Eurograd message

Message posted on 19/09/2023

Invitation for PhD Course: Living with Algorithms, 7-9 February, 2024, Copenhagen, with M. Ruckenstein, H. Ratner and M. H. Bruun

Invitation for PhD Course: Living with Algorithms, 7-9 February, 2024, Copenhagen, with M. Ruckenstein, H. Ratner and M. H. Bruun

Minna Ruckenstein, Helsinki University, Helene Ratner, Aarhus University and Maja Hojer Bruun, Aarhus University are teaching the PhD course Living with Algorithms: Power, Practices, and People in a Datafied World on 7-9 February, 2024, at DPU, Aarhus University in Copenhagen.

Deadline for application: 7 December, 2023.

More about the course: https://phdcourses.dk/Course/108700

Living with Algorithms: Power, Practices, and People in a Datafied World In this PhD course, we engage with these timely concerns by shifting our perspective from the systems to the people who (have to) work and live with them. Using analytic sensibilities from Science & Technology Studies (STS), anthropology of technology, and Critical Data and Algorithm Studies, we ask: what happens if we study algorithmic systems through the experiences and practices of all kinds of people: experts, citizens, developers, consumers and users. Examining algorithmic systems from the perspective of tech professionals, for example, allows us to engage with their own conceptions about issues such as society inequality and future users. Conversely, the perspective of those who use or are exposed to such systems, including credit scoring, welfare predictions, health diagnostics, performance measures, recommender systems, and self-tracking devices, brings us to the realm of privacy and autonomy and a sense of empowerment or disempowerment. To cope with such systems, people rely on algorithmic folklore, and workarounds and resistances, which not only tell of such practices, but of agential possibilities in the digital environment.

The course will introduce literature that details new forms of organizing, mediation, contestation, and resistance that algorithmic systems have generated. This in turn, creates avenues for thinking about policy, design, and interventions. In the STS spirit of thinking otherwise, we will discuss concepts, including fear and anticipation, breakages and repair, friction and weeds, that aid in rethinking power, practices and people in relation to algorithmic systems and futures.

Once we begin to examine, through ethnography and other interpretive methods, the different practices that form in relation to datafied and algorithmic systems, the range of questions and concerns begins to expand. Insights from the field become important entry points that help us re-imagine established critiques and their analytic purchase. A key aim of the course is therefore to provide an overview of analytic possibilities across a range of fields, and to facilitate a reflexive space for thinking about the normativities, practicalities, and possibilities entailed in different approaches to datafication and algorithmic systems.

Please spread this invitation.

Best wishes, Maja

Maja Hojer Bruun Associate Professor

Aarhus University Department of Educational Anthropology Danish School of Education (DPU) Nobelparken, building 1483 - 527 Jens Chr. Skous Vej 4 8000 Aarhus C Denmark T: +45 2124 2730


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