<div dir="ltr"><div>Dear friends,<br><br>Please find the CFP for the March workshop below. Shout if you see a problem (before we send it out to the known universe.)<br><br>Thanks, k<div>-----------------------</div><h1 class="gmail-title" id="gmail-page-title">Between Cyberutopia and Cyberphobia : the Humanities on the African continent in the Era of Machine Learning</h1><font size="4"><span class="gmail-date-display-single">Thursday, 7 March, 2019 - 11:00</span></font><div class="gmail-region gmail-region-content"><div id="gmail-block-system-main" class="gmail-block gmail-block-system gmail-first gmail-last gmail-odd"><div class="gmail-content"><div class="gmail-ds-1col gmail-node gmail-node-cck-event gmail-view-mode-full gmail-node-by-viewer gmail-clearfix"><div class="gmail-field gmail-field-name-body gmail-field-type-text-with-summary gmail-field-label-hidden"><div class="gmail-field-items"><div class="gmail-field-item even"><br></div><div class="gmail-field-item even"><strong><span style="color:rgb(178,34,34)"><span style="font-size:14pt;font-family:Arial;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Please complete</span></span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><span style="font-size:14pt;font-family:Arial;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"> </span></span><a href="https://goo.gl/forms/vuFFMqeTuMYYa1g62" style="text-decoration:none"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><span style="font-size:14pt;font-family:Arial;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:underline;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">this form</span></span></a><span style="color:rgb(178,34,34)"><span style="font-size:14pt;font-family:Arial;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"> if you would like to join us for this event.</span></span></strong><div class="gmail-field gmail-field-type-text-textarea-with-summary gmail-field-body"><div class="gmail-field-items"><div class="gmail-field-item">
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"> </p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><img alt="" src="https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~yuejiec/nonconvex_surface.png" style="width: 300px; height: 212px; float: left; margin: 10px;"></p><p><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">This workshop takes its focus from the upheaval in popular and scholarly understandings of the intellectual (and political) prospects of the networked planet. A decade ago advocates and precocious users were celebrating the levelling, democratic and disruptive possibilities of the Internet, and of social media platforms in particular. Today an elaborated loathing of these technologies and their political effects -- succinctly captured by the Channel 4 series Black Mirror -- has become common and politically compelling. Popular and scholarly disillusionment with the promises of the network society is now close to self-evident, and the subject of daily reports in the major international newspapers. Much more difficult to assess is the critical and political power of the dystopian critique of cybernetics (of which Black Mirror is only the most recent compelling example) that emerges from the humanist tradition. In this workshop we propose an assessment of these two movements, and their mutual engagement, in the special circumstances of the African university.</span></p>
<p> </p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">The combination of ubiquitous social media, feedback-centred devices and the sorting and predictive techniques of machine-learning, now released from the old constraints on data-processing, seems to present an existential danger to the long-established habits of disciplinary enquiry in the humanities. These carefully engineered features of the global network affect young and old alike. An explosion of source materials -- to focus only on the most obvious problem -- has been combined with a technological order of continuous distraction, where user-produced data (much of it in text form) has become the key profit-driver for the wealthiest firms in the world. In this new global economy, and in the simplest formulation, it is the absence of uninterrupted time that makes the spontaneous development of the post-Renaissance ethic of self-directed reading increasingly untenable. It is this concern that drives the deep and persuasive pessimism about the production, consumption and meanings of digital content, and devices, that now dominates the humanities.</span></p>
<p> </p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">In this workshop we will focus on the intellectual and philosophical claims of machine learning as both a subject of humanist enquiry and as the key set of skills and technologies shaping the workings of the network society. Precisely because the field is concerned with the engineering of consciousness the history and contemporary debates in machine learning are philosophically sophisticated, richly informed by the old core problems of humanism, and many of the key technological claims are evaluated, within the engineering disciplines, using the old philosophical arguments. The most influential and persuasive scholarly accounts of the current state and future prospects of artificial intelligence are those that take this history of philosophical and institutional conflict as a guide to its future. Likewise it is the researchers working in this field -- especially the youngest researchers -- who are most alert to the potential for the new technologies to renew and entrench the oldest structures of inequality and preoccupied with developing automated remedies. It is important to acknowledge that this acute sensitivity to the philosophical and political critique of machine learning gives the humanities unusual leverage in contemporary debates.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"> </p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">These questions are, we believe, especially acute on the African continent. There is, already, a long list of the well-articulated political and intellectual dangers for Africans that follow from the development of generalised tools of machine learning. The most obvious derive from the dense, hidden and ingrained structures of racism. There are also problems of bias that result from the absence of high-quality training datasets -- for example of African names or facial images or words. A third obvious risk is that AI will exaggerate the already existing brutal deficits of infrastructure – of high-speed network connections, reliable power supplies, data processing centres and, especially, of human expertise. Many experts worry that the growing power of the centres of artificial intelligence in the United States and China – and the global monopoly power of a small number of firms secured by AI -- will produce a new era of data-driven extraversion and dependency that will remove the decisive philosophical and political deliberations from the continent. And there is the intractable problem of formal work itself in the face of a global movement to automation. A less obvious and thus controversial question for the humanities on the African continent and abroad is whether these new tools will support insidious and powerful infrastructures of social ordering. Companies that specialise in the technologies of surveillance and social scoring that the Chinese state is fostering have already found easy accommodation in the African countries -- including Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda -- that share a common vision of bureaucratic control and surveillance and weak privacy laws. As the wealthiest societies in the Americas, Europe and Asia have begun over the last two years to propose meaningful regulation of the digital economy, some of the most influential figures are arguing that the unrestricted, and welcoming, economies on this continent can serve -- like China thirty years ago -- as an unregulated laboratory of networked innovation. This is the second troubled, concern that drives heated debates.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"> </p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">After several decades of naive optimism the humanities have reached a moment of bad-tempered critical reflection that offers productive insights into the strengths of the disciplines, the priorities for the future and opportunities that may still be realised in the networked society. These questions have particular urgency on the African continent where the weakness of the humanities, the limits of regulatory constraint, the offshoring of data-processing, and elites’, donors’ and states’ enthusiasm for automated tools of surveillance and social ordering suggest the possibility that the networked dystopia that is much worried about in the rich countries may first take form here. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">In this workshop we invite proposals for papers that consider the following or related problems:</span></p>
<ol dir="ltr"><li style="list-style-type:decimal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;line-height:1.38;margin-top:12pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">What can we learn from the intellectual history and philosophical debates within the fields of artificial intelligence about the prospects of these technologies and their relationships with the humanities? What exactly do we mean by the well-worn popular descriptions of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Cybernetics?</span></li><li style="list-style-type:decimal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Does the universal distribution of attention-mining social media represent an inescapable existential danger to the (often unconscious) intellectual habits on which the humanities have been established?</span></li><li style="list-style-type:decimal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Does the development of ubiquitous and automated scoring -- of either the Chinese or American kind -- subvert the normative and political ambitions of the core disciplines of the humanities -- of philosophy, political studies, religion, literature?</span></li><li style="list-style-type:decimal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Conversely, are the grand -- and obviously naive -- claims currently being made about the social and political implications of machine learning especially vulnerable to dystopian humanist critique?</span></li><li style="list-style-type:decimal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Will the universally distributed network, and the open-sourcing of the tools and platforms of machine learning, strengthen or weaken African universities and research, and the humanities disciplines within them?</span></li><li style="list-style-type:decimal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:12pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">What opportunities and remedies are available for those who seek to disrupt the ordering and extractive logics at work on the network? Can we use the same -- or similar -- technologies to achieve contradictory ends?</span></li></ol><h2 dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:12pt;margin-bottom:12pt"><span style="font-size:16pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Proposed panels</span></h2>
<ul dir="ltr"><li style="list-style-type:disc;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">What is Machine Learning ? History, technology politics</span></li><li style="list-style-type:disc;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">What is the relationship between the Humanities and Machine Learning?</span></li><li style="list-style-type:disc;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Automating African Authoritarianism and the Alternatives</span></li></ul><h3 dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:16pt;margin-bottom:4pt"><span style="font-size:14pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(67,67,67);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">The second day of this workshop will be devoted to the assessment of proposals for funding from the </span><a href="https://wiser.wits.ac.za/page/programme-african-digital-humanities-2018-2023-13069" style="text-decoration:none"><span style="font-size:14pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(17,85,204);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:underline;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Programme of African Digital Humanities</span></a><span style="font-size:14pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(67,67,67);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">.</span></h3></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div style="text-align:left">-------<br>Keith Breckenridge <b><span style="color:rgb(153,0,0)">W I S E R</span></b><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)"> - The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand | Pbag 3, PO Wits, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2050 |<font size="2"> Phone +27(0)11-7174272 | </font></span><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)">Web</span>: <font size="2"><a href="http://wiser.wits.ac.za" target="_blank">wiser.wits.ac.za |</a> <a href="http://goo.gl/nJKK5N" target="_blank"><i>Biometric State</i>, CUP, Sept 2014</a> | Co - Editor, <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=AFH" target="_blank">Journal of African History</a>.<br></font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>