AI REUSE: Speaker Session with Dylan Mulvin

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AI REUSE: Speaker Session with Dylan Mulvin

AI REUSE: Speaker Session with Dylan Mulvin

By AI REUSE

Date and time

Thursday, October 14, 2021 · 3 - 4:30pm CEST

Location

Copenhagen Business School - Dalgas Have (Room DH.V.2.88)

15 Dalgas Have Room DH.V.2.88 2000 Frederiksberg Denmark

About this event

For the next AI Reuse speaker series session, Assistant Professor Dylan Mulvin of the London School of Economics and Political Science will join us to talk about his wonderful new book Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In (MIT Press 2021).

The session will be co-hosted by DIIS and University of Copenhagen.

Place and time

Time: October 14, 15:00-16:30 CET.

Place: Zoom (link upon registration) or Room DH.V.2.88, Copenhagen Business School, Dalgas Have 15, 2000 Frederiksberg.

To read: Chapter 1, 2 and 6.

The book is open access and you can download it here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5154/ProxiesThe-Cultural-Work-of-Standing-In

About the book

Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In

For designers of technology, some bits of the world end up standing in for other bits, standards with which they build and calibrate. These “proxies” carry specific values, even as they disappear from view. Dylan Mulvin explores the ways technologies, standards, and infrastructures inescapably reflect the cultural milieus of their bureaucratic homes. Drawing on archival research, he investigates some of the basic building-blocks of our shared infrastructures. He tells the history of technology through the labor and communal practices of, among others, the people who clean kilograms to make the metric system run, the women who pose as test images, and the actors who embody disease and disability for medical students. Each case maps the ways standards and infrastructure rely on prototypical ideas of whiteness, able-bodiedness, and purity to control and contain the messiness of reality. Standards and infrastructures, Mulvin argues, shape and distort the possibilities of representation, the meaning of difference, and the levers of change and social justice.

About the author

Dylan Mulvin is Assistant Professor of Media & Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Programme Director of the Masters in Media and Communications. He is the author of Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In (MIT 2021 open access, https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5154/ProxiesThe-Cultural-Work-of-Standing-In) and has written widely about culture, technology, and the body.

About AI Reuse speaker series

The AI Reuse research group and the Digital Transformations Platform hosts a speaker series with selected guests during the fall of 2021. We read a text by the guest speaker in advance, which will be distributed upon sign-up. We discuss questions about the politics and ethics of data and models, algorithmic ethics, public-private partnerships in AI technologies, and AI in the public sector. We would like to invite you to join us for these sessions either in-person or virtually.

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