Pub Date : 2021-10-26DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34994
Ariel Ludwig
This article calls for an abolitionist turn in Science and Technology Studies (STS) in order to engage with mass incarceration and the carceral-industrial-complex. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in New York City jails, this article sets out to (1) argue for an abolitionist STS that intervenes in the racialized logics of “criminal man”; (2) offer the carceral body as arising from this abolitionist intervention into mass incarceration; and (3) illustrate how ontological multiplicities and critical phenomenology might be deployed as abolitionist STS tools. The premise is that ending mass incarceration requires philosophical interventions that resist the current racist, capitalist framework of the carceral-industrial-complex by disrupting the very foundations of reality. Abolitionist STS arises out of feminist and critical race STS as an intervention not only into criminology, but also into social theory’s ontological turn by attending to the interplay of carceral epistemologies and ontologies. When multiplicities, experientialities, complexities, contradictions, and power dynamics are drawn out, abolition is no longer an undoing but a proliferation that disinvests and contravenes carceral logics.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-26DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v7i2.35973
Beth Coleman
In addressing the issue of harmful bias in AI systems, this paper asks for a consideration of a generatively wild AI that exceeds the framework of predictive machine learning. The argument places supervised learning with its labeled training data as primarily a form of reproduction of a status quo. Based on this framework, the paper moves through an analysis of two AI modalities—supervised learning (e.g., machine vision) and unsupervised learning (e.g., game play)—to demonstrate the potential of AI as mechanism that creates patterns of association outside of a purely reproductive condition. This analysis is followed by an introduction to the concept of the technology of the surround, where the paper then turns toward theoretical positions that unbind categorical logics, moving toward other possible positionalities—the surround (Harney and Moten), alien intelligence (Parisi), and intra-actions of subject/object resolution (Barad). The paper frames two key concepts in relation to an AI in the wild: the colonial sublime and black techné. The paper concludes with a summation of what AI in the wild can contribute to the subversion of technologies of oppression toward a liberatory potential of AI.
{"title":"Technology of the Surround","authors":"Beth Coleman","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v7i2.35973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.35973","url":null,"abstract":"In addressing the issue of harmful bias in AI systems, this paper asks for a consideration of a generatively wild AI that exceeds the framework of predictive machine learning. The argument places supervised learning with its labeled training data as primarily a form of reproduction of a status quo. Based on this framework, the paper moves through an analysis of two AI modalities—supervised learning (e.g., machine vision) and unsupervised learning (e.g., game play)—to demonstrate the potential of AI as mechanism that creates patterns of association outside of a purely reproductive condition. This analysis is followed by an introduction to the concept of the technology of the surround, where the paper then turns toward theoretical positions that unbind categorical logics, moving toward other possible positionalities—the surround (Harney and Moten), alien intelligence (Parisi), and intra-actions of subject/object resolution (Barad). The paper frames two key concepts in relation to an AI in the wild: the colonial sublime and black techné. The paper concludes with a summation of what AI in the wild can contribute to the subversion of technologies of oppression toward a liberatory potential of AI.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122030638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-26DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v7i2.36687
Hayri Dortdivanlioglu
This paper presents a speculative mapping exercise as a feminist resistance method with the aim of rendering surveillance technologies and their fields of view visible. The focus is on the North Avenue Smart Corridor, located in Atlanta, Georgia, which is one of the world's top ten most surveilled cities. Through the design of these speculative maps, I question our relationship with surveillance. More specifically, I show that unnoticeable materiality and invisible processes of smart surveillance technologies prevent the public from forming an opinion on their intrusion into daily life. Acceptance of these technologies allows powerholders to protect and enhance their power over marginalized communities. Therefore, by mapping the intensity of surveillance, this study aims to raise awareness against the lure of technocracy in so-called smart cities. It situates the reader in the position of surveillance sensors and allows the reader to speculate on what they can see. In doing so, it seeks to highlight the oppressive agency of these technologies and question their appeal to objectivity with the potential to disrupt their patriarchal powers. Can we free ourselves from the oppressive gaze of smart surveillance by mapping, seeing, and understanding its remarkably limited fields of view?
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Pub Date : 2021-10-26DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34734
Jordan Kraemer
For many cosmopolitan urban Germans and Europeans in Berlin in the late 2000s, social media platforms were a site where gender and class were enacted through articulations of emergent nerd masculinity or hip, ironic femininity. But these platforms, such as Facebook or Pinterest, encoded normative assumptions about masculinity and femininity in their visual and interaction design, excluding women and acceptable femininity as subjects of technological expertise. Sites that presented themselves as neutral spaces for connection and interaction, like Twitter or Facebook, instantiated gendered understandings of technology that rendered public space implicitly masculine, white, and middle class. Visually based sites like Pinterest and Etsy, in contrast, were marked as domains of feminine domesticity, representing not only a shift to visual communication but to visual modes of interaction that structured gender online. Although many young people resisted hegemonic notions of gender, their social media practices stabilized their class status as aspiring urban cosmopolitans. In this article, I consider how gender and class stabilized temporarily through material-semiotic engagements with technology interfaces.
{"title":"Gender of the Interface","authors":"Jordan Kraemer","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34734","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34734","url":null,"abstract":"For many cosmopolitan urban Germans and Europeans in Berlin in the late 2000s, social media platforms were a site where gender and class were enacted through articulations of emergent nerd masculinity or hip, ironic femininity. But these platforms, such as Facebook or Pinterest, encoded normative assumptions about masculinity and femininity in their visual and interaction design, excluding women and acceptable femininity as subjects of technological expertise. Sites that presented themselves as neutral spaces for connection and interaction, like Twitter or Facebook, instantiated gendered understandings of technology that rendered public space implicitly masculine, white, and middle class. Visually based sites like Pinterest and Etsy, in contrast, were marked as domains of feminine domesticity, representing not only a shift to visual communication but to visual modes of interaction that structured gender online. Although many young people resisted hegemonic notions of gender, their social media practices stabilized their class status as aspiring urban cosmopolitans. In this article, I consider how gender and class stabilized temporarily through material-semiotic engagements with technology interfaces.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122843795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-26DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34839
Teddy Goetz
In May 2019 the photographic cellphone application Snapchat released two company-generated image filters that were officially dubbed “My Twin” and “My Other Twin,” though users and media labeled them as feminine and masculine, respectively. While touted in most commentary as a “gender swap” feature, these digital imaginaries represent a unique opportunity to consider what features contribute to classification of faces into binary gender buckets. After all, the commonly considered “male” filter makes various modifications—including a broader jaw and addition of facial hair—to whichever face is selected in the photograph. It does not ask and cannot detect if that face belongs to a man or woman (cis- or transgender) or to a non-binary individual. Instead, the augmented reality that it offers is a preprogrammed algorithmic reinscription of reductive gendered norms. When interacting with a novel face, humans similarly implement algorithms to assign a gender to that face. The Snapchat “My Twin” filters—which are not neutral, but rather human-designed—offer an analyzable projection of one such binarization, which is otherwise rarely articulated or visually recreated. Here I pair an ethnographic exploration of twenty-eight transgender, non-binary, and/or gender diverse individuals’ embodied experiences of facial gender legibility throughout life and with digital distortion, with a quantitative analysis of the “My Twin” filter facial distortions, to better understand the role of technology in reimaginations of who and what we see in the mirror.
{"title":"Swapping Gender is a Snap(chat)","authors":"Teddy Goetz","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34839","url":null,"abstract":"In May 2019 the photographic cellphone application Snapchat released two company-generated image filters that were officially dubbed “My Twin” and “My Other Twin,” though users and media labeled them as feminine and masculine, respectively. While touted in most commentary as a “gender swap” feature, these digital imaginaries represent a unique opportunity to consider what features contribute to classification of faces into binary gender buckets. After all, the commonly considered “male” filter makes various modifications—including a broader jaw and addition of facial hair—to whichever face is selected in the photograph. It does not ask and cannot detect if that face belongs to a man or woman (cis- or transgender) or to a non-binary individual. Instead, the augmented reality that it offers is a preprogrammed algorithmic reinscription of reductive gendered norms. When interacting with a novel face, humans similarly implement algorithms to assign a gender to that face. The Snapchat “My Twin” filters—which are not neutral, but rather human-designed—offer an analyzable projection of one such binarization, which is otherwise rarely articulated or visually recreated. Here I pair an ethnographic exploration of twenty-eight transgender, non-binary, and/or gender diverse individuals’ embodied experiences of facial gender legibility throughout life and with digital distortion, with a quantitative analysis of the “My Twin” filter facial distortions, to better understand the role of technology in reimaginations of who and what we see in the mirror.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115362880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-26DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34916
Radhika Radhakrishnan
In contemporary India, AI-enabled automated diagnostic models are beginning to control who gets access to what kind of medical care, with the most invasive systems being aimed at underserved communities. I critically question the dominant narrative of “AI for social good” that has been widely adopted by various stakeholders in the healthcare industry towards solving development challenges through the introduction of AI applications targeted towards the sick-poor. Using feminist theory, I argue that AI systems should not be seen as neutral products but complex sociotechnical processes embedded with gendered knowledge and labor. I analyze the layers of expropriation and experimentation that come into play when AI technologies become a method of using diverse bodies and medical records of the sick-poor as data to train proprietary AI algorithms at a low cost in the absence of effective state regulatory mechanisms. I posit that an overwhelming focus on “spectacular technologies” such as AI derails public efforts from solving the actual needs of populations targeted by the “AI for social good” narrative, and from the development of sustainable, responsible, situated healthcare solutions. Lastly, I offer social and policy recommendations that would enable us to envision inclusive feminist futures in which we understand and prioritize the needs of underserved populations over capitalist market logics in the development, deployment, and regulation of AI systems.
{"title":"Experiments with Social Good: Feminist Critiques of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare in India","authors":"Radhika Radhakrishnan","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34916","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34916","url":null,"abstract":"In contemporary India, AI-enabled automated diagnostic models are beginning to control who gets access to what kind of medical care, with the most invasive systems being aimed at underserved communities. I critically question the dominant narrative of “AI for social good” that has been widely adopted by various stakeholders in the healthcare industry towards solving development challenges through the introduction of AI applications targeted towards the sick-poor. Using feminist theory, I argue that AI systems should not be seen as neutral products but complex sociotechnical processes embedded with gendered knowledge and labor. I analyze the layers of expropriation and experimentation that come into play when AI technologies become a method of using diverse bodies and medical records of the sick-poor as data to train proprietary AI algorithms at a low cost in the absence of effective state regulatory mechanisms. I posit that an overwhelming focus on “spectacular technologies” such as AI derails public efforts from solving the actual needs of populations targeted by the “AI for social good” narrative, and from the development of sustainable, responsible, situated healthcare solutions. Lastly, I offer social and policy recommendations that would enable us to envision inclusive feminist futures in which we understand and prioritize the needs of underserved populations over capitalist market logics in the development, deployment, and regulation of AI systems.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131094561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-26DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34906
Jason Toncic
Recent advances in science and engineering have facilitated the development of artificial intelligence voice assistants. While this is true from a technical aspect, smart speakers and voice assistants did not develop in isolation from the rest of human society. The devices may be new, but the practices and patterns in their development and use are not. Using Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, I map homologous practices of smart speaker interaction onto historical conceptions of supernatural magic use. This structural comparison suggests that practices and patterns that were essential to magic use have re-emerged in smart speaker utilization in similar forms. Some of these practices are noteworthy for their homology alone. However, other homologous behaviors revive patterns of inequity that, in Western magical traditions, had privileged the traditionally educated man. The goal of this paper is to elucidate the ghost in the machine: the prejudiced social practices of supernatural magic that were asserted to be eradicated yet which are now, nevertheless, newly instantiated within our most cutting-edge devices.
{"title":"I Dream of Siri: Magic and Female Voice Assistants","authors":"Jason Toncic","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34906","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34906","url":null,"abstract":"Recent advances in science and engineering have facilitated the development of artificial intelligence voice assistants. While this is true from a technical aspect, smart speakers and voice assistants did not develop in isolation from the rest of human society. The devices may be new, but the practices and patterns in their development and use are not. Using Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, I map homologous practices of smart speaker interaction onto historical conceptions of supernatural magic use. This structural comparison suggests that practices and patterns that were essential to magic use have re-emerged in smart speaker utilization in similar forms. Some of these practices are noteworthy for their homology alone. However, other homologous behaviors revive patterns of inequity that, in Western magical traditions, had privileged the traditionally educated man. The goal of this paper is to elucidate the ghost in the machine: the prejudiced social practices of supernatural magic that were asserted to be eradicated yet which are now, nevertheless, newly instantiated within our most cutting-edge devices.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123393318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-26DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34903
Wendy H. Chun
This article explores how the “gaps” that structure networks and communities enclose and preserve “racialized others,” whom they seem to expel: from Black residents in US biracial housing projects to Japanese and Japanese Americans in World War II internment camps. It also calls for an embrace of ambi-valent neighbors to render these undead spaces into vibrant, if in/different, modes of inhabitation.
{"title":"The Space between Us: Network Gaps, Racism, and the Possibilities of Living in/Difference","authors":"Wendy H. Chun","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34903","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34903","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how the “gaps” that structure networks and communities enclose and preserve “racialized others,” whom they seem to expel: from Black residents in US biracial housing projects to Japanese and Japanese Americans in World War II internment camps. It also calls for an embrace of ambi-valent neighbors to render these undead spaces into vibrant, if in/different, modes of inhabitation.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"100 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131438441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-26DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v7i2.36103
Olivia Adams
{"title":"Pain: A Political History, by Keith Wailoo (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)","authors":"Olivia Adams","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v7i2.36103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.36103","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131077324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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