Tag: Caitlin Heppner

Building our critical community

Thank you to all of you who have spent time this year building the critical pedagogies project with us. We know the demands that the colonial capitalist university makes on your time and are so heartened by the fact that you push back by spending time with us!

Special thanks go to Caitlin Heppner, who gave this year’s annual lecture ‘Tethered to the grid and rendered intelligible’. If you missed Caitlin’s lecture, you can now listen to it through the website here. Remember that you can always catch up on past lectures, whether as a teaching or research resource, by listening to the online archive.

Thank you also to Annapurna Menon, who led us through a critical, joyous, and restorative afternoon of zine-making last week. Annapurna’s workshop brought our year to a hopeful and energetic end.

Over the summer Dale, Jennifer, and Mrinalini will be planning next year’s readings, lectures, and workshops. If you would like to suggest topics or readings for the reading group, speakers for the annual lecture, or facilitators for the summer workshop, please do let us know in the comments. Our aim is to educate ourselves about critical practices that help us build a different kind of university than the one we have now. If you know of practices, thinkers, texts, podcasts, art, or anything else you think we should be reflecting on, please do share!

Tethered to the Grid and Rendered Intelligible: CPG Annual Lecture with Caitlin Heppner

We cordially invite you to attend this year’s annual lecture, which will be delivered by Caitlin Heppner (University of Ottawa). The lecture begins at 4 pm on June 6th, 2024.

Tickets for attending in person or via live-streaming are available to book now at: https://buytickets.at/studentpartnershipuow/1231625

Tethered to the Grid and Rendered Intelligible

Algorithmic processes are increasingly tasked with normative evaluation within state infrastructure, answering questions like: who is a criminal, where crime is likely to occur, and which family homes are safe? In answering these questions, algorithms classify and constrain subjects through the co-creation of kinds of people. This algorithmic creativity tends to bury both social construction and moral evaluation under the guise of natural classification: a cataloguing of so-called natural properties legitimized by the authority of “The Algorithm.”

In the spirit of Michel Foucault, my work aims to unveil the role of power in the algorithmic construction and control of people. I examine three algorithmic systems to demonstrate how the veiling of social and contingent classifications tricks us into believing that these kinds are natural, and therefore so too is the ordering of these kinds. The algorithmic political order is portrayed as simply the natural order of things: there can be no other way. This is the threat of the algorithmic state. By automating normative evaluation—the identification of who might be a criminal or a terrorist, of where dangerous neighbourhoods are, or of what makes a good home—we are denied the possibility of thinking and doing otherwise.

About our speaker

Caitlin Heppner is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Ottawa in Canada and a researcher at the Canadian Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Ethical Design Lab. Her co-authored in-development work includes a “Critical Research into Tech” toolkit for navigating the risks of critiquing Big Tech, a bioethics framework for the public testing of AI, and a series of storytelling modules for ethically conscientious design. This applied work is motivated by the skeptical intuition that nothing should be done simply because it has always been done.

How to find the lecture: The lecture will be held at the University of Westminster, Marylebone Campus. Full travel and access information can be found at: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/visit-us/marylebone