Discussion

Co-Opting AI: Body

10/28 Monday | 6pm

*Please note: This event is over-subscribed, and seating will be available on a first-come first-served basis. An RSVP does not guarantee a seat. Please arrive a few minutes early if you can. Doors open at 5:30PM.

This event will be live-streamed via Twitter: @nyu_ipk.

NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge and the 370 Jay Project invite you to a discussion on the body in as part of the Co-Opting AI series. Featuring Laura Forlano, Danya Glabau, Karen Levy and Mona Sloane in conversation, this event examines the intersection of AI, data and the human body. How can we understand this intersection? What are the social implications of AI technologies and data being used to monitor and control the human body? Who benefits, who is affected? How is this intersection related to structures of power and privilege? The speakers will come together to provide their expertise in AI, data, technology, the body, and inequality to consider these questions.

Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning, and National Science Foundation-funded scholar, is a writer, social scientist and design researcher. She is an Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design and Affiliated Faculty in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology where she is Director of the Critical Futures Lab. Forlano’s research is focused on the aesthetics and politics at the intersection between design and emerging technologies. Over the past ten years, she has studied the materialities and futures of socio-technical systems such as autonomous vehicles and smart cities; 3D printing, local manufacturing and innovation ecosystems; automation, distributed labor practices and the future of work; and, computational fashion, smart textiles, and wearable medical technologies. She is an editor of three books: Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press 2019), digitalSTS (Princeton University Press 2019) and From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011). She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

Danya Glabau is a Visiting Industry Assistant Professor and Interim Director of the Science and Technology Studies program in the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Danya’s work is centered in feminist STS and medical anthropology, including work on food allergies, medical activism, cyborgs and feminist cybercultures, and the digital health economy. She is the author of numerous articles about digital health for the online tech and culture magazine Real Life, including Sins of the Mother and Bill of Health. Her academic writing appears in Medicine Anthropology Theory, Science as Culture, and the Journal of Cultural Economy. Her book-in-progress, Reproducing Safety: Food Allergy Advocacy and the Politics of Care, examines how food allergy activism in the United States is shaped by norms of whiteness, femininity, and the nuclear family ideal. She has also been Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research since 2015 and is the Founder of Implosion Labs, LLC, an ethnography-driven research and consulting group. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Cornell University. 

Karen Levy is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, associated faculty at Cornell Law School, and field faculty in Cornell’s Department of Science and Technology Studies and Department of Sociology. She researches how rules and technologies interact to regulate behavior, with emphasis on legal, organizational, and social aspects of surveillance and monitoring. In 2019, she is a New America National Fellow and a Faculty Fellow at Cornell’s Institute for the Social Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University, where her dissertation work examined the development of legal and organizational surveillance in the United States trucking industry. She also has a JD from Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. Before joining Cornell, Karen was a postdoctoral fellow at New York University School of Law’s Information Law Institute, NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, and the Data and Society Research Institute.

Mona Sloane is a sociologist and her work examines the intersection of design and social inequality. Her current research is on AI design and policy in the context of inequality, valuation practice, data epistemology, and ethics. At IPK, Mona founded and convenes the ‘Co-Opting AI’ series. Mona completed her Ph.D. at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE scholarship) with a thesis on commercial spatial design practices. She also is a co-founder and former member of the LSE research programme Configuring Light/Staging the Social which explores the socio-technical role of public lighting in cities. Mona has published on design inequalities, interior design and atmospheres, material culture in design practice, social justice and lighting design, social research in/for design, aesthetics, design thinking, the politics of design, practitioner-academic collaboration for societal impact, and AI ethics. She has completed fellowships at UC Berkeley and the University of Cape Town. Follow her on Twitter @mona_sloane.

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Image credit: Philipp N. Hertel

This event series is so-sponsored by the NYU Tandon Department of Technology, Culture, and Society.

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