

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, who leads the Digital Democracies Institute, will be in conversation with respondents Hannah Turner and Evelyn Wan, moderated by Wayne Modest on MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 | 16.30-18 hours CET.
On the event of the publication of Chun's most recent book Discriminating Data - Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press), as part of our Thinking With conversation series, we consider how "big data and predictive machine learning currently encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage." As a museum, with extensive histories collecting 'ethnographically,' we are interested in how notions of “discriminating data” in the contexts of the digital, which Chun works with, can inform our own collection practices—past, present, and affect how we do so in the future. More generally, in our conversation, we also engage Chun’s overarching question, "How can we release ourselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data?", in order to also ask the same question of ourselves at the museum?
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, and leads the Digital Democracies Institute which was launched in 2019. The Institute aims to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation by fostering critical and creative user practices and alternative paradigms for connection. It has four distinct research streams all led by Dr. Chun: Beyond Verification which looks at authenticity and the spread of disinformation; From Hate to Agonism, focusing on fostering democratic exchange online; Desegregating Network Neighbourhoods, combatting homophily across platforms; and Discriminating Data: Neighbourhoods, Individuals and Proxies, investigating the centrality of race, gender, class and sexuality to big data and network analytics.
Evelyn Wan is Assistant Professor in Media, Arts, and Society at the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She also conducted postdoctoral research at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society at Tilburg University. She graduated cum laude from her PhD programme with her dissertation, “Clocked!: Time and Biopower in the Age of Algorithms”, and was awarded a national dissertation prize by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation in the Netherlands in 2019. Her work on the temporalities and politics of digital culture and algorithmic governance is interdisciplinary in nature, and straddles media and performance studies, gender and postcolonial theory, and legal and policy research. Her writings have appeared in International Journal of Communication, GPS: Global Performance Studies, Theatre Journal, and International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, amongst others.
Hannah Turner (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at the UBC School of Information. She researches the historical classification and categorization of material culture; and seeks to understand the relationship between technology and the return of cultural belongings. Her first book, Cataloguing Culture (2020), is an investigation into colonial legacies in recordkeeping, documentation, and computerization in an ethnographic and natural history museum. Her more recent work looks at histories of record keeping and classification in Canadian museums. She is particularly interested in how tools and technologies of data collection rebuild colonial relations instead of ameliorate them, and focuses on institutional and community-driven projects for return and repair.