Race and/as Technology - II

Abstract

In her seminal essay, “Race and/as Technology”, Wendy H. K. Chun proposed that race could be understood as a technology—that is, as neither biological nor cultural, human nor machine, mediated nor environmental, visible nor invisible, but as a category that organises all of these dualisms and many more. Race, she argued, can be thought of as a “technique that one uses, even as one is used by it” (38). Using this essay and its concerns as a touchstone, this panel will ask how we might understand race and/as technology in the present. What is the relationship between visibility/invisibility and race and how is it mediated? How are emergent technologies of control, such as facial recognition, racialised? How might we think categories—like race, person, or population—after Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and big data? How might these technologies be understood historically? What is the relationship to related categories, such as gender, class or ability, in the technologisation of race? How might analyses of culture help us to understand race and/as technology? If we adopt Chun’s idea that this approach “displaces ontological questions of race” (56), what different things might race be made to do, in the present? We want to bring together scholars working in any discipline touched by these questions to think through what it might mean to consider race and/as technology today.

Chair

• Thao Phan, Deakin Univeristy

Individual Presentations

• Correlating Race: On Machine Learning and Racial Categories - Scott Wark, University of Warwick

• Flesh in the Machine: Digitality, Embodiment and Life in the Carceral Surround - Raymond Joshua Scannell, New School University

• Historical Media Technologies and the Production of Race in "Return of the Obra Dinn" - William Clyde Partin

• Race as a Technology in Medicine and Epidemiology: Contrasting Germany and the US - Andrea zur Nieden, Institute of Sociology, University of Freiburg, Germany

• Race as Technology in the Dutch Governmental Data Ontology: Introducing Racetechnicity - Gerwin van Schie, Utrecht University

Session Organizers

• Thao Phan, Deakin Univeristy

• Scott Wark, University of Warwick