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X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260623T100000
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UID:312-1782208800-1782235800@leverhulmecal.webspace.durham.ac.uk
SUMMARY:The Data Interface
DESCRIPTION:23 June 2026\, Department of Sociology\, University of York \nOn 23rd June 2026\, we hosted an event at the University of York on the topic of ‘The Data Interface’. It was a free-to-attend one-day event\, with talks from leading figures and open discussion exploring the different ways data interface with the social world: from the state to the body\, from identities to economies\, from consumption to employment\, from the senses and emotions to algorithmic infrastructures and stratifications. The topic was chosen to allow the event to work across scales and contexts\, and also to bring wider social issues into the debate around data and algorithms. The speakers were invited with this in ambition in mind\, and also to facilitate dialogue on those broader developments that might extend extend beyond the event itself. The speakers selected from across disciplines and were chosen to cover a variety of cutting-edge work related to the topic. These speakers included Ayona Datta\, Olga Goriunova\, Beatrice Fazi\, Rebecca Coleman\, Addie McGowan\, Preeti Raghunath\, Ben Jacobsen and Ludmila Lupinacci. In the first session of the day\, we also invited Harrison Smith to respond to the opening talks. In total we had 41 attendees at the event\, at various career stages\, and from very different disciplinary backgrounds. The event acted as a focal point\, drawing people together around some shared and emerging interests. The outstanding quality of the talks provoked extremely engaging and lively discussion\, with questions around methods and approaches\, as well as the substantive\, conceptual and theoretical issues coming to the fore. A number of synergies and linkages between the topics began to emerge during the day\, not least around the materiality of the data interface\, which was particularly prominent. The speakers\, and the discussions too\, brought-out aspects of the experiences of data\, the infrastructures\, the categories and classifications\, as well as the histories and envisioned futures that shape the current conjuncture. We are hoping that the event will act as a spark for bringing people into the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life\, and also for continuing these and other discussion around the relations between data\, algorithms and the social world.
URL:http://leverhulmecal.webspace.durham.ac.uk/event/the-data-interface/
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260519T090000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260520T130000
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UID:167-1779181200-1779282000@leverhulmecal.webspace.durham.ac.uk
SUMMARY:Politics of Algorithmic Life Workshop
DESCRIPTION:19-20 May 2026\, Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life\, Durham \nSpeakers include:\nLauren Wilcox on War beyond the human\nBen Jacobsen on Politics of synthetic data\nJenny Edkins on Certainty and the fantasy of closure \nSign up here: Politics of Algorithmic Life Workshop – Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life – 19&20 May – Fill in form \nThe Politics of Algorithmic Life workshop is free to attend. Travel and accommodation bursaries are available for PhD students and early career researchers in precarious positions or without access to research funds. \nWhat does the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms mean for politics? At first glance it may seem self-evident that AI is transforming politics and has consequences that we would call political. When machine learning algorithms are used to select targets for military strikes or to generate probabilities for immigration enforcement\, the technologies are tangibly implicated in the exercise of sovereign political power and violence. Beneath these spectacular political effects\, are algorithmic technologies registering or even constituting new political rationalities? What underlying logics link the disparate deployment of these techniques in warfare\, at the border\, in an election\, or a political protest? Contemporary machine learning algorithms are not only used in politics but are themselves techniques of government in the broadest sense – enabling novel ways of assembling populations\, making inferences\, and even expressing political will.\nWhen Ian Hacking (2006) noted that the human sciences historically “create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before” he had in mind the “making up of people” and societies associated with statistical knowledges. This world-making power of statistical models defined a specific relationship of technology to politics in biopolitical modernity\, making possible the rationalization of politics and life through bureaucratic modes of administration (Agar\, 2003)\, governed by the rule of law (Daston\, 2022). Intuitively\, algorithms\, understood as rule-based computational procedures\, should intensify such calculative rationalities of government. But in our current conjuncture\, we see longstanding relationships between expertise and liberal government breaking down. The emboldenment of far-right and fascist movements; the violent alliances between tech companies and racist and misogynist political agendas; the colonial foreclosure of resistances and counter-movements – these have flourished in an age defined by “the AI state”.\nHow can we characterize the distinctiveness of this (geo)political environment in relation to the algorithmic technologies that underpin it? Algorithms and especially AI have become both a means of governing populations and increasingly a more autonomous end of government itself. More familiar logics of security justify state interventions into microchip supply chains\, while the spectre of total economic transformation produces distinctive political alliances between frontier research labs\, the financiers underwriting their massive capital expenditure\, and states themselves. In what ways\, then\, do the concepts and spatial arrangements of algorithms remake politics in their own image—and vice versa?\nContemporary generative AI and “task agnostic” machine learning models\, for instance\, actively subvert inherited forms of domain expertise and expert specialization so central to rational administration in favour of a multi-purpose (and multi-modal data) model that travels across disparate political fields\, seeking generalised solutions to di icult problems. As machine learning algorithms are increasingly trained on novel forms of synthetic data (an algorithm-to-algorithm political relation)\, even the concept of governing via data involves a world made by algorithms for use by other algorithms.\nWhat happens to the political categories of race\, territory\, border\, nation when these are differently configured with machine learning spatial imaginaries? How might the distinctive distributions modelled by AI and machine learning even narrow or foreclose the possibility of political futures?
URL:http://leverhulmecal.webspace.durham.ac.uk/event/politics-of-algorithmic-life/
LOCATION:Mill Hill Lane\, Mill Hill Lane\, Durham\, Dh1 3LB\, United Kingdom
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