[csaa-forum] Seminar on Automation and Gender

[Ned Rossiter]

Institute for Culture and Society
Western Sydney University

Seminar on Automation and Gender
Professor Caroline Bassett, Sussex University
Associate Professor Helen Thornham, University of Leeds

Date: Tuesday, 24 April 2018
Venue: PS-EA.1.04 (Parramatta South campus)
Time: 11am-1pm

Helen Thornham
Autom-data-ed bodies and the irreconcilable

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:  ‘I might as well have a big fucking sign on my head: [It says] ‘On Benefits”.

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.

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.

Caroline Bassett
The Automation of Gender

The automation of gender can be taken to concern algorithmic operation and machine learning; the impression and learning of gender bias: the operation of gendered divisions. Automation and 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 droning of gender in new circuits of everyday life where modulation rather than self-consciousness is the key.

Speaker bios
Helen Thornham 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 Ethnographies of the Videogame: Narrative, Gender and Praxis (2011) and co-editor of Renewing Feminisms (2013) and Content Cultures (2014), her forthcoming book (2018) is entitled Gender and Digital Culture: Between irreconcilability and the Datalogical.

Caroline Bassett is 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.

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Ned Rossiter
Professor of Communication
Institute for Culture and Society / School of Humanities and Communication Arts
Western Sydney University
Parramatta Campus
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith NSW 2751
Australia






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