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Just Infrastructures Lecture: Lilly Irani, "Claiming Democracy over Digital Infrastructures" (April 28) 12-1 CST

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
College of Engineering SRI
Virtual
wifi event
Date
Apr 28, 2021   12:00 - 1:00 pm  
Speaker
Dr. Lilly Irani
Registration
Registration
Contact
Karrie Karahalios
E-Mail
kkarahal@illinois.edu
Views
2
Originating Calendar
Illinois ECE Calendar
We invite you to a talk that we believe may be of interest to many of you — by Dr. Lilly Irani from the University of California-San Diego — at the University of Illinois Spring 2021 Just Infrastructures Speakers Series.  The series addresses the ethical complications, political implications, and future directions of emerging data- and AI-driven systems.
 
 
Who:  Lilly Irani, Associate Professor, UCSD
Title:  Claiming Democracy over Digital Infrastructures
When:  April 28, 12-1 CST
Where:  On Zoom via registration at this link: https://just-infras.illinois.edu 
 
 
Abstract:
We work and live through layers of infrastructure designed and installed by companies and public agencies, often out of sight and seemingly beyond our grasp. Design justice asks us to pay attention to how these infrastructure express the assumptions of the powerful and guides us to design with directly affected communities. In this talk, I will argue that we need to go a step further to address the problem of political agency over digital infrastructures. By political agency, I mean the capacity of agents to create effects through direct and institutional action. I will motivate and elaborate this argument with two case studies: a struggle to shape public-private smart cities infrastructure in San Diego, as well as struggles to transform platform work conditions for Amazon Mechanical Turk workers.

 
Bio:
Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Redacted (with Jesse Marx) (Taller California, 2021). Chasing Innovation has been awarded the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. Her research examines the cultural politics of high-tech work and the counter-practices they generate, as both an ethnographer, a designer, and a former technology worker. She is a co-founder of the digital worker advocacy organization Turkopticon. Her work has appeared at ACM SIGCHI, New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values, South Atlantic Quarterly, and other venues. She sits on the Editorial Committee of Public Cultureand on the Editorial Advisory Boards of New Technology, Work, and Employment and Design and Culture. She has a Ph.D. in Informatics from University of California, Irvine. 
 
 
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Looking ahead, we conclude our Spring event calendar on May 5 with Sasha Costanza-Chock (MIT) discussing, "Design Justice."
And be on the lookout for our Fall 2021 Speaker Series calendar!
 
For more info, check out: https://just-infras.illinois.edu 
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