Over on Antipode’s site there’s a blog post about an intervention symposium on “algorithmic governance” brought together by Jeremy Crampton and Andrea Miller, on the back of sessions at the AAG in 2016. It’s good that this is available open access and, I hope, helpful that it maybe puts to bed some of the definition wrangling that has been the fashion. Obviously, a lot draws on the work of geographer Louise Amoore and also of political theorist Antoinette Rouvroy, which is great.
Reading through the overview and skimming the individual papers provokes me to comment that I remain puzzled though by the wider creeping use of an unqualified “non-human” to talk about software and the sociotechnical systems they run/are run on… this seems to play-down precisely the political issues raised in this particular symposium – that the kinds algorithms concerned in this debate are written and maintained by people, they’re not somehow separate or at a distance… It’s also interesting to note that a sizeable chunk of the debates concern ‘data’ but the symposium doesn’t have “data” in the title, but maybe ‘data–’ is passé… 🙂
I’ve copied below the intro to the post, but please check out the whole thing over on Antipode’s site.
Intervention Symposium: “Algorithmic Governance”; organised by Jeremy Crampton and Andrea Miller
The following essays first came together at the 2016 AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Jeremy Crampton (Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky) and Andrea Miller (PhD candidate at University of California, Davis) assembled five panellists to discuss what they call algorithmic governance – “the manifold ways that algorithms and code/space enable practices of governance that ascribes risk, suspicion and positive value in geographic contexts.”
Among other things, panellists explored how we can best pay attention to the spaces of governance where algorithms operate, and are contested; the spatial dimensions of the data-driven subject; how modes of algorithmic modulation and control impact understandings of categories such as race and gender; the extent to which algorithms are deterministic, and the spaces of contestation or counter-algorithms; how algorithmic governance inflects and augments practices of policing and militarization; the most productive theoretical tools available for studying algorithmic data; visualizations such as maps being implicated by or for algorithms; and the genealogy of algorithms and other histories of computation.
Three of the panellists plus Andrea and Jeremy present versions of these discussions below, following an introduction to the Intervention Symposium from its guest editors (who Andy and Katherine at Antipode would like to thank for all their work!).
Read the whole post and see the contributions to the symposium on the Antipode site.
