Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
... This basic gesture, to move beyond the biomedical framing and ever outward to gain a fuller understanding of the factors in health and disease, is consistent with long-standing principles in medical humanities, and is needed to help us better understand complex syndromes such as long COVID, and specific vulnerabilities to future EIDs. The term 'exposome' also usefully signals that our daily exposures to structures of health datafication have consequences for our wellbeing, it gestures towards critical research on environmental racism and the consequences of unequal exposure to surveillance and harm, and highlights that exposures to data pollution are so ubiquitous that they should be considered as determinants of health (Browne 2015). By integrating the concept of the digital health exposome into medical humanities, researchers can further expand the domains of 'health' considered by the field, engaging with the ecological and the Indigenous, 'One Health', as well as 'more-than-human digital health' (Lewis et al. 2018;Lupton 2022;McClymont et al. 2022). ...
This essay argues that emerging forms of translational work in the field of medical humanities offer valuable methods for engaging with communities outside of academic settings. The first section of the essay provides a synthetic overview of definitions and critical engagements with the concept of ‘translation’ in the context of medical humanities, a field that, in the wake of the COVID pandemic, can serve as an exemplar for other fields of the humanities. The second section explains the ‘data/narrative’ divide in medicine and health to demonstrate the need for new translational methodologies that can address this nexus of concern, particularly in collaboration with constituencies outside of academic settings. The third section maps out the sites and infrastructures where digital medical humanities is poised to make significant translational interventions. The final section of the essay considers data privacy and health ecology as conceptual frameworks that are necessary for bridging the data/narrative divide. Examples are drawn from the ‘Translational Humanities for Public Health’ website, which aggregates projects worldwide to demonstrate these emerging methodologies.
... As some have argued, the prison-industrial complex has its prehistory in the slave ship, thus giving us an alternative genealogy of punitive power that, unlike Foucault's, no longer brackets the colonial history of Euromodern surveillance and disciplinary power and connects that disciplinary power to the colonial history of racial capitalism (Rodríguez 2007;Gilmore 2007;Browne 2015). I here suggest that if we can trace the panopticon of the prison-indus-trial complex back to the slave ship, we should also trace the dispersed, mobile, and adaptable invisible penal archipelago, in which a plurality of actors can inflict enforced disappearances with total impunity, back to the historical genocide of indigenous and Black peoples. ...
In this article, I offer a preposterous history of Antigone’s adaptations that contrasts Sophocles’ classical tragedy with Jean Anouilh’s Euromodern melodrama and Ariel Dorfman, Patricia Nieto, and Sara Uribe’s postmodern Antigones in Latin America. I offer that history to understand a significant change in sovereign power when the state takes hold of the socially dead rather than living body. Here, I argue, we need to move from the theory of biopolitics to the theory of necropolitics to further explain the role that slavery and its aftermath play in the radicalization of state violence under contemporary neoliberalism. I thus contrast the ancient violence inflicted in the publicly desecrated corpse of Polyneices with the Euromodern violence that misidentifies Polyneices and the postmodern violence that instead disappears not one but many Polyneices. This explains why enforced disappearances figure so prominently among postmodern Latin American Antigones, a form of violence that I trace back to the settler colonial logic of elimination whereby settlers claim nativity to the territory by means of erasing its prior inhabitants.
... in Upstart's model. Similar models have raised concern amongst consumer advocates that a variable like education may proxy for legally protected categories such as race or gender (SPBC, 2020) Given the social significance of education, it is not hard to envision how a proxy derived from education could enable what Simone Browne (2010;2015) calls "digital epidermalization" in which the bio-spatial dimensions of race become "rendered as digitalized code" (2015: 109) and ...
Alternative credit scores have become an increasingly important tool for lenders to assess risk and authorize investment in consumer debt. Using alternative data and processing techniques that leverage machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), these models are designed to bypass existing barriers to risk-based pricing, which is the idea that financial institutions offer different interest rates to consumers based on their likelihood of default. Through an algorithmic audit of one lender's (Upstart) credit scoring model, I find that alternative data, particularly whether an applicant has a bachelor's degree, strongly impacted loan outcomes. This raises important equity concerns about overhauling lending criteria via opaque models that restructure the logic of risk assessment. In following the logic of risk assessment generated by Upstart's model, I also audit three fintech-bank partnerships and examine the balance sheets of banks providing capital via Upstart's platform. This is done to demonstrate rising capital allocation to these types of loans at banks engaged in fintech-bank partnerships, in one case rising from 0.14% to 15.6% of the banks’ balance sheet over three years. My analysis shows that alternative credit scoring systems function as a key piece of calculative infrastructure, which allows some institutions to bypass barriers to risk-based pricing, and becomes an infrastructural site for tech startups to partner with financial institutions seeking out new sources of revenue.
The practice of credit scoring is ubiquitous in today’s economy. Three-digit credit scores or their underlying data are applied well beyond the lending decisions for which they were originally designed and are routinely used in the contexts of employment, housing, and more. Drawing on carceral logics and abolitionist politics, we develop a framework to critically interpret the practice of credit scoring. We theorize credit scoring as a carceral practice and technology in the afterlife of slavery that expands anti-black discipline and punishment. We suggest that credit scoring is incapable of objectively assessing risk and that claims of objectivity legitimize an exploitative system of evaluation that mediates people’s access to the means of survival. Moreover, credit scoring expands the scope of how people are conscripted into consumerism and disciplined and punished under racial capitalism. We review research literature on credit scoring as a step toward applying this framework and demonstrate how research provides an alibi for anti-black racism embedded in contemporary credit scores. We conclude with a call to abolish the practice of credit scoring and imagine new, abolitionist alternatives for people to live safely and with dignity.
This chapter explores the digital afterlife of difficult, violent death and is empirically informed by the 2019 Christchurch massacre. The live stream of the mosque attack not only documented real and violent death, but it also showed death and dying through the vantage point of the killer: this contributed to a particular digital afterlife of the victims where the perpetrator’s gaze contributes to and remains in the digital artefact’s affective layers. Adopting a data-centric perspective, we conceptualise digital afterlife (Harju and Huhtamäki 2021) as having two co-constitutive dimensions, data afterlife (the socio-technical dimension) and data as afterlife (the affective dimension). With focus on post-death data, we examine the ways in which materiality of data allows affective relatedness while also having a fragile, volatile element to it, and how this shapes the memory and remembering of the dead. Mediated, violent death represents difficult death from multiple perspectives: the role of data in the construction of digital afterlife and difficult memory; the socio-political dimension and hierarchies of grievability of public death; mediated remembering, affective relatedness but also affect alienation in digital spaces where violent death resonates with diverse audiences, some standing with the victims, some with the perpetrators.
This chapter takes as its point of departure the fact that trans and non-binary people face obstacles to mobility and migration, making experiences of border-crossing challenging or even impossible. While recent legal interventions that recognise non-binary gender have attempted to rectify some of the problems faced by trans and non-binary individuals, biometric security technologies like body scanners create further challenges for gender-diverse communities when crossing international borders. This chapter draws upon interviews conducted with trans and non-binary respondents to evaluate experiences with border-crossing to help understand this dynamic whereby governance strategies become more inclusive, while bureaucratic structures and security technologies pose new obstacles. Amongst this increasingly securitised landscape, artistic forms of resistance can offer a means of subverting discriminatory policing and surveillance practices by posing alternative visualisations that reveal and challenge their supposed objectivity. The concluding section turns to such practices of creative resistance by artists like Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Zach Blas, and Ma Liuming to offer illustrative examples of how (gendered) recognition can be contested and reconceived through art.
Technology is playing an increasingly important role in policing and the governance of policing. Already at the end of the twentieth century, digitalisation was seen as a tool to enhance transparency and accountability in a cost-efficient way. Police stops imply police officers on the move and, therefore, mobile technologies may be involved in governance. These technologies are raising new issues for both the police and the public. The main goal of the chapter is to provide a comprehensive comparative analysis of the state of the art and the possibilities and pitfalls of the use of police accountability technologies focussing on the role of body worn cameras within the governance of police stops in Belgium, Croatia, England, Germany and Scotland.
The introduction to this volume offers a critical survey of the contemporary proliferation of in/visible borders in the United States, arguing for a new interpretation of state boundaries beyond the opposition inside/outside. It takes critical definitions of the segmented, liminal, and biopolitical border as a point of departure for exploring the multiple dimensions of the concept within the US cultural map and situates the contributors’ reflections on diverse literary and filmic works against the backdrop of changing ideas about ethnicity, citizenship, and race. Tracing cultural manifestations that envision the US as an ambiguous site of intercultural negotiation, this introduction addresses how the discourse producing ethnic discrimination has historically coalesced with those around belonging, labor, and freedom to flesh out a new border dialectic beyond the concept’s normative frame. By questioning the implicit exclusionary rhetoric of the border, this introduction builds a critical foundation for the volume’s examinations, underlining the existing interdependence between center and margins and the oscillating meaning that the threshold generates.
The neoliberal transformation of higher education in the UK and an intertwined focus on the productive efficiency and prestige value of universities has led to an epidemic of overwork and precarity among academics. Many are found to be struggling with lofty performance expectations and an insistence that all dimensions of their work consistently achieve positional gains despite ferocious competition and the omnipresent threat of failure. Working under the current audit culture present across education, academics are thus found to overwork or commit to accelerated labour as pre-emptive compensation for the habitual inclemency of peer-review and vagaries of student evaluation, in accommodating the copiousness of ‘invisible’ tasks, and in eluding the myriad crevasses of their precarious labour. The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools and more specifically, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, offers potential relief for academics and a means to offset intensive demands and discover more of a work-based equilibrium. Through a recent survey of n = 284 UK academics and their use of GAI, we discover, however, that the digitalisation of higher education through GAI tools no more alleviates than extends the dysfunctions of neoliberal logic and deepens academia’s malaise. Notwithstanding, we argue that the proliferating use of GAI tools by academics may be harnessed as a source of positive disruption to the industrialisation of their labour and catalyst of (re)engagement with scholarly craftsmanship.
p>Formal spatial modeling and analytical approaches to maroon settlement, fugitivity, and warfare in the colonial-era Caribbean have tended to mine historical cartographic sources instrumentally to analyze the distributions and simulate processes driving marronage in St. Croix (Dunnavant 2021b; Ejstrud 2008; Norton and Espenshade, 2007). Through close-in analysis, we compare two Danish maps of St. Croix produced in 1750 and 1799 in relation to modern cartographic sources, to explore how cartographic forms and cartesian conventions (attempt to) elide blind spots in the colonial gaze. By modeling possible subject-oriented maroon movement on georeferenced colonial maps and contemporary LiDAR, we demonstrate how GIS can recover anti-colonial agency. Additionally, the practice of georeferencing itself is a critical site of analysis, revealing distortions suggestive of social and environmental conditions that limited colonial cartographers’ ability to map certain wilderness and contested landscapes that lay outside of their control.</p
p>This article reads several works of African American literature that depict the urban roofscape as a site of contemporary fugitive praxis, made in and against the enclosures of 20th century urban space. The forms of freedom rehearsed on the roof are intersecting, overlapping and, at times, contradictory. Ultimately, I argue that the roofscape offers an analytic object through which to explore the thorny questions of property, gender, enclosure, and mobility—questions that enrich and complicate the study of fugitive geographies and their use as models for escaping and living outside of the violent enclosures of gendered racial capitalism. The multivalence of the rooftop provides an opportunity to dwell with the complex questions of fugitive method: What forms do geographies of fugitivity take? Who do they limit or enable? And under what conditions? How do fugitive geographies both sustain and break from the social, political, and economic relations from which their producers flee?</p
After decades of turbulence and acute crises in recent years, how can we build a better future for Higher Education?
Thoughtfully edited by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin, this rich and diverse collection by academics and professionals from across 17 countries and many disciplines offers a variety of answers to this question. It addresses the need to set new values for universities, trapped today in narratives dominated by financial incentives and performance indicators, and examines those “wicked” problems which need multiple solutions, resolutions, experiments, and imaginaries.
This mix of new and well-established voices provides hopeful new ways of thinking about Higher Education across a range of contexts, and how to concretise initiatives to deal with local and global challenges. In an unusual and refreshing way, the contributors provide insights about resilience tactics and collective actions across different levels of higher education using an array of styles and formats including essays, poetry, and speculative fiction.
With its interdisciplinary appeal, this book presents itself as a provocative and inspiring resource for universities, students, and scholars. Higher Education for Good courageously offers critique, hope, and purpose for the practice and the trajectory of Higher Education.
This article starts from the observation that practices of ‘algorithmic governmentality’ or ‘governance by data’ are reconfiguring modes of social relationality and collectivity. By building, first, on an empirical exploration of digital bordering practices, we qualify these emergent algorithmic categories as ‘clusters’—pulsing patterns distilled from disaggregated data. As fluid, modular, and ever-emergent forms of association, these ‘clusters’ defy stable expressions of collective representation and social recognition. Second, we observe that this empirical analysis resonates with accounts that diagnosed algorithmic governance as a threat to legal subjectivity and socio-political cohesion, and called for a reinvigoration of democratic values and their re-alignment with new ‘infrastructural publics’. Against this backdrop, however, we explore alternatives avenues of legal imagination by pushing in a different (somewhat opposite) direction. Against the re-inscription of liberal categories, we linger with the promise and prospect of illegibility as resistance against the foreclosure of future potentialities in algorithmic forms of subject-making. Instead of falling back on the projection of autonomous human agency and liberal subjectivity to counteract the ‘cluster’, we imagine emancipatory expressions of resistance that are enacted through fugitive, opaque, and experimental collectivities.
We present the first exploration of individuals’ expectations for smart streetlights and associated urban data collection practices, with a focus on privacy implications. We conducted an anonymous online survey with 598 participants from across Canada. We found that participants were more accepting of data collection and usage when these were benefiting the community, and when data collection occurred through non-intrusive, privacy-preserving sensors. We also uncovered that participants lacked a coherent understanding of what constitutes a ‘smart’ streetlight. While unsurprising, these inaccurate mental models can unknowingly expose individuals to privacy risks. Our findings suggest that surveys about smart cities in general are not necessarily applicable to individual technologies such as smart streetlights because these surveys fail to account for the context in which residents encounter streetlights and the disparate impact smart streetlights can have on diverse populations. We highlight the need for cities in collaboration with smart streetlight creators to establish an iterative, resident-centered design approach and emphasize the importance for HCI designers to consider the social, cultural, and political contexts in which smart streetlights are introduced.KeywordsSmart StreetlightsSensing TechnologiesResident PerceptionSurvey
Purpose
Typically understood in the United States to be a “protective” institution, the family is often a site of isolation and rejection for many transgender (trans), gender nonconforming, and nonbinary (TGNCNB) people. This paper introduces the concept of the “bad parents narrative” to describe the connections between isolation and rejection of TGNCNB people as a form of gender-policing, particularly of TGNCNB young people of color, as a structural arrangement that goes beyond simple “bad parents”.
Method
Through a methodological framework coined Critical Ethnographic Criminology, which includes people-based methods of interviews, this article includes evidence from interviews with eight TGNCNB people living across the United States to express how their experiences with gender policing from family shows more of a nuanced understanding of policing from family than simply “bad parents”.
Results
Findings from Black TGNCNB peoples’ experiences with gender-policing from family showed a noticeable understanding of their potential vulnerability to law enforcement and societal violence.
Conclusions
This article encourages research in the areas of queer family policing to divert from the “bad parents narrative”, because of its racialized suggestions and Black families particular understandings of their proximities to the carceral state. This article encourages more focus on the family as an institutional regime of power, and how that institution is permeated with policing and surveillance logics that are influenced by policing and law enforcement institutions. Ultimately, this paper seeks to contribute to criminological definitions of policing and surveillance, not only related to the experiences of TGNCNB people, but also for gendered and racialized people more broadly.
Las investigaciones sobre la implantación de algoritmos en el sector del reparto de comida a domicilio se han centrado en la asignación de pedidos y en cómo estas decisiones automatizadas afectan a las condiciones laborales. Sin embargo, las compañías de este sector también han implementado cálculos algorítmicos para otras funciones, principalmente para lidiar con el llamado «mercado negro de cuentas de reparto». Se han implementado sistemas de reconocimiento facial para perseguir «fraudes de identidad», buscando aquellos repartidores trabajando bajo aplicaciones de otros. Este artículo, basado en una etnografía multi situada en diferentes ciudades españolas, aborda el creciente fenómeno de subarrendar y alquilar cuentas personales, una práctica extendida entre repartidores migrantes con distintas situaciones administrativas. Concretamente, abordamos el contexto de emergencia, el funcionamiento interno, y los efectos en red de los sistemas de reconocimiento facial implementados por Glovo y Uber Eats, dos compañías clave del sector. Este análisis preliminar reflexiona sobre el paradójico desarrollo del eficiente sistema algorítmico de identificación biométrica en el sector de reparto de comida en España.
Language ideologies are a powerful way of perpetuating inequalities, as peripheralized speakers who have internalized the lack of legitimacy attributed to them often end up reproducing censure rather than resisting it. Foregrounding the affective dimension, this paper explores the role of shame as a fulcrum articulating the individual with the collective in the perpetuation of linguistic stigma. To do so, it presents excerpts of autobiographies written by university students that reveal the impact of language idealization on the subjectivities of those who, by deviating from the norm, forge subaltern identities. As victims of language shaming are often unaware that their suffering is due to ideologies, but instead blame it on personal failings, rather than challenge the linguistic vigilantes who harass them, they silence themselves. The paper discusses how the inherently social nature of the construction of otherness and stigma is obscured by the individuality of shame and presents an educational intervention with which to scaffold students to overcome language shame.
Citizen is a live crime and safety tracking app in New York City that uses AI to monitor police scanners for incidences that are relevant to “public safety,” whilst also utilizing user‐recorded footage, as users near a crime, fire, or accident are encouraged to “go live” and film unfolding events. Users comment additional information and post expressive emojis as incidences unravel. In sharing information across a digital network, Citizen functions as both a form of social media and a peer‐to‐peer surveillance app. Through this lens, my ethnographic research investigates the impact of the digitization of crime and safety as an everyday experience in increasingly gentrified neighbourhoods in Brooklyn. The question of whether technology is a marker of simultaneous inclusivity and exclusivity speaks to the dialectical nature of digital technology, as producing concurrent “good” and “bad” effects. This article explores the ways that Citizen exemplifies these tensions: The app makes users feel safer but also more anxious; Citizen is a place for community information sharing to both productive and pejorative effects, it is used to both surveil one’s neighbourhood, instilling fear and mistrust, and to sousveil law enforcement and circumnavigate the NYPD at protests, producing accountability and a sense of safety. Through ethnographic examples, this article further navigates the cultural and local specificities of use, the complex positionalities that are mediated by the app and the consequences this has for those who experience social inclusion and exclusion.
Purpose
The development of the Northern VA and the Washington, DC metro area as a key node in the globalizing digital urban system is well established. This essay investigates the growth of that technological geography in the 1990s and 2000s as a part of the planetary epoch of human transformation that some have called the “Plantationocene” (vs. Anthropocene).
Approach
A historical and critical interpretive analysis of race, landscape, and technology policy in the Northern VA area.
Findings
The paper establishes the region’s social attachments to its “bucolic” agrarian landscape, rooted in the US Civil War and vast inequalities of the reimposition of the plantation as an “afterlife of slavery” after Reconstruction’s failure. It then suggests that the conditions of the plantation economy within a kind of digital plantation economy—featuring resource monopolies, extractive forms of exploitation, and monocrop “ecologies”—based on the “Server Farming” (aka, data center) industry through which some 70 % of the world’s Internet traffic flows. It looks at this digital aspect of the Plantationocene as post-Bellum and insurgent, in which the manipulation of history, the accumulation and control of ‘arable’ (digital) land, and the dispossession of social processes under quasi-feudalistic property rights encourage unequal, unsustainable, and often violent cultures and political ecologies.
Practical implications
Researchers considering digital urbanism might use this approach to understand online and offline geographies of the contemporary media industry.
Social implications
It treats the contemporary anti-government and ethno-nationalist movements growing in digital mediation as part of a much longer and unsettled planetary conflict over the plantation system, racialized social inequality, and the abolition of slavery.
Originality/value
While some work on “data colonialism” implicitly connects digital urbanism to the mostly agriculturally-focused work on the Plantationocene, this essay makes the connection explicit, place-based in specific historical-geographical contexts, and focused on the roles of specific political economic actors.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems increasingly purport to deliver knowledge about people and the world. Unfortunately, they also seem to frequently present results that repeat or magnify biased treatment of racial and other vulnerable minorities. This paper proposes that at least some of the problems with AI’s treatment of minorities can be captured by the concept of epistemic injustice. To substantiate this claim, I argue that (1) pretrial detention and physiognomic AI systems commit testimonial injustice because their target variables reflect inaccurate and unjust proxies for what they claim to measure; (2) classification systems, such as facial recognition, commit hermeneutic injustice because their classification taxonomies, almost no matter how they are derived, reflect and perpetuate racial and other stereotypes; and (3) epistemic injustice better explains what is going wrong in these types of situations than does the more common focus on procedural (un)fairness.
As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, their asymmetrical methods of application, and their unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists—and others who rely on data in their work—to ignore. But it is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? These are some of the questions that emerge from a larger project we call data feminism, a way of thinking about data science and its uses that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. In this essay, we introduce data feminism and outline its seven principles.
The increased accessibility of technology is often employed as rationale for data extraction and surveillance. This paper examines critical perspectives on surveillance and educational technologies from Library and Information Science (LIS) literature, as well as those from disability studies that concern technology development more broadly. This research aims to understand how a disability justice framework can interrogate both the overall expansion of surveillance technologies and justifications for increased surveillance that argue that data extraction and analytics lead to increased accessibility for disabled users. As an activist approach toward disability advocacy that underscores the connections between white supremacy, sexism and colonialism as central to ableism, disability justice recognizes surveillance technologies as embedded in systems of power that disproportionately harm people of color, immigrants, transgender people, and gender nonconforming people. Using a disability justice framework, this paper argues against the expansion of surveillance technologies – especially in the name of increasing accessibility.
With their exponentially rising computational power, digital platforms are heralding a new era of hybrid intelligence. There has recently been much enthusiasm and hype that the Metaverse has the potential to unlock hybrid intelligence. This is premised on the idea that the Metaverse represents an applied convergence of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) and Extended Reality (XR) that intersects with urbanism in terms of the distinctive features of platform-mediated everyday life experiences in cities. However, social interaction and its resulting social organization in the Metaverse are mediated and governed by algorithms and thus submitted to—a dream of—complete logical ordering. This raises a plethora of concerns related to the systemic collection and algorithmic processing of users’ personal, brain, and biometric data, i.e., profound societal—and the hardest to predict ethical—implications. Therefore, this study analyzes and synthesizes a large body of scientific literature on the unfolding convergence of AIoT and XR technologies, neurotechnology, and nanobiotechnology in the realm of the Metaverse in order to derive a novel conceptual framework for the Metaverse as an envisioned virtual model of platform urbanism. Further, it examines the key challenges and risks of these converging technologies in relation to the Metaverse and beyond. This study employs thematic analysis and synthesis to cope with multidisciplinary literature. The analysis identifies seven themes: (1) Platformization, (2) platform urbanism, (3) virtual urbanism, (4) XR technologies, (5) AIoT technologies, (6) neurotechnology, and (7) nanobiotechnology. The synthesized evidence reveals that, while neurotechnology and nanobiotechnology have numerous benefits and promising prospects, they raise contentions and controversies stemming from their potential use to inflict harm to human users—if left unchecked—through the black box of the algorithmic mediation underpinning the Metaverse. The findings serve to steer the Metaverse to contribute to human flourishing and wellbeing by adhering to and upholding ethical principles as well as leveraging its underlying disruptive technologies in meaningful ways. They also aid scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in assessing the pros and cons of these technologies, especially their inevitable ramifications.
In this editorial for the special collection Confronting Discrimination: Phenomenological and Genealogical Perspectives, we discuss the productive aspects and limitations of discrimination as a concept for social criticism. Insofar as a proper understanding of discrimination must take into account both concrete experience and historical conditions, we propose to combine phenomenological and genealogical methodologies. While phenomenological analyses run the risk of individualizing discrimination, genealogical approaches are often suspected to reduce experiences of discrimination to their social-historical conditions. Dovetailing phenomenology and genealogy allows for mutual instruction and may herald a more comprehensive understanding of discrimination. To this end, we revisit formative phenomenological contributions to the study of discriminatory experiences and recall prominent motifs in the genealogical tradition for investigating discriminatory patterns. Finally, we show how the articles in this collection apply and critically reflect upon this proposal.
Racial threat hypothesis contends that growing minority populations produce a threat to social order that results in the weaponization of the criminal justice apparatus. We hypothesize this threat has resulted in the incommensurate surveillance of Black and Brown communities. We define this phenomenon as surveillance load, the disproportionate accumulation or “load” of social control which grows heavier as surveillance technologies and strategies amass. Assessments of these tools are typically conducted in a vacuum without contemplating the collective impact of the larger surveillance infrastructure on Black and Brown communities. We use the application of surveillance technologies in NYC to illustrate surveillance load and argue that unregulated government use of location, biometric, and identity surveillance technologies has exacerbated racial disparities in policing, is amplified by counterterrorism strategies, and outpaced Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Finally, we propose policy recommendations that create system-level controls over surveillance technologies and engage affected communities.
Paul Andell argues that the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a White police officer, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) highlights the current crisis in criminal and social justice. He notes that in the US public demonstrations were met with attempts, by the now defeated President Trump, deploying active duty troops under the 1807 Insurrection Act against the wishes of state and city authorities (Borger 2020). These events and others like them, he observes, have prompted questions across the globe about the role and accountability of state agencies in relation to black and working class communities. Aligned to this, further questions are raised about the kinds of knowledge that might be utilised to guide future policy and practice to improve the community safety of populations ‘at risk’ from ‘over-policing’.
Although national governments made commitment on Sustainable Development Goals in 2016, there is now a prevailing global consensus that cities have a massive role to plan in ensuring that these goals are achieved by 2030. As a result, there has been a concerted effort to encourage cities to take up a leading role in the institutionalization, localization, and implementation of SDGs. Like most global cities, the City of Durban has made commitments to lead the process of institutionalizing and localizing SDGs at local level. However, this commitment is entangled in a number of local challenges that require innovation and collective effort to overcome. At the center of those challenges is the lack of quality, reliable, and integrated city-level data that is critical for monitoring and tracking SDG progress in cities. It is therefore the intention of this chapter to detail how the City of Durban has used a data-driven approach to center institutionalization, localization, and deepen SDG implementation. What this approach is helping the city achieve is fostering cocreation, coproduction, and strong multistakeholder ownership of the SDG process. At the same time, the approach has assisted the city understand the value of building a robust data ecosystem as central in SDG institutionalization and localization. The chapter highlights how the City of Durban has used data-driven approach to adopt a three-layered process of institutionalization, localization, and deepening.
Many popular artificial intelligence (AI) ethics frameworks center the principle of autonomy as necessary in order to mitigate the harms that might result from the use of AI within society. These harms often disproportionately affect the most marginalized within society. In this paper, we argue that the principle of autonomy, as currently formalized in AI ethics, is itself flawed, as it expresses only a mainstream mainly liberal notion of autonomy as rational self-determination, derived from Western traditional philosophy. In particular, we claim that the adherence to such principle, as currently formalized, does not only fail to address many ways in which people’s autonomy can be violated, but also to grasp a broader range of AI-empowered harms profoundly tied to the legacy of colonization, and which particularly affect the already marginalized and most vulnerable on a global scale. To counter such a phenomenon, we advocate for the need of a relational turn in AI ethics, starting from a relational rethinking of the AI ethics principle of autonomy that we propose by drawing on theories on relational autonomy developed both in moral philosophy and Ubuntu ethics.
With reference to the Italian agribusiness sector, this chapter probes the specters of “the plantation” as the (ob)scene of discourses on “modern slavery,” and traces alternative genealogies of the current organization and representation of migrant farm labor. The history of the transatlantic trade and the New-World plantation has a prominent presence in this field of representation. But multiple, geographically and temporally heterogeneous plantation pasts and specters of enslavement haunt contemporary agribusiness districts, the slums and labor camps which punctuate them, and their patterns of labor management, in different and even contradictory ways. “The plantation” and “slavery” as its principle of organization may be evoked in diminishing or oppressive terms that work as a distancing mechanism to occlude subjectivities and struggles. At the same time, redemptive and oppositional conjurings of the New-World plantation emerge from the coinage of the notion of a “Black Mediterranean” as a redemptive parallel to the “Black Atlantic,” and in workers’ myriad references to practices and cultures of marronage first developed in cross-Atlantic exchanges. Yet, other scenes, recursive patterns, localized geographies and buried genealogies are shown to be equally crucial to understand contemporary forms of extraction, containment and racialization, and for truly abolitionist struggles.
In this chapter, we outline our contribution to the study of plantations, building upon a wide and important body of critical literature that has developed on the subject over more than a century of reflections and struggles. Plantations are analyzed according to three main axes: an eco-material dimension that articulates to racial injustices; the long-term material, affective and symbolic imprints of plantations; and their sovereign dimensions. We explore these topics through a variety of examples and transdisciplinary approaches that cut across chronologies, geographies and political contexts and provide a navigation tool through the edited volume’s contributions. By stressing plantations’ more-than-human relations and their all-too-human (modern, colonial, imperial) dynamics, we want to both call into question any monolithic notion of “the” plantation and pinpoint the common features that accrue to the different plantation experiences and experiments addressed by authors. Contributing to the current discussion on the predicaments of the Plantationocene, we argue that this book’s breadth and vision might help imagine more nuanced ways of narrating plantation regimes and forms of resistance against them—past, present and future.
Gängige Formen von Diskriminierung sowie die Reproduktion normativer Stereotype sind auch bei künstlicher Intelligenz an der Tagesordnung. Die Beitragenden erläutern Möglichkeiten der Reduktion dieser fehlerhaften Verfahrensweisen und verhandeln die ambivalente Beziehung zwischen Queerness und KI aus einer interdisziplinären Perspektive. Parallel dazu geben sie einem queer-feministischen Wissensverständnis Raum, das sich stets als partikular, vieldeutig und unvollständig versteht. Damit eröffnen sie Möglichkeiten des Umgangs mit KI, die reduktive Kategorisierungen überschreiten können.
Gängige Formen von Diskriminierung sowie die Reproduktion normativer Stereotype sind auch bei künstlicher Intelligenz an der Tagesordnung. Die Beitragenden erläutern Möglichkeiten der Reduktion dieser fehlerhaften Verfahrensweisen und verhandeln die ambivalente Beziehung zwischen Queerness und KI aus einer interdisziplinären Perspektive. Parallel dazu geben sie einem queer-feministischen Wissensverständnis Raum, das sich stets als partikular, vieldeutig und unvollständig versteht. Damit eröffnen sie Möglichkeiten des Umgangs mit KI, die reduktive Kategorisierungen überschreiten können.
Concerns about safety and property rights have led to seemingly endless expansion of technologies and practices structuring modern surveillance society. While presumably “practiced with a view to enhancing efficiency, productivity, participation, welfare, health or safety” (Lyon, 1994 Lyon, D. (1994). The electronic eye: The rise of surveillance society. University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar], p. 52), we argue the continued function of a “social problems industry” (Pitter & Andrews, 1997 Pitter, R., & Andrews, D. L. (1997). Serving America’s underserved: Reflections on sport and recreation in an emerging social problems industry. Quest, 49(1), 85–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/00336297.1997.10484225[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) in cities like Baltimore, reflect a “colorblind” paternalization of sport-based charitable aid that disguises racialized surveillance under the auspices of educating lower-income Black youth through prescriptive measures to become upwardly mobile citizens. As Simone Browne (2015 Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters: On the surveillance of blackness. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822375302[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) reminds us, rather than seeing surveillance as logical outcomes of innovation, we must “factor in how racism and anti-Blackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order” (p. 8). Beyond CCTV and helicopter reconnaissance, this study situates sport/physical activity programming as yet another context of anti-Black surveillance, and discusses the potential of emergent resistive spaces that empower, rather than discipline.
The talk of the existence of ‘Big Brother’ in the lives of ordinary people is something that is often discussed in mainstream literature as a distant occurrence. It is often associated with “the state and its agencies exspressing their overreach tendencies through intelligence and policies strategies” (Lyon & Murakami Wood, 2020). It is also presented in very abstract terms in its manifestation and material consequences. It is framed as if it only targsets terrorists or in lay man’s terms ‘the enemies of the state’. This ‘watching over’ of individuals and collectives is meant to control, discipline and sort information and behaviours. It is synonymous with the tracking and monitoring of the activities of what some loosely call ‘problematic elements’ in society. Such a stereotypical representation of surveillance is problematic on many fronts. It simplifies a very complex societal phenomenon with disproportionate consequences on individual and collective rights. It obfuscates the invasive and intrusive nature of surveillance in contemporary societies. It ignores the ‘everydayness’ of this unprecedented and pervasive ‘watching over’. It normalizes surveillance activities of the state and corporate entities in an environment where the infrastructure for monitoring and tracking actors and actants in everyday life has become pervasive and relatively cheaper to acquire and deploy. In most cases, the idea of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is sold to many of us in colourful and enticing ways. Unfortunately, what is obfuscated from this technological solutionistic narrative is that automation, datafication of society and robotization of social processes unintentionally promote invasive surveillance practices and cultures. These surveillance practices impact negatively on the enjoyment of the right to privacy as enshrined in national constitutional, regional instruments and international model laws.
For understandable reasons, global discourses around queer, feminist, and decolonial activism are unified by an emphasis on action, the agential, and the productive. Doing is what matters most, hence the critical focus of this special issue on how the doing gets done, or the forms that most effectively transmit action. However, these discourses risk reproducing the hard binaries by which political activity has historically been assessed, including success/ failure and resistance/passivity - in other words, they can unintentionally reinforce a racialized and gendered dichotomy between those who do things in the world and those who are simply undone by it. Such binaries further scaffold progress narratives that have long been weaponized against populations in the global South, founding good subjects, proper objects, legitimate politics, and viable futures in line with agendas set elsewhere. In this article, I turn to contemporary South African art to ask a different question: what might we learn from scenes of undoing instead? What expanded repertoire of actions, affects, alliances, and options emerges when we are sensitive to how decompositions, not just compositions, reroute agency, mediate relations, and make worlds? My article explores decomposition as a literal and figurative method in recent works by Zanele Muholi, Jean Brundrit, and Nolan Oswald Dennis, three South African artists who do not all align with notions of visual activism proper. But by placing pressure on the unruliness, vulnerabilities, and expressive limits of form and material, I argue that each artist usefully troubles the figure in whom normative notions of political agency are supposed to reside. In so doing, they sensitise their audiences to how vectors of precaritization and (in)capacity intersect today, unravelling the linear means-ends logics that conventionally underwrite theories of both art and activism.
The proliferation of biometric systems in our societies is shaping public debates around its political, social and ethical implications. Yet, whilst concerns towards the racialised use of this technology have been on the rise, the field of biometrics remains unperturbed by these debates. Despite the lack of critical analysis, algorithmic fairness has recently been adopted by biometrics. Different studies have been published to understand and mitigate demographic bias in biometric systems, without analysing the political consequences. In this paper, we offer a critical reading of recent debates about biometric fairness and show its detachment from political debates. Building on previous fairness demonstrations, we prove that biometrics will be always biased. Yet, we claim algorithmic fairness cannot distribute justice in scenarios which are broken or whose intended purpose is to discriminate. By focusing on demographic biases rather than examine how these systems reproduce historical and political injustices, fairness has overshadowed the elephant in the room of biometrics.
Dominican American author Junot Díaz’s short story “Monstro” (2012) centers on the narrator’s return to the Dominican Republic to visit his ailing mother. During that visit, the island undergoes an outbreak from a mysterious disease that attaches itself to the infected body like a “black mold-fungus” that then “gradually started taking you over.” Named “La Negrura” for its capacity to re-blacken already black skin, the disease turns the infected into proto-zombies at first and full “zombies” by the end of the story. Gil’Adí show’s how Díaz’s oeuvre is constructed around depictions of the Caribbean as a postapocalyptic space and Afro-Latinxs as science-fiction embodiments. The figure of the zombie here expands the concept of “fukú americanus,” which Díaz uses in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). “Monstro” presents the Caribbean (and the Americas) as instantiated into modernity by this curse of the New World (fukú), which remains into the present as a haunting presence and allows Díaz to narrate the Caribbean as a space created through a cataclysmic rift that emits dead bodies. Díaz exhumes the histories of colonialism, slavery, embodied labor, and racial expendability: histories that demonstrate an inescapable pattern of violence. The zombies’ mass groupings and screams become a form of racial protest against the histories that created them as dead subjects.
This chapter outlines the key theoretical anchor points used throughout the book, drawing together ideas, stances and approaches from critical language policy, language ideologies, surveillance studies and raciolinguistics. I argue that these stances offer a comprehensive framework for examining and interrogating what are deemed to be normative language practices in schools, in ways which expose deep-rooted systems of power where minoritised speakers have been framed as sub-standard, deficient and lacking. At the centre of this discussion is the social and colonial construct of standardised English, conceptualised as an engineered language which is based on the language practices of the white middle classes and a powerful tool of governance for upholding white supremacy. I explore the links and overlaps between standard language and raciolinguistic ideologies, and argue that schools have long been a key space in which these ideologies are paired and enshrined. The chapter ends with a theorisation of linguistic surveillance in schools, in terms of how both sound and body are monitored and managed.KeywordsLanguage ideologyLanguage policyRaciolinguisticsPowerInequalityStandard English
This chapter is largely based on data generated from time spent in a London secondary school, in which I observed lessons, spoke with teachers and collected de jure and de facto language policy artefacts. I developed a theory of panlinguistic surveillance by examining how the body, gesture and various semiotic resources get policed alongside language in schools, showing how discourses of discipline intermingle with language ideologies, which co-construct ‘bad behaviour’, ‘bad bodies’ and ‘bad language’. This, I argue, is especially the case within policies rooted in deficit perspectives about language which are marketed under guises of scientific objectivity and social justice. I show how many of these policies, which run central to post-2010 language education reforms in England, are imports from north America, which themselves have roots in methods of urban policing and the punitive treatment of low-income, racialised speakers.KeywordsDisciplineLanguage policingWord gapCriminalisationAcademic languageZero tolerance
The chapters in this book so far have explored how the crafting of historical and contemporary policy works to erase and stigmatise the language practices of low-income and racialised children, labelling these as non-compliant, deviant and in need of policing. However, critique must also propose solutions for change—educational linguists are not only responsible for exposing social inequalities and hierarchies but should look to undo them and reimagine new futures for education. This chapter explores histories and possibilities for enacting raciolinguistic resistance and the building of alternative worlds. This chapter is called (re)resistance because I want to immediately highlight the scope of existing anti-racist, critical work within language education in England. Taking inspiration from this work, the second half of the chapter presents a case study of research that a teacher and I conducted in a London secondary school, where we used literary texts to create a space to interrogate raciolinguistic ideologies and challenge existing structures of power.KeywordsRaciolinguistic perspectiveLiteratureActivismAgencyAnti-racismCulturally sustaining pedagogies
This chapter establishes some of the entry points and assumptions in beginning to think through language policy making in schools, and how policies are shaped by sets of overlapping language ideologies. It begins the genealogical approach which underpins the entire book, whereby policy initiatives framed as ‘new’ are shown to be resonant of ‘historical’ policies—which themselves are tethered to British colonial practices in which the speech of racialised communities was deemed to be deficient and in need of remediation. I provide a statement on my own positionality and begin to outline some of the key theoretical anchor points used in the remainder of the book.KeywordsRaciolinguisticsLanguage ideologyColonialityCurriculum reformIntersectionalitySchools
This chapter moves on from the broader, self-described “Conservative” movement of Chapter 4 to study the visual popular culture and visual discourses of one specific part of the far-right—the “alt-right” movement in the United States. It focuses on the visual politics of pop culture, specifically the use of memes, to illustrate how the “alt-right” used images and social media to spread racist and white supremacist ideas while deflecting responsibility with claims they were “just joking.” At issue here is how memes have been “weaponized” in the sense they are used against perceived “enemies” of the “alt-right” and of a broader “us” This “us” for the “alt-right” and its supporters, is racialized as white and categorized as “real America.” An understanding of this process as “mimetic weaponization” drawn from Peters and Allan (2021), centers on agency and directs attention to both the modes by which memes are spread, and the tactics used to deflect responsibility by those spreading racist, xenophobic memes. In this chapter, the “alt-right’s” use of a popular image—that of Pepe the frog—is analyzed to note how they describe threats, what (and who) is supposedly being threatened, and the measures thus promoted. The “alt-right’s” invocations of the term “white people” or “Western civilization” are used to support their xenophobic, racist, and misogynistic portrayals of immigrants, immigration, and people of color. Connected to this is a broader “alt-right” narrative that states a weak government is favoring people of color and thus injuring the white population.
In this chapter I examine the way that people who are homeless navigate the urban environment in order to meet their needs for digital access, basic survival, and to move out of homelessness. I examine the challenges as well as the affordances of cities as sites of connectivity, and shows how digital access barriers, in combination with the design and regulation of urban space, subject people who are homeless to new imperatives of movement, surveillance, and control. The chapter draws together findings from an Australian co-design study and research conducted on LinkNYC, a digital kiosk network in New York City used by rough sleepers, young people, and other public groups. Drawing on these findings, the chapter connects with the book’s broader argument to reveal the socio-spatial dimensions of precarious connectivity, arguing for the need to factor in urban design and governance in addressing digital inequalities.KeywordsMobilitiesUrban designPrecarious mobilitiesSurveillanceRegulationPublic space
In this chapter I examine the rise of smart and algorithmic technologies and what this means for understandings and experiences of homelessness. The concept of ‘the data–connectivity exchange’ is introduced and explained with reference to the asymmetries of datafication at the point of connection to digital services. This is applied to the case of LinkNYC to consider the potential for homeless and marginalised groups to be exposed to new data risks and harms through their use of ‘free’ Wi-Fi and other connectivity services. I then examine examples of algorithmic systems introduced by national governments to recover overpayments to welfare recipients using automated data-matching. The chapter makes the argument that with the rise of smart cities and algorithmic governance, social and spatial inequalities become further embedded into the logics and infrastructures of cities and states and are another means through which people experiencing homelessness can be policed and punished.KeywordsSmart citiesAlgorithmic governanceDigital citizenshipPolicingDataficationUrban inequalities
In this paper, we analyze two key claims offered by recruitment AI companies in relation to the development and deployment of AI-powered HR tools: (1) recruitment AI can objectively assess candidates by removing gender and race from their systems, and (2) this removal of gender and race will make recruitment fairer, help customers attain their DEI goals, and lay the foundations for a truly meritocratic culture to thrive within an organization. We argue that these claims are misleading for four reasons: First, attempts to “strip” gender and race from AI systems often misunderstand what gender and race are, casting them as isolatable attributes rather than broader systems of power. Second, the attempted outsourcing of “diversity work” to AI-powered hiring tools may unintentionally entrench cultures of inequality and discrimination by failing to address the systemic problems within organizations. Third, AI hiring tools’ supposedly neutral assessment of candidates’ traits belie the power relationship between the observer and the observed. Specifically, the racialized history of character analysis and its associated processes of classification and categorization play into longer histories of taxonomical sorting and reflect the current demands and desires of the job market, even when not explicitly conducted along the lines of gender and race. Fourth, recruitment AI tools help produce the “ideal candidate” that they supposedly identify through by constructing associations between words and people’s bodies. From these four conclusions outlined above, we offer three key recommendations to AI HR firms, their customers, and policy makers going forward.
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