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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB">Institute
for Culture and Society</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB">Western
Sydney University</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB">Seminar on Automation and Gender</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB">Professor Caroline Bassett, Sussex
University</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB">Associate Professor Helen Thornham,
University of Leeds</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB">Date:
Tuesday, 24 April 2018</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB">Venue:
</span><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;mso-fareast-font-family:
"Times New Roman";color:black;mso-ansi-language:EN-AU">PS-EA.1.04
(Parramatta
South campus)</span><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New
Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-AU"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB">Time:
11am-1pm</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB">Helen Thornham</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><i
style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB">Autom-data-ed
bodies and the irreconcilable</span></i></b><b
style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB"></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB">Steph
is one of the 12 young women we worked with for 2 and a half
years on a project
exploring the felt and lived impacts of the Digital by Default
agenda of the
UKs Coalition (2010-15) and Conservative (2015-) governments.
She tells us on
many occasions:<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>‘I might
as well have a
big fucking sign on my head: [It says] ‘<i
style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">On
Benefits</i>”.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB">Drawing
on the work with young women who are NEET (not in education,
employment or
training), I suggest that the increasing elision between the
datalogical and
discursive is repositioning issues of gender and class in
problematic ways. The
category of NEET is arrived at through longstanding digital
bureaucratic
processes embedded in education, social and health services that
can, through a
series of binary quantifications at the age of 16, label the
young adult ‘NEET’
(not in education, employment or training). Once the NEET status
is generated,
it is powerful both within the datalogical system and beyond it:
it has utility
and meaning across different systems and at different scales; it
creates
‘brutal expulsions’ (Sassen 2014) and inequalities.<span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB">NEET
is an algorithmically generated category, but it is also a
socio-economic
category positioned within a wider culture of gendered
neoliberalism that seeks
to construct individuals as responsible for their own status.
There is a
particular elision between the normative consensus and the
values of the
datalogical system, which we should not ignore (see also Berry
2014: 14,
Cheney-Lippold 2011: 165) – a particular convergence of the
datalogical and the
discursive. It is this, I think, that for Steph generates the
feeling of
obviously and problematically being labelled as ‘on benefits’
and I want to
suggest in this talk that this is incredibly important for two
reasons. The
first is because of what it reveals about the close correlations
between
datalogical and discursive systems. The second reason relates to
what this does
to gender, namely subsuming or even obscuring gender within a
wider datalogical
system that is also – as Steph’s experience reminds us – lived
and everyday.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB">Caroline Bassett</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><i
style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB">The
Automation of Gender </span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><i
style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB"> </span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB">The
automation <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">of</i> gender
can be taken to
concern algorithmic operation and machine learning; the
impression and learning
of gender bias: the operation of gendered divisions. Automation
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">and</i> gender meanwhile
suggests an
exploration of the relationship between processes of automation
and forms of
social discrimination or discrimination; and in response the
distinction
between feminist accelerationism and its unmarked other (an
accelerationism in
general that feminism feels the need to write against) is
germane here. Looking
back to earlier moments of the encounter between the
computational and the
cultural the ambiguity amplifies. Then gender was said to have
been automated through
its ‘becoming virtual’ – which was sometimes also taken to imply
gender’s
confusion, its final end. This is in contrast to the early case
of ELIZA, the
therapist bot, whose apparently ‘gendered’ personality was part
of why ‘she’
was (wrongly) celebrated as a marker of AI success in NLP. The
automation of gender,
in sum, is widely understood to be an intrinsic element of an
encounter between
automating machines, and human cultures; but what is really
meant by this
coupling is often left unexamined. This paper begins to redress
this neglect -
or at least to recognize the complexity of what is often taken
to be a simple
relation. My interest is partly media archaeological, but also
arises out of a
concern with the new behaviourism; I am interested in the
implications for
social subjects of the new behaviourism, and with what might be
termed,
adapting Mark Andrejevic, the <i
style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">droning</i>
of gender in new circuits of everyday life where modulation
rather than
self-consciousness is the key. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB">Speaker bios</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB">Helen Thornham</span></b><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB"> is an Associate
Professor in Digital Cultures at the University of Leeds. Her
research focuses
on gender and technological mediations, data and digital
inequalities,
embodiment, youth, space, place, and communities. She has been
led a number of
recent research projects (2012-16) investigating practices in
digital media
that are funded by the EPSRC, ESRC and British Academy. Author
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Ethnographies of the
Videogame: Narrative,
Gender and Praxis</i> (2011) and co-editor of <i
style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Renewing Feminisms</i> (2013) and <i
style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Content
Cultures</i> (2014), her forthcoming book (2018) is entitled <i
style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Gender and Digital Culture:
Between
irreconcilability and the Datalogical</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB">Caroline Bassett</span></b><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-GB"> </span><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-style:italic"
lang="EN-US">is </span><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB">Professor of Digital
Media at the University of Sussex and the Director of the Sussex
Humanities
Lab, a £3.7m research programme investigating critical digital
humanities. Her
research explores digital technology and cultural
transformation. She has
recently published work on Weizenbaum, automation and
behaviourism, and is currently
completing two projects; on anti-computing, defined as critical
response to
automation, to be published by MUP in 2019, and a collaboration
exploring
feminist technophile politics and writing (with Kate O’Riordan
and Sarah
Kember). She has published extensively on gender and technology,
critical
theories of the technological, on automation and expertise, and
on science
fiction and technological imaginaries. </span><span
style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-bidi-font-weight:
bold;mso-bidi-font-style:italic" lang="EN-US"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
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