CSAS Lecture | Genealogies of Knowledge Production: Information, Data, and Algorithmic World-Making
Purnima Mankekar, Professor, Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
Genealogies of Knowledge Production:
Information, Data, and Algorithmic World-Making
Current controversies about Artificial Intelligence (AI), ranging from the future of work, healthcare and the economy to surveillance and privacy, national sovereignty, and, indeed, human survival, are deeply implicated in constructions of futurity. Many critiques of AI and algorithms center on questions of bias: the implication is that if the data encoded in algorithms was unbiased we could be assured of a more just future. While the concerns underlying these critiques are valid, most anxieties about bias frame the problem too narrowly. Such critiques also deal inadequately with the imbrication of AI and algorithms with culture, history, and politics.
What happens when we reframe the story of information, Big Data and, hence, algorithms from the perspective of the Global South? In this talk, I focus on two sites in postcolonial India: the role of information in development projects, and the launch of the Aadhar project. My aim is to diagram a theoretical framework that moves away from universalist and singular narratives of information, data, and algorithms by proposing postcolonial and conjunctural accounts. Such accounts push back against the naturalization of information as self-evident and as a “thing” that can be disseminated, transferred, or produced as an object in order to assert its imbrication of in larger genealogies of knowledge production imbricated in coloniality, empire, nationalism, and neoliberalism. I also argue for mining the glitch and the workaround or jugaad as opportunities for potentially interrupting statist and neoliberal projects of the informatization of social formations. I conclude by ruminating on what these accounts suggest about futurity as an affective-temporal regime.
Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Purnima Mankekar has conducted interdisciplinary research on television, film, and digital media, and on publics/public cultures with a focus on the politics of affect. She is completing a book on affective labor and the production of futurities in the Business Process Outsourcing industry in Bengaluru, India titled Future Tense: Affective Labor and Disjunctive Temporalities (co-authored with Akhil Gupta). Her new ethnographic project is on the sociopolitical implications of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in India.
Her teaching interests include digital and “virtual” anthropology; theories of affect; feminist anthropology and ethnography; postcolonial and women of color feminism; anthropological approaches to sexuality, queer theory, and queer of color critique; and Asian American and South Asian Studies.
Made possible with the generous support of the Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
Information, Data, and Algorithmic World-Making
Current controversies about Artificial Intelligence (AI), ranging from the future of work, healthcare and the economy to surveillance and privacy, national sovereignty, and, indeed, human survival, are deeply implicated in constructions of futurity. Many critiques of AI and algorithms center on questions of bias: the implication is that if the data encoded in algorithms was unbiased we could be assured of a more just future. While the concerns underlying these critiques are valid, most anxieties about bias frame the problem too narrowly. Such critiques also deal inadequately with the imbrication of AI and algorithms with culture, history, and politics.
What happens when we reframe the story of information, Big Data and, hence, algorithms from the perspective of the Global South? In this talk, I focus on two sites in postcolonial India: the role of information in development projects, and the launch of the Aadhar project. My aim is to diagram a theoretical framework that moves away from universalist and singular narratives of information, data, and algorithms by proposing postcolonial and conjunctural accounts. Such accounts push back against the naturalization of information as self-evident and as a “thing” that can be disseminated, transferred, or produced as an object in order to assert its imbrication of in larger genealogies of knowledge production imbricated in coloniality, empire, nationalism, and neoliberalism. I also argue for mining the glitch and the workaround or jugaad as opportunities for potentially interrupting statist and neoliberal projects of the informatization of social formations. I conclude by ruminating on what these accounts suggest about futurity as an affective-temporal regime.
Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Purnima Mankekar has conducted interdisciplinary research on television, film, and digital media, and on publics/public cultures with a focus on the politics of affect. She is completing a book on affective labor and the production of futurities in the Business Process Outsourcing industry in Bengaluru, India titled Future Tense: Affective Labor and Disjunctive Temporalities (co-authored with Akhil Gupta). Her new ethnographic project is on the sociopolitical implications of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in India.
Her teaching interests include digital and “virtual” anthropology; theories of affect; feminist anthropology and ethnography; postcolonial and women of color feminism; anthropological approaches to sexuality, queer theory, and queer of color critique; and Asian American and South Asian Studies.
Made possible with the generous support of the Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
| Building: | Weiser Hall |
|---|---|
| Event Type: | Lecture / Discussion |
| Tags: | Asia, gender studies |
| Source: | Happening @ Michigan from Center for South Asian Studies, International Institute, Department of Film, Television, and Media, Asian Languages and Cultures |
