Algorithms and their Politics

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

It has long been accepted in STS that technoscience is politics by other means, although there are serious differences in how STSers conceptualize politics and technoscience. Technoscientific knowledge is the product of plans, choices, decisions, situated actions and interactions. This session presents several studies of particular technosciences and their politics, or in other words their plans, choices, and decisions. While we recognize that some consequences of these choices are unintended, we argue that these algorithms are nevertheless responsible for those consequences. The humans who build algorithms and infrastructures are also responsible. We regard the work of examining these algorithms as contributing to the development of responsibility. Each of the authors in this session discusses how politics is configured, what the stakes are, and who the players are. Through these discussions, each paper complicates both "algorithms" and "politics."

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Ramya M. Rajagopalan

Individual Presentations

• Better environmentalism through calculation?: Transforming economics from the inside out - Laura Alex Frye-Levine, University of Wisconsin–Madison

• Politics of Microseconds: Auditing Algorithms in Financial Markets - Bo Hee Min, University Of Wisconsin-Madison

• The Computer Will See You Now : When Diagnosis Goes Digital - Ramya M. Rajagopalan

• Big Biology, Infrastructures, Algorithms, and Race: How genomics became imbricated in representations of race - Joan Fujimura, University Of Wisconsin-Madison; Ramya M. Rajagopalan