[Air-L] DATA VIOLENCE//DATA SOLIDARITIES - 4S call for abstracts

[Linda Huber]

Hello all! We wanted to draw your attention to our call for abstracts to
the DATA VIOLENCE//DATA SOLIDARITIES workshop to be held at 4S in Seattle
in the fall.


We are specifically looking for scholarly, creative, and activist work
exploring modes of resistance,forms of solidarity, and alternate data
configurations in the face of environmental, colonial, political-economic
and representational data violence. In addition to a panel featuring short
presentations, the second half of this combined format panel will be a Data
Solidarities Workshop. Using ideas introduced through the short
presentations, we will engage in speculative co-design for a theory and
praxis of data solidarities.

This panel / abstract is meant to be a generative space, and we welcome
questions / proposals / ideas. Please feel free to reach out to us directly
- the full call for abstracts is pasted below.

Deadline: January 31

Submission link: https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_seattle.php

Rebecca Smith, Assistant Professor, Lawrence Technological University
Department of Architecture

Linda Huber, PhD Candidate, University of Michigan School of Information

Full call for abstracts:

The emerging representational and environmental violence of generative AI
can be understood as only the newest manifestation of decades of data
violence. Scholars have shown how datafication reproduces and extends
projects of surveillance / militarism (Suchman 2023); colonialism and
capitalist extraction of value (Dyer-Witheford et al 2019; Mejias & Couldry
2019); white supremacy and gender essentialism (Scherman et al 2021,
Benjamin 2019, Brown 2015). Data violence is enacted at a material-semiotic
level, through binaristic modes of computation, abstraction,
classification, and decontextualization (Jefferson 2020, Bering-Porter
2022) - and is enabled and amplified through violent legal regimes of
private property, carcerality, and financialization.

Many techniques and strategies for resistance to data violence are already
emerging, including counter-mapping (Maharawal & McElroy 2017), critical
visualization (D'Ignazio & Klein 2020), data solidarities and
collectivities (Prainsack et al 2017), and speculative design (Dunne & Raby
2013, Kim & DiSalvo 2010). Through this combined format panel, we will
continue developing conceptual and practical tools for interrupting data
violence.

We ask:

   -

   What might it look like to pursue ‘data solidarities’, rooted in a
   praxis of mutualism and interdependence?
   -

   How might data solidarities be enacted at the level of semiotics and
   structure, through new forms and models of data-as-representation?
   -

   How can we exploit the collectivized nature of data-value to interrupt
   current models of private property and ownership? What alternative kinds of
   claims or rights to data can we explore, rooted in collective
   responsibility and stewardship?
   -

   What tactics can help us to interrupt the political, economic and social
   infrastructures enabling data violence?


We invite submissions from those engaging with these questions in
scholarly, activist, and creative registers.

This Combined Form Open Panel will be broken into two parts. The first
component will feature short presentations which respond to, document, or
critically examine enactments of data violence and / or data solidarities.
The second component will be a Data Solidarities Workshop, using ideas
introduced through the short presentations to engage in speculative
co-design for collecting, generative, and developing a theory and praxis
for data solidarities.


Dyer-Whitheford, Nick, Kjosen, Atle Mikkola, and Steinhoff, James. Inhuman
Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism. London: Pluto
Press, 2019.

Couldry, Nick ; Mejias, Ulises A. “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s
Relation to the Contemporary Subject.” Television & New Media. Los Angeles,
CA: SAGE Publications, 2019. doi:10.1177/1527476418796632.

Scheuerman, Morgan Klaus; Pape, Madeleine; Hanna, Alex.
“Auto-Essentialization: Gender in Automated Facial Analysis as Extended
Colonial Project.” Big Data & Society. London, England: SAGE Publications,
2021. doi:10.1177/20539517211053712.

Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim
Code. Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity, 2019.

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.  Durham:
Duke University Press, 2015.

Jefferson, Brian Jordan. Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the
Digital Age. Minneapolis, Minnesota ; London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2020.

Bering-Porter, David. “Data as Symbolic Form: Datafication and the
Imaginary Media of W. E. B. Du Bois.” Critical Inquiry. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2022. doi:10.1086/717308.

D'Ignazio, Catherine and Klein, Lauren F. Data Feminism. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020.

Maharawal, Manissa M. ; McElroy, Erin. “The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project:
Counter Mapping and Oral History toward Bay Area Housing Justice.” Annals
of the American Association of Geographers. Washington: Routledge, 2018.
doi:10.1080/24694452.2017.1365583.

Dunne, Anthony and Raby, Fiona. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction,
and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013.

Kim, Tanyoung, & DiSalvo, Carl. “Speculative Visualization: A New Rhetoric
for Communicating Public Concerns” In Design Research Society International
Conference of Design & Complexity. 2010.

Prainsack, Barbara ; El-Sayed, Seliem ; Forgó, Nikolaus ; Szoszkiewicz,
Łukasz ; Baumer, Philipp. “Data Solidarity: A Blueprint for Governing
Health Futures.” The Lancet. Digital Health, 2022.
doi:10.1016/S2589-7500(22)00189-3.
-- 
*Linda Huber, she/her*
*PhD Candidate, University of Michigan School of Information
<https://www.si.umich.edu/about-umsi>*
*+1 773 575 7783*