Media Futures Hub researchers in Social Sciences Week 2021 events

Researchers from the UNSW Media Futures Hub (MFH) feature in a variety of public online events to be held as part of the Social Sciences Week 2021 (SSW2021).

 Media Futures Hub is a collection of scholars in the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at UNSW researching justice, media and emerging technologies. Social Sciences Week is a week-long series of events held across Australia each September offering insight into the impact of the social sciences on our lives. It is an initiative of several of Australia’s Social Sciences associations and is coordinated by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Details of events featuring Media Futures Hub researchers are below:

Tuesday 7 September

VIRTUAL PANEL The Future of Justice

In this digital event join author/filmmaker, Media Future Hub’s Mary Zournazi, philosopher Michael Sandel and theologian Rowan Williams to explore what concepts like gratitude and grace mean for us as individuals and societies, and how humility and love may serve us in our relationships with each other. Instead of separating secular and theological approaches, what ideas can we bring together to chart a course for the common good and a more just world?

Further details and registration link here: https://www.centreforideas.com/event/the-future-of-justice

Wednesday 8 September

VIRTUAL PANEL Emotion Inequality in Pandemic Australia

This webinar will map the emotional contours and costs of COVID-19, including various forms of suffering and solidarity, as well as the impacts of government efforts to contain the virus. Media Futures Hub Co-Director Michael Richardson will be speaking on surveillance strategies and over policing of the general public in pandemic Australia. Panellists include: Michelle Peterie, Lea Williams Veazey, Barbara Barbosa Neves, Cameron Parsell, Sukhmani Khorana and Gaby Ramia.

Further details and registration link here: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/emotion-inequality-in-pandemic-australia-tickets-165377625931

Friday 10 September

VIRTUAL PANEL Critical Race Theory: Transforming Knowledge in the Australian Social Sciences and Humanities

This virtual panel features leading Australian critical race scholars including, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Debbie Bargallie, Alana Lentin, Andrew Brooks of the Media Futures Hub and Sherene Idriss. Critical Race Theory (CRT) has had high profile media attention in both the US and Australia this year, with Sky News, the Daily Telegraph and the Australian echoing calls from the US to ‘ban’ CRT. The Senate passed a motion to ‘reject’ CRT in the national curriculum. Beyond this moral panic, Australian social science and humanities scholars are yet to fully grapple with how critical race perspectives potentially challenge and transform disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledges in a settler colonial context.

Further details and registration link here: https://socialsciences.org.au/socialsciencesweek/event/critical-race-theory-transforming-knowledge-in-the-australian-social-sciences-and-humanities/

PODCAST SPECIAL: Ask a Social Scientist - Politics of Listening with Tanja Dreher

In this Social Science Week podcast Media Futures Hub Co-Director Tanja Dreher discusses the recent ‘turn to listening’ in media studies, cultural studies and political theory. Listening is increasingly understood: as a political practice; as a critical frame; as an alternative politics; and as a contribution to justice and/or as an ethics of relation. The discussion focuses on settler responsibilities to listen in the context of First Nations sovereignties. The ‘Ask a Social Scientist’ podcast series is hosted by UNSW’s Siobhan O’Sullivan and features 10 academics from UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture.

Listen here

IMAGES OF MACHINE LEARNING SYMPOSIUM PAPERS NOW ONLINE

Images of Machine Learning was an online symposium chaired by Prof. Anna Munster and Prof. Adrian MacKenzie and was held on June 30 – July 1, 2021. Bringing together artists, cultural producers, critical AI scholars, and media and STS thinkers, the sessions critically presented processes, sensibilities, techniques and methods for understanding the operations of images in machine learning. The speakers focussed on how images are reconfiguring the political social and aesthetic conditions for visuality produced by machine learning. Collectively, they asked: how might we come to differently parse images of machine learning? 

The keynote addresses and all individual papers are available for viewing and listening on the Media Futures Hub YouTube channel. 

PUBLICATION: Kevin Witzenberger's research on EdTech publishes in leading journal

Kevin Witzenberger’s recent paper “Why EdTech is always right: students, data and machines in pre-emptive configurations” in collaboration with Prof. Kalervo Gulson is published in Taylor & Francis journal. The paper looks at the use of pre-emptive methods within education.

Pre-emption describes a system of automated knowledge creation and intervention that steers the present towards a desirable future, by building on knowledge derived from the past. Folding together temporalities makes it impossible to disprove pre-emption. It is increasingly featured within EdTech, introducing new forms of automated governance into education. This paper examines how students and EdTech come together to make pre-emption possible, not as a single event but as a normalised governance instrument. For this, we introduce Lucy Suchman’s idea of configuration to examine pre-emptive EdTech. The paper presents three openings into the configuration of students and pre-emptive EdTech. These include observations from an EdTech trade show; interviews with insiders of technology companies; and analysis of accepted papers to a learning analytics conference. We conclude the data used at the heart of pre-emptive EdTech seeks to exclude students and configures them as absent. Yet, its interventions have material consequences.

URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2021.1913181

Kevin Witzenberger is a Scientia PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His dissertation investigates forms of automated governance within education. Kevin is interested to understand the shifting power relations as tools of automated governance transform into fully automated technical systems. He also received the HDR Research Output Award for publishing in a Q1 journal from the faculty for this article.

Kevin can be reached at @KevinWtz

ONLINE SYMPOSIUM: IMAGES OF MACHINE LEARNING (June 30 & July 1, 2021)

Large image collections – from Sloan Sky Survey through to ImageNet – and their traversals through and by datasets, algorithmic functions and predictive models have become the operative ‘matter’ of contemporary AI. At the same time, machine learning assemblages have come to re-organise seeing itself as comprising processes of feature detection, convolutional accumulation of image/pixel building blocks and latent spaces.  How have artists, cultural producers and critical AI scholars engaged with the ways in which images and machine learning have come to re-configure each other? What might redeployments of image-oriented machine-learning techniques tell us about the less than predictable sensibilities of AI’s visuality? This online symposium gathers artists and producers, media and STS thinkers together to think about and discuss such issues, collectively questioning how we might come to differently parse images of machine learning.

Organised by Anna Munster (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) and Adrian MacKenzie (Australian National University, Canberra Australia) and supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project scheme.

Hosted by Media Futures Hub, UNSW.

Program

Wednesday, June 30 2021, 3-6pm AEST

Keynote by Anna Ridler, artist and researcher

Automated Dreaming: Using AI in a Creative Practise

Panel 1: Images and Machine Learning Practices: critical interventions in art and curation

Katrina Sluis, Associate Professor, Head of Photography and Media Arts, Australian National University

Kynan Tan, Independent artist and postdoctoral fellow and, ARCDP, Re-Imaging the Empirical, National Institute for Experimental Arts, University of New South Wales

Monica Monin, Lecturer, University of Technology, Sydney

Thursday, July 1 2021, 3-6:30pm AEST

Keynote by Fabian Offert, Assistant Professor, History and Theory of Digital Humanities, UC Santa Barbara 

Latent Deep Space: GANs between Art and Science

Panel 2: Images, machine learning and practices of knowledge-production

Mitchell Whitelaw, Professor, Design, Australian National University

Maya Indira Ganesh, writer and researcher, Bergruen Institute Fellow, Leuphana University, Lüneburg

Gabriel Pereira, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University

Free registration: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/images-of-machine-learning-online-symposium-tickets-156848266387

Website: https://imagesofml.ai/

CONFERENCE PANEL ON NON-HUMAN VISION

Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) Conference panel on Non-Human Vision, organized by Adam Fish, Michael Richardson, and Edgar Gomez Cruz, August 17, 2020.

MEDIA FUTURES HUB WRITING GROUP: WRITING WEDNESDAYS

The Writing Wednesdays writing sessions aim to share experiences and strategies of writing up research in media studies. The sessions provide quiet, focused company for writing. 

Each Wednesday morning we meet (online) to chat, catch up and share writing goals. The conversations are focused on ongoing media research, research methods, and writing strategies. We will then sit down for two hours of focused work time. 

Convenors: Danielle Hynes & Diana Kreemers