for this highly anticipated event. News websites have financial incentives to spread disinformation, in order to increase their online traffic and, ultimately, their advertising revenue. Meanwhile, the dissemination of disinformation has disruptive and impactful consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a recent example. By disrupting society’s shared sense of accepted facts, these narratives undermine public health, safety and government responses.
To combat ad-funded disinformation, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) deploys its assessment framework to rate news domains’ risk of disinforming their readers. These independent, trusted and neutral ratings are used by advertisers, ad tech companies and platforms, to redirect their online ad spending in line with their brand safety and disinformation risk mitigation strategies.
GDI defines disinformation as ‘adversarial narratives that create real world harm’, and the GDI risk rating provides information about a range of indicators related to the risk that a given news website will disinform its readers by spreading these adversarial narratives. These indicators are grouped under the index’s Content and Operations pillars, which respectively measure the quality and reliability of a site’s content and its operational and editorial integrity.
The launch event will see panelists discuss the findings of the research, and discuss the impacts of those findings, before taking Q&A from the audience:

Nobel Conference 2021
2021-10-05 08:00 - 2021-10-06 17:00
Nobel Conference 57 – Big Data REvolution
Wendy presents at the Nobel Conference on Beyond Verification. How do we reduce the spread of misinformation and disinformation? What makes any piece of info true? Fact checking alone is inadequate to such a task. Wendy Chun is working with a deeply multidisciplinary team of researchers that includes everyone from data analysts to dramaturgs, to develop a model that can answer that question, developing new ways to displace fake news. The project, called “Beyond Verification,” is part of the Digital Democracies Institute.

Wendy at Westminster Town Hall
2021-10-04 10:00 - 11:30 | Online
Democracy’s Digital Dilemma
Dr. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s upcoming book, Discriminating Data, delves into how social media platforms are designed to make us hate one another across political, racial, and class lines. She will speak at the Forum on how the internet and algorithms have undermined democracy and how they could be used in the pursuit of racial and social justice.
This forum will be presented in a virtual hybrid format. Dr. Chun will not be physically at Westminster. Instead, she will speak live from Canada which we will project in the Westminster Sanctuary. She will take questions from the live Westminster audience. This will all be available to watch on the Forum’s website and Facebook.

Anti-Asian Sentiment Before Covid-19
2021-09-29 12:00 - 13:30 | Online
Join Grace Kyungwon Hong (UCLA), Lisa Nakamura (UMich) and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (SFU) for a discussion on anti-Asian sentiment before Covid-19. As many media accounts have recounted, Stop AAPI Hate reported that anti-Asian violence soared during the first wave of the 2020 COVID19 pandemic. From mid-March 2020 to the end of February 2021, 3,795 “Anti-Asian hate incidents” were reported to Stop AAPI Hate. North of the U.S. border in the Canadian province of British Columbia, “Anti-Asian hate crimes” reportedly increased by 717% in 2020. Focusing on recent developments in social media, this event will examine the longer historical context of anti-Asian violence, interrogating why and how sentiments such as “hate” and acts of violence committed by individuals have become the primary framework for understanding Asian racialization. Within this context, Wendy Chun will briefly outline the historical ties between sentiment analysis, homophily, discrimination and anti-Asian violence, Grace Hong will speak about “Affect, Sentiment, and the Human: Love and Hate in a Time of Anti-Asian Violence”, and Lisa Nakamura will discuss “Women of Color and the Digital Labor of Repair”.
This event is moderated by Kirsten McAllister (SFU), and respondents are Siyuan Yin (SFU), and Sun-ha Hong (SFU).

For registration, please click here, and we will then send out zoom link details 24 hours before the event.

Grace Kyungwon Hong is Professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA; she also holds a joint appointment in Gender Studies. Her research focuses on women of color feminism as an epistemological critique of and alternative to Western liberal humanism and capital, particularly as they manifest as contemporary neoliberalism.
She is the author of Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) which won the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies book prize, and The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Cultures of Immigrant Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). She is the co-editor (with Roderick Ferguson) of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University Press, 2011). She is the co-editor (also with Roderick Ferguson) of the Difference Incorporated book series at the University of Minnesota Press.
Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and she has been writing about digital media, race, and gender since 1994. She is author of Racist Zoombombing, with Hanah Stiverson and Kyle Lindsey (Routledge 2021); Technoprecarious, written as part of Precarity Lab Collective (MIT and Goldsmiths Press 2020); Race After the Internet, co-edited with Peter Chow-White (Routledge 2011); and Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, (University of Minnesota 2007). She has written books and articles on digital bodies, race, and gender in online environments, on toxicity in video game culture, and the many reasons that Internet research needs ethnic and gender studies.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. 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 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. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and she has held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She has been a Visiting Professor at AI Now at NYU, the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany), and a Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is an Associate.

Kirsten E. McAllister is a Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her research and teaching focus on political violence, racism, migration and diaspora and her approach is interdisciplinary. She has conducted community-based research projects in national and transnational contexts.
Siyuan Yin is an assistant professor of Migration and Communication in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She engages in interdisciplinary scholarship spanning the fields of cultural and media studies, feminist studies, social movements, and political economy. Siyuan’s current project examines mediated activism and cultural production among women and migrant workers in the local and transnational contexts.
Sun-ha Hong is an Assistant Professor at SFU. His research focuses on how the way we think and talk about technologies shape their human and social implications. He is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project entitled Personal Truthmaking. It traces the cultural and historical resonances between two different ways in which the idea of ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ are being weaponised today: (1) in the politically polarised, platform-amplified practice of ‘fact signalling’ that demonises the other side as irrational and antimodern; (2) constantly recycled technological futures that encourage us to dream of fully automated luxury objectivity through the power of algorithms and AI.

Simon Fraser University respectfully acknowledges the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie), kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen peoples on whose unceded traditional territories our three campuses reside. While this is a virtual discussion, the servers that make this event possible are physical and also reside on unceded traditional territories.

Wendy gives President's Lecture at SFU
2021-09-28 18:30 - 19:30
In this President’s Faculty Lecture, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (SFU’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media) will discuss themes from her forthcoming book Discriminating Data about how big data and predictive machine learning currently encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage (MIT Press).
The lecture is free with registration, which you can sign up for here.
This lecture will explore how polarization is a goal—not an error—within current practices of predictive data analysis and machine learning for these methods 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. The predictive programs thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.

Giulio Dalla Riva presents to the lab
2021-09-22 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
“Prolegomena to Antifascist Data Science: theory, praxis, but mostly pizza.”
In this talk Giulio is going to try and sketch how it may be possible to do data science in a way that is rooted in antifascist thinking and practice. He will try to do that by reflecting upon two intense years of research and activism around the online spreading of toxic ideologies. Both the research and activism are situated in Ōtautahi Christchurch, yet he has personal roots in the mountains of Veneto, in Italy, and date from long before. The sketch will be incomplete, idiosyncratic, and overall unsatisfying. He will offer more questions than answers. He will ask for help more than once.
Data scientist Giulio Dalla Riva explores and tries to make sense of what happens in complex, dynamical networks. He is interested in ecological networks and the evolutionary processes that modify them in time; in particular he develops mathematical and statistical tools to study the relationship between ecological biodiversity and evolutionary diversity.
He is also interested in Social Networks, especially online. He tries to understand what makes them work in the way they work.

Wendy Gives the 12th Annual Attallah Lecture at Carleton University
2021-09-16 15:30 - 17:30 | Online
Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication invites you to the 12th annual Attallah Lecture, on Thursday, September 16th at 3:30pm PST. This year’s speaker is Dr. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University.
Dr. Chun’s research draws from the humanities and social 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. Dr. Chun’s lecture, Discriminating Data, will explore how polarization is a goal – not an error – within current practices of predictive data analysis and machine learning. This is an urgent and timely topic, and the lecture promises to be thought provoking.
The 2021 Attallah Lecture is open to the public and will be held online via Zoom this year. We ask that you please register in advance.
