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Hi! I'm a Professor of Gender & Society at Linköping University, and currently working in a WASP-HS project on care & robots and one on synthetic data. I also run the WASP-HS graduate school. I'm super happy so many of you wanted to take a course on STS for autonomous systems and AI! Please use the spaces to the right to introduce yourself and tell everyone a bit about your PhD research.

See you in Norrköping!

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All activities except study visits are in the Room Götaplatsen in Vasa House 2. Entrance from Vera Sandbergs Allé 8 at Chalmers University.

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Room: Room Götaplatsen in Vasa House 2.

You think you have agency. Think again. This session problematizes how we think of agency as something to be had/possessed, as particularly human, and as singular.

Johnson, Jim [Latour, Bruno]. (1988) “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems 35, no. 3: 298–310. https://doi.org/10.2307/800624.

Barad, K. (1998) "Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality". Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 10: 2 87-128.

Suchman, Lucille Alice (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Chapter 13 and 15

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Room: Jupiter 322 Lindholmen den 16/9 kl.14-18. https://maps.chalmers.se/#ec71ff2a-0477-4729-bfcb-606fd2cf8154

In this session, we will map the evolution of STS, highlighting key readings and seminal concepts that have shaped this diverse field. Our exploration will be grounded in a recognition of the socio-technical assemblages and infrastructural underpinnings that make scientific and technological practices possible.We will draw a map of the foundational work that has critically examined how scientific knowledge and technological systems are constructed, maintained, and transformed.

Winner, Langdon (1980) Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus 109(1):121-136

Haraway, Donna. 1987. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Australian Feminist Studies 2 (4): 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.1987.9961538.

Cohn, Carol. 1987. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12 (4): 687–718. https://doi.org/10.1086/494362.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1990. “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions.” The Sociological Review 38 (1 Supplement): 26–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1990.tb03347.x.

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Also: check out my Robot Meets Pet TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@robot_meets_pet

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🐱🤖The Robot Cat🤖🐱 (@robot_meets_pet) TikTok | Watch 🐱🤖The Robot Cat🤖🐱's Newest TikTok Videos

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🐱🤖The Robot Cat🤖🐱 (@robot_meets_pet) on TikTok | 140 Likes. 75 Fans. What happens when pets meet a robot?

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19:00 Dinner at Deg (covered by WASP-HS)

Please email email graduate.school@wasp-hs.org by Monday 9/9 with your choice of pizza. See menu here: https://www.deggoteborg.se/

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An in-person, three day course in Gothenburg. Students should do the reading in advance.

Points: 3 HP

When/where: 16-18 September, 2024 (3 days, lunch-to-lunch), in Glothenburg

Teachers: Francis Lee and Ericka Johnson

Participant limit: 30

Examination: Implosion presentation day three (Please prepare this ahead of time, using your research as viewed through the readings).

Interested? Send an email to francis@francislee.org or ericka.johnson@liu.se or describing what you are studying and how far along you are.

Register for the course here:  https://wasp-hs.org/sts-methods-for-autonomous-systems-and-ai/

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Monday, 16 September, 2024

13.00-14:00: Session 1: Visit to Social Drones Project

14.15-15:00: Session 2: A brief history of STS (Ericka & Francis)

15:00-15:30 Coffee

15:30-17:30 Session 3: Ethnographies of digital systems (Francis)

19:00 Dinner at Deg

Tuesday, 17 September, 2024

8:30-10:30 Session 4: AI artefacts have politics (Ericka)

10:30-11:00 Coffee

11:00-13:00: Session 5: Infrastructures and Classification (Ericka)

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:45 Session 6: The making of natural realities (Ericka & Francis)

(Coffee, taken with us on the go...)

16:00-17:30 Session 7: Relational agency

Free evening (in case you haven’t finished your implosion…)

Wednesday, 18 September, 2024

8:30-12:00 Session 8 (Examination): Present your implosion for the group

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https://wasp-hs.org/

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Join the e-mail list: https://groups.google.com/g/sts_sverige
More info here: https://swests.org/

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Hi! I'm a PhD student of Science and technology didactics at Linköping University. My research is focused around sociotechnical imaginaries of AI in education, with a special interest in teachers' views and opinions. I am very much looking forward to getting a broader understanding of STS, which is the theoretical basis for sociotechnical imaginaries.

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Hello! I am a PhD student in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm. My research centres around digitalisation and datafication in the Swedish Public Employment Service, specifically how different technological systems are mediating interactions with social actors. I'm very excited about this course, since my dissertation project is closely related to STS and I'm planning on using the implosion method with undergraduate students this autumn. Looking forward to seeing you all soon!

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Room: Room Götaplatsen in Vasa House 2.

This session highlights that mathematical approaches to fairness are impossible, which points us to the importance of the situatedness of AI. And then the necessity of doing ethnographic and relational research on digital systems. An important takeaway is that we should go from analyzing “Machine Ethics,” where the algorithm is in focus, to analyzing how power is enacted with algorithmic systems.

Angwin, Julia, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner. 2016. “Machine Bias: There’s Software Used across the Country to Predict Future Criminals. And It’s Biased against Blacks.” ProPublica. 2016. https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing.

Sumpter, David. “Impossibly Unbiased.” In Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives, 59–70. London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018.

Mehrabi, N. et al. 2021. A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning. ACM Comput. Surv. 54, 6, Article 115 (July 2021), 35 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3457607

Politics of research ’Show your work’ Chapter 7 i D’Ignazio & Klein 2019 Data Feminism. MIT Press. Tillgängligt här: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4660/Data-Feminism

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Hello! I am a PhD student and a member of the Responsible AI group at the department of Computing Science at Umeå University. My research is in AI explainability and interpretability. In particular, I am interested in considerations for how explainability may both support and undermine human control over AI systems. I am very excited for this course and meeting everyone in Gothenburg soon!

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Hello! I'm at IBL at Linköping University, looking into what competencies or literacies might be relevant for K-12 teachers working with AI. This involves looking at teachers' professional practice and agency in relation to these "tools", and I think some STS-perspectives might provide useful insights!

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hi im lux,, i get weird with robots https://luxmiranda.com

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Hi! I am a PhD student in Ethnic and Migration Studies at Linköping University. My research concerns the implementation, use, and combination of A.I. and biometric surveillance in policing with a particular focus on facial recognition technologies. I am very excited about the course since STS and A.I. is not among the most commonly studied areas in my department. Hence, I look forward to learning more and to seeing you all soon.

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Hi! I'm at the STS division at Chalmers University of Technology. In my research, I've been driven by curiosity about how AI changes the understanding of life in life sciences. To address this, I've conducted an ethnography of researchers at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who develop AI to search for life in outer space. My work is situated in the field of STS so I really look forward to this course!

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Study Visit to The Rise of Social Drones

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Study Visit to The Rise of Social Drones

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Laboratory visit to the WASP-HS project "The Rise of Social Drones"

Lindholmsplatsen 1, building Kuggen. Floor 3

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Hi! I am Mafalda, a PhD student at Chalmers University of Technology. I am funded to study social drones from a design perspective -- but have a deep dislike of the technology. My work is focused on ways of knowing within design, in particular somaesthetics and first-person perspectives.

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1. Register for the course:  https://wasp-hs.org/sts-methods-for-autonomous-systems-and-ai/

2. Look over the whole schedule, and send us an email if anything is unclear.

3. Download the readings. The readings are available in the dropbox. See link to the right. The password is "STS 2024".

4. Start reading! The course is based on your readings.

5. Make a presentation of yourself and add it to the right.

6. Choose your pizza for the dinner on day 1, and email graduate.school@wasp-hs.org by Monday 9/9. See menu here: https://www.deggoteborg.se/

7. Show up in Göteborg and explore with us!

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Room: Room Götaplatsen in Vasa House 2.

Technology is politics with different means. This session focuses on the intertwining of technology, power, and AI drawing on historical and contemporary cases. It highlights the need for paying attention to the politics and practices of infrastructures and technology. Can technologies be inherently political?

Cockburn, Cynthia. “The Material of Male Power.” Feminist Review, no. 9 (1981): 41–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/1394914.

Hicks, Mar (2019) Hacking the CIS-tem. Transgender Citizens and the Early Digital State. IEEE Anals of the History of Computing https://marhicks.com/writing.html

Crawford, Kate. Atlas of Ai: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. Chapters 1, 3, & 4.

Benjamin, R. 2019 Coded Exposure, Chapter 3 in Race After Technology Polity (part 1, pgs. 97-113).

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Room: Room Götaplatsen in Vasa House 2.

A basic assertion of many critical social science fields is that the nature/culture divide is both a false dichotomy and - more importantly - a dichotomy that is leveraged in debates for particular ideological purposes. What can we do with research which demonstrates this? How can we leverage a blurring or entanglement of these two concepts in our own work?

Collins, Harry M., and Trevor Pinch, eds. “A New Window on the Universe: The Non-Detection of Gravitational Radiation.” In The Golem: What You Should Know About Science, 2nd ed., 91–108. Canto Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107295612.010.

Latour, Bruno. “The ‘Pédofil’ of Boa Vista.” Common Knowledge 4, no. 1 (1995): 144–87.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy.” Social Text, no. 11, Winter 1984/1985 (1984): 20–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/466593.

Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru (2018). “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classiﬁcation,” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81:1-15.

D’Ignazio & Klein 2019 What gets counted counts’ Chapter 4 in Data Feminism. MIT Press. Tillgängligt här: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4660/Data-Feminism

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Hi! I am a PhD candidate and a member of the DIGSUM research group at the department of Sociology at Umeå University. I am a part of the project Cyborg Politics: Artificial agents in online democratic deliberation and my dissertation topic relates to how bots are constituted directly and indirectly in a variety of settings.

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Room: Room Götaplatsen in Vasa House 2.

This exercise has been inspired by Dumit, J (2018) Writing the Implosion Cultural Anthropology 29(2) 344-362 http://doingsts.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/dumit-implosion.pdf)

Step 1: Identify an object you want to implode – a very concrete one – from your research project.

Step 2: Implode it: Ask questions about “how is the world in ‘it’ and how is ‘it’ in the world” (see Dumit (2018) 351-4 for inspiration, if you want). Think through questions about different dimensions of its entanglement – labour, professional, epistemological, material, technological, contextual, political, economic, textual, biological, historical, educational,  mythological, symbolic… (if you want to read more on implosion, see*)

Step 3: Map your answers – literally. Make a visual diagram that you can show to the class when you present this (feel free to use paper and coloured pens, or presentation software, or take inspiration from this article: Crawford, K. and V. Joler (2018) Anatomy of an AI system, (https://anatomyof.ai)

Step 4: Think about the areas you have mapped. Then think about the spaces between them. Reflect in writing and for the class discussion on how (methodologically) you would be able to say something about the spaces that are now blank. What is missing from your study, and how would you address it?

Step 5: Present it during the last session of the course.

* on implosion: see: Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™. Feminism and Technoscience (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p.12.

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Hi everyone! I am a PhD student at Tema Genus at Linköping University. I am working within the project called 'Operationalising Ethics for AI' and here I will be working with Explainable AI (XAI). Not sure what the scope of my research will be quite yet as Im currenty in the process of formulating a research proposal but Im looking forward to draw a lot of inspiration from the course contents and discussions with you all :) See you soon!

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Hi! I'm an Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Chalmers University. I lead a WASP-HS project on scientific knowledge production with AI. I'm so excited that you want to come explore the power and politics of science, technology, and AI with us!

You can find me here:

- https://francislee.org

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Hi! I'm at UMU, exploring digital health technologies from a patient-centric perspective. I come from a Design+HCI background, and have been interested in interdisciplinary health/medical research. My current projects examine the role and relevance of participatory and collaborative methods that make use of self-tracked data and AI/ML tools as design materials, for developing novel preventive physiotherapy interventions.

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Room: Room Götaplatsen in Vasa House 2.

Often technologies - especially digital ones - rely on classification systems in their development and functionality. However, in their use these technologies then reify and reproduce those systems of classification. Yet classification systems have histories (not seldom ones that make us feel uncomfortable) and produce/reproduce power structures (sometimes problematic ones). How can we approach this analytically in existing technologies and take responsibility for the power of classification structures in our work with new technologies?

Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Intro + apartheid chapter

M’chark, Amade, Shramm, K. and Skinner, D. (2013) Topologies of Race: Doing territory, population and identity in Europe. ST& HV 39(4):468-487

D’Ignazio & Klein 2019 The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves’ Chapter 6 in Data Feminism. Tillgängligt här: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4660/Data-Feminism

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The password is "STS 2024".

Difficulties? Email francis@francislee.org.

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Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!