As governments procure, develop, implement, and mandate the use of digital and computational systems, the state becomes ever more “datafied” — and the boundaries between public and private power and accountability are increasingly blurred. Our emerging research agenda, The Datafied State, explores the growing impact of algorithms, automation, and surveillance across civic life, and the benefits […]
When an Amazon package arrives at your doorstep, it’s a non-event. Rarely do we pause to wonder about the workers involved, including the original merchant who shipped our purchase or the delivery driver who ferried it to our porch. This is no accident: logistics that appear seamless and impersonal are ones Amazon can manage at […]
Reproductive rights activists in Latin America have long fought for reproductive freedom, including some significant battles won. With the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade in the US, the “green wave” — a color associated with the movement for safe and legal abortion that started in Argentina and spread to the rest of the continent […]
“I just think that the company could do better if they wanted to, [rather] than just looking at us as just numbers, and try and see us as human beings, as people that have been risking their lives every single day for them.” —Essential worker
“Like every major system of exclusion, caste has its interpersonal, individual, and structural manifestations. It’s the structural pieces of caste, where we see power consolidated at the top with dominant caste people, that we really want to concern ourselves with when we see the reorganization of power in tech companies around biases of caste and […]
“Computational Hex is a heuristic that invokes the ambivalent pleasures and compelled habits of the algorithmic ordinary including, especially, its raced and gendered articulations.” – Shaka McGlotten Drawing on literary histories of the doppelgänger and emphasizing the ambivalent dis/enchantments of the algorithmic ordinary, Shaka McGlotten considers the invisible forces that animate the versions of ourselves […]