Wendy at SFU School of Communication Book and Speaker Series

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