Special Presentation: Anita Say Chan

Affiliate Associate Professor Anita Say Chan will give the talk, "Data Cultures: Decentering Data Futures from Latin American Startup Ecologies."

Abstract: Accounts of Big Data as the latest global disruptor primed for universal takeover have prompted a range of critical reactions among researchers - from calls for more ”algorithmic transparency” to demands to “audit the algorithm.” While urgency has grown to make algorithms more transparent and legible via such strategies, other critical data scholars diagnose a growing fetishization and technological determinism around algorithms that has marginalized an analysis of the varied human actors, publics, and institutions around which big data ecologies diversely function and are produced. This talk thus offers an ethnographic lens into one data-driven start up - the Code Academy Laboratoria in Latin America - that has been celebrated for "transforming" women from economically-challenges areas of Latin America into employable coders in six months. Taking a cue from globalization scholarship, this project argues for the need to develop methods and analytic lenses into Data Cultures and their frictions that detours from an exclusive focus on big data as either a discrete technological system with universal impacts, or as a kind of abstracted technological force that can be read as removed from the institutional contexts and local sites in which they were developed, used and deployed. And it takes seriously the power of globalizing frameworks of Technological Universalism that project new technologies, and especially digital technologies – as imbued with inevitable impacts. Impacts that would set local sites onto a single line of evolution towards a given future that furthermore, already was projected to mirror those of Western "innovation" centers and high-tech capitals like Silicon Valley.  However powerful, and readily embraced such frameworks become, they fail to account for the vast array of means by which local sites always imagine and improvise alternatives to dominant modes of technological adoption and use - and the way that such local sites decenter the power and singularity of dominant forms.

Anita Say Chan is an associate professor in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies and a Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Her research and teaching interests include globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the "periphery", science and technology studies in Latin America, and hybrid pedagogies in building digital literacies. She received her PhD in 2008 from the MIT Doctoral Program in History; Anthropology; and Science, Technology, and Society. Her first book the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism was released by MIT Press in 2014, and was released in Spanish by the Institute of Peruvian Studies in 2018. Her research has been awarded support from the Center for the Study of Law & Culture at Columbia University's School of Law and the National Science Foundation. She is faculty affiliate at the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (I-CHASS), the Illinois Informatics Institute, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy (CHAMP). She is a 2018-19 Faculty Fellow with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities' Training in Digital Methods for the Humanities Program, and a 2017-19 Faculty Fellow with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.