with Magdalena Eitenberger (University of Vienna, CeSCoS) 

with Sarrah Kassem (University of Tübingen)

In this talk, Sarrah Kassem will be presenting her new book "Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization". This book examines two key and contrasting Amazon platforms that differ in how they organize workers: its e-commerce platform and digital labor platform (Mechanical Turk). With access to the people who are working at the heart of these platforms, it explores how different working conditions alienate workers, and how, despite these conditions, workers organize within their political-economic contexts to express their agency in traditional and alternative ways.

with Anat Ben-David (Open University of Israel)

This talk delves into the multifaceted landscape of digital surveillance within democracies under duress. Focusing on Israel's enduring political crisis, the lecture explores the legal, economic, (geo)political, and social contexts that led to the growing justifications and normalization of state and political surveillance tools, shedding light on their implications for civil liberties and norms.

*** This lecture had to be postponed. A new date will be announced shortly. ***

with Te Taka Keegan (University of Waikato)

This lecture will cover data sovereignty, why it is important to indigenous people, and the Māori Data Sovereignty movement. It will also look at the latest example of colonisation of Māori data, the ability of ChatGPT to speak Māori, and the subsequent concerns that Māori have for the protection of Māori knowledge in the new environment of Generative AI.

*** This lecture had to be postponed. A new date will be announced shortly. ***

with Sarah Wadmann (Danish Center for Social Science Research)

Reflecting vast government investments over many decades, Denmark sits at the top of international comparative assessments of the digital readiness of the public sector. While the comprehensive digital infrastructure provides for more flexible interactions with government authorities for many citizens, it also poses challenges of digital inclusion. In this lecture, Sarah Wadmann will give a brief overview of the comprehensive digitalization efforts in Denmark, provide examples of how these efforts can reconfigure encounters between citizens and public authorities and discuss how challenges of digital inclusion are currently being dealt with by government authorities in Denmark.

with Astrid Mager (Institute of Technology Assessment) and Fabian Fischer (University of Applied Arts Vienna)

In this lecture, we will present our sociotechnical analysis of the so-called AMS Algorithm the Austrian public employment service tries to roll out for some time now. We will highlight its potential for socio-technical bias and discrimination, but also the challenges involved in the implementation of such a (semi)automated decision-making system into institutional practices and wider society.

with Linnet Taylor (Tilburg University) 

In the lecture Linnet Taylor will talk about the ways in which ID and fintech systems are coming together into supra-state infrastructures that pose new questions of governance. She will look at displaced and disadvantaged populations, and the ways in which they are being conceptualised as both test-subjects and new markets for these systems.

with Thomas Allmer (Paderborn University) 

Although new information and communication technologies bring direct benefits for consumers, they arrive with a high social and ecological prize. The societal costs of digital media are tremendous, though often inconspicuous and invisible. This lecture will shed light on local, national and global phenomena such as the gig economy, digital slavery and e-waste.

with Eugenia Stamboliev (University of Vienna)

This lecture will examine the role of new technologies (such as artificial intelligence) in shaping and norming affect and emotions, as well as the implications for politics and governance. It will discuss the positive and negative political perceptions of emotion and affect, the role of cognitive sciences, the political value of emotions, ethical norms, and governance issues.

with Rene König (Rhine-Waal University) 

Can you imagine a life without digital platforms? Probably not. They shape what we know about the world, how we work and connect to each other, what we buy, where we go. There can be no doubt that we live in a platform society. But what does that actually mean? How do platforms decide what or who is visible, who gets access, who is excluded? The lecture unpacks some of the underlying principles that drive platforms to provide an understanding of their impact. Pressing problems will be explained and then discussed in an interactive way.

with Katja Mayer (University of Vienna, DigiGov)

Open for Whom? The Un/intended Divides of Open Science With the digital transformation, the demand for better and broader access to scientific knowledge production has been increasingly actualised, for example through open access to scientific publications and educational materials. However, while open science is often presented as a mechanism for democratisation, it also reveals multifaceted power imbalances. Specifically, open access publishing can introduce financial challenges that may disadvantage researchers from low-resource settings. Additionally, the increasing emphasis on data availability and open-source approaches brings forth concerns about potential concentrations of knowledge and power. This talk will provide an overview of these issues and discuss the advantages and potential pitfalls of public digital infrastructures supporting open science.

with Amelia Fiske (Technical University of Munich)

AI raises pressing ethical concerns, ranging from bias, to fairness, accountability, explainability, and responsibility. Importantly, the effects of AI are not experienced equally, exacerbating social, material, and political inequalities and creating new ones. In debates over how to build ethical AI, two dominant responses have emerged: ethicists and social scientists have focused largely on principle-based approaches, and developers have focused on technical fixes for addressing problems in databases and applications of AI models. In this talk I consider some approaches for building more just, public-centered forms of AI, and introduce the embedded ethics methodology as one possibility.

with Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem (University of Pretoria)

We will consider the seeming dichotomy between a need for global regulation to ensure responsible AI governance on the one hand, and the need for diversity in drawing up such regulation. How do we find the connection between the global and the local?

with Ranjit Singh (Data & Society) 

Global North scholarship on AI ethics revolves around keywords such as bias and fairness, accountability, transparency, explainable AI, and human-centered design. A key similarity between these AI ethics keywords is that all of them are grounded in thinking about AI from a design perspective. AI is seen as a tool; it is approached as a design problem. In contrast, the conceptual vocabulary of scholars in/from the majority world (or the global south) focuses more explicitly on how these systems work for some, often at the expense of others, but not for everyone. The challenges of contending with AI are often mirrored in mundane moments of everyday life where people navigate inequities in power relations along well-recognized intersections of gender, race, class, caste, and ability. AI is treated as a part of everyday life; the core problem is not designing it but living with it. In this talk, I examine ordinary ethics of everyday experiences with processes of marginalization in the implementation of digital welfare services through India's biometric-based national identity number (Aadhaar) that manifest in exclusion.