TechnAct conference: The pleasures, problems and paradoxes of digital technologies: interdisciplinary approaches

TechnAct final conference November 7, 2024

This conference explores the relationship between digital technologies and new articulations and imaginings of life in transnational and local spaces. Such expressions can include the novel ways in which diverse types of collectives connect across geographical distances through digital technologies – from feminist and queer communities, to hybrid anti-gender alliances - but also the multi-sensory forms of pleasure that can be derived from engaging digital cultures, or the worldviews emerging through diverse more-than-human approaches to machines. Scholars have argued that exchanges between physical and digital space creates an entangled world. However, in contemporary times of dataification, climate crisis and global culture wars, what are the risks with such entangled worlds, and what are the possibilities?

Please register for the event by sending an email to Mia [dot] liinason [at] genus [dot] lu [dot] se at latest October 15.

Program

November 7

Venue: Biskopshuset, Lund University, Biskopsgatan 1, Lund

• 13.00 Opening

• 13.15-14.15 Key note (online lecture)

  Crystal Abidin (professor School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University, Australia):  “Gender, ethnography, and the influencer industry”

• Break 30 min.

• 14.45-16.15 Panel I: Intersectional, queer and interdisciplinary approaches to AI

  Ericka Johnson (Professor of Gender Studies, Linköping University): “Intersectional perspectives on synthetic data” 

  Evelina Liliequist (Senior Lecturer, Digital Humanities, Umeå University): “Casting a queer eye on AI – perspectives, challenges and possible ways forward”

  Stefan Larsson (Associate Professor of Technology and Social change, Lund University): “Anthropomorphic Brains or Embodied Math? Normative implications of how artificial intelligence is conceptualised”

• Break 30 min.  

• 16.45-18.15 Panel 2: Emerging digital cultures: Feminist struggles and global change

  Naila Sahar (Assistant Professor of English, American University in Dubai) “Muslim Women’s Activism in the USA: Politics of Digital Resistance Strategies”

  Sama Khosravi Ooryad (PhD-student in Film Studies, University of Gothenburg) “Memeing back at misogyny”

  Lena Martinsson (Professor of Gender Studies, University of Gothenburg) “My techno friends and the climate crisis”

  Mia Liinason (Professor of Gender Studies, Lund University) “Digital cultures and bodies as tactics”

• Conference closing

Abstracts

Panel I: Intersectional, queer and interdisciplinary approaches to AI

• “Intersectional perspectives on synthetic data” - Ericka Johnson 

Synthetic data - used to assure privacy, create data portability or amplify small datasets - promises to be ’the same, but different’ from the original dataset. That promise implies data fidelity but also contains inevitable intersectional hallucinations. This talk will explore a few examples of such hallucinations, discuss their implications for dataset use especially with social data, and suggest some methods for dealing with these inevitable hallucinations.

• “Casting a queer eye on AI – perspectives, challenges and possible ways forward” - Evelina Liliequist

Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is largely integrated into society and people's everyday lives, and it is becoming increasingly common to replace human-based decisions with algorithmic calculations and evaluations using AI. Facial Analysis (FA) is a specific type of AI technology that depends on personal data that can be retrieved from physical bodies, in this case a person’s face. It is a technology that is used to label individuals binarily: persons either correspond to a certain pre-programmed label, or they do not. Previous studies about AI technology from a queer theoretical gaze have identified several problems and risks with AI systems, such as categorization and labelling, often in stereotypical ways, cementing normative performances of gender. In Liliequist et al. (2023) and Danielsson et al. (2023) we argue for the continued need and benefits of queer theory to make visible problems, risks and challenges with AI tech, and the increasing implementation of such tech in society, and the possibilities for adopting participatory approaches to increase users' involvement and strengthen their role during the design process of digital technologies and systems.

As part of the endeavor to find ways forward, we have formed the interdisciplinary research group Queer AI at Humlab, Umeå university where we combine our expertise in queer studies, informatics, digital humanities and computer science, with the aim to find new ways of building AI technology and training AI systems for an inclusive future. We seek to explore how fluid identities and performances can be expressed and represented in data, empowering contributors and transforming people from data subjects into being data creators on their own terms. Further, we have initiated scholarly conversations and network collaborations with the aim to keep a queer eye fixed on AI to make visible both the challenges, but also possibilities. Our intention is to continue both conducting research, but also to keep forming academic and public alliances and networks with stakeholders in these issues. 

• “Anthropomorphic Brains or Embodied Math? Normative implications of how artificial intelligence is conceptualised” - Stefan Larsson

Drawing from the field of conceptual metaphors directed at the conceptual implications of new technologies, this presentation focuses on normative implications of how “artificial intelligence” (AI) is conceptualised. Contemporary discourses of AI governance are indicated by a multitude of ethics guidelines and a recently adopted AI Act in the EU, which in Larsson’s talk will be used to showcase signs of how understandings of AI are constructed.

Firstly, in his talk, Larsson proposes five alternative ways that AI can be, and in various degrees have been, conceptually understood. Secondly, he unpacks how these lead to alternative ways of thinking and talking about AI. Consequently, and thirdly, this sets different emphasis in the normative governance of AI. For example, depending on how elements of anthropomorphism, dis- or embodiment, and/or materiality, are part in the conceptual construction of AI, the normative governance approach will be shaped accordingly.
 

Panel 2: Emerging digital cultures: Feminist struggles and global change

• “Muslim Women’s Activism in the USA: Politics of Digital Resistance Strategies” - Naila Sahar 

This presentation will explore ways in which dynamics of visibility/invisibility of American Muslim women activists are transformed in secular places like USA, while these women struggle surviving on the borderlands. Borderland and boundary are perceived as lived spaces that are culturally hybrid and are seen as a theatre for radical action. In this paper I contend that Muslim women activists in the USA operate from geographies of borderland and while inhabiting this hybrid third space they generate digital discourses of dissent that challenge stereotypes about them. Hailing from diverse backgrounds and countries, with different cultural roots yet same belief system and faith, American Muslim women activists adapt varied resistance strategies to challenge the Muslim patriarchy and the western hegemony that has persisted to portray Muslim women as an oppressed group of people in need of saving. Tracing Muslim women activists’ emotional and experiential geographies I will look at ways in which dynamics of solidarity between them have moved beyond dichotomous divisions of global-local, global North-global South, and empire-colony. With the discussion of lives and activism of Amina Wadud, Linda Sarsour and Asra Nomani, this paper will contextualize these activists within the spaces of resistance which they inhabit, while navigating their challenges in the context of geopolitical tensions and conflicts which are their lived realities in the USA.

• “My techno friends and the climate crisis” - Lena Martinsson 

I understand technology, bodies, and capitalism as inseparable from the creation of meaning, visions, and possible futures. It is not always a smoothly co-existence. My own desire and passionate relationship to technology and my dear machines, my lap top and my phone, conflicts with the need of global transformations due to the climate crisis. My lecture will focus this conflict between the love and desire for new machines and a climate crisis which can cost us the planet we live on. The conflict is inseparable from identity and subjectivity shaped in a capitalist era where technical solutions is supposed to protect the privileged from the need to change practices and ambitions.

•  “Memeing back at misogyny” - Sama Khosravi Ooryad 

I examine the emergence of “meme-feminism” on Iranian social media, which adopts innovative tactics to combat gendered hate online. I propose the concept of “memeing back” at misogyny and numerous gendered inequalities as not only a unique feminist tactic but also a political and satirical world-building practice. With a detailed analysis of theorizations of (digital) feminist activism and mediated visual humor, I demonstrate how the adoption of memes can, through anonymity and visual community-building, extend beyond dominant forms of popular feminism to combat the pervasion of anti-feminism on Iranian social media. I further unpack how this tactic mobilizes feminist memes by utilizing shared aesthetic visualization, a feminist politics of exposure, and visual nagging as embodied and mediated interventions to critique socioeconomic inequalities impacting women-identifying individuals in Iran. On this basis, I argue for the significance of online memes and the “memeing back” tactic in advancing feminist demands under suppressive, violent, and capitalist states.

• “Digital cultures and bodies as tactics” - Mia Liinason

In contrast to the ways in which the body have been conceptualized as a multifaceted instance in contexts of feminist resistance, as a site of vulnerability and power, and as a sign or a ‘text’ filled with meaning (Sutton 2011; Gago 2020), in digital spaces, activism has been described as a disembodied and individualized activity, disconnected from material reality (Gonzales 2022). In addition, scholars have theorized digital activism as ephemeral, shortlived, fragile and with a low impact on political and social structures (Alaimo 2015; Couldry 2015; Bozarth and Budak 2017). Nonetheless, recently, as in in the example of the viral flashmob #UnVioladorEnTuCamino, a new type of digital activism has emerged across the globe. #BLM, #NiUnaMenos, #FeministFive, #MeToo, the #UmbrellaRevolution, and the #WomenLifeFreedom movement are only some examples of these new types of protests that have spread across the globe over the last decade. These developments push us to rethink conceptions of the body in digital feminist activism. This presentation will take these emergent transformations as its point of departure, and explore how the body is used as a tactic when actors put the body on the line in political struggle. Recognizing that collective protests take shape in overlapping digital and physical spaces, I discuss the advantages that appear in the mixture between the material and the virtual, in an understanding of the virtual as immanent potential or embedded possibility.