[Air-L] Feb 2, 7pm CET: Noopur Raval: The Algorithm is a Convenient Lie: Rethinking expertise and invisibility to support decolonial digital practice (public online lecture)

[Katja Mayer]

Public LecturebyNoopurRaval2.2.237 pm CETonline (please register with 
sonja.prendinger at univie.ac.at )

Wearepleasedtoannouncethefollowingpubliclectureaspartofthisyear'sDigiGovWinterSchool"Digitalpracticesandglobalinequalities 
<cid:part1.SOwTCsyU.KInJryyq at univie.ac.at>" 
<cid:part1.SOwTCsyU.KInJryyq at univie.ac.at>:

*The Algorithm is a Convenient Lie: Rethinking expertise and 
invisibility to support decolonial digital practice *

Noopur Raval, PhD <cid:part2.0S0IPMTz.4j0wbWnH at univie.ac.at>

"As AI, machine learning and algorithmic processing get more and more 
embedded in our digitally mediated communications and transactions, it 
has become necessary to interrogate algorithms as political and social 
objects. One critique that scholars and journalists offer is to point at 
a so-called AI or automated system and reveal the actually low-paid 
humans behind the AI - often brown and black bodies especially from the 
majority of the world engaged in supposedly boring and repetitive work 
to make the fantasy of automation and intelligence look real. We are in 
a moment where multiple critiques of AI, techno-colonialism and labor 
exploitation have emerged.

My talk responds to this moment in two parts. Firstly, drawing on my 
past ethnographic research with appbased gig workers in India, I will 
talk about how algorithmic systems are made to function smoothly through 
the work of a variety of human actors. Through these various platform 
encounters, I will show what forms of expertise and agency are 
attributed to ‘the algorithms’ as a convenient opaque object and 
in-turn, what is obscured. The second part of the talk asks - what next? 
What do we do after we have located the hidden human workers of AI, 
where do we go from here? I unpack the uneven global relations that 
shape the political economy of AI and argue against the mode of 
sentimentalism, to instead pay attention to contingencies and diverse 
infrastructural realities to decolonize critical AI thinking and 
activist and creative responses to the rise of AI."

Readings:

Raval, Noopur: An Agenda for Decolonizing Data Science. In: spheres: 
Journal for Digital Cultures. Spectres of AI (2019), Nr. 5, S. 1–6. DOI: 
https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/13499

Ranjit Singh (2021): The decolonial turn is on the road to contingency, 
Information, Communication & Society, DOI: 
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1986104

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