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Senior Researcher, PhD Veli-Matti Karhulahti

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I was quit when I came in here, and I'm twice as quit now: a positive academic utopia

Science and research have evolved as components of humanity for a long time. From the dedicated pursuit of wisdom under goddess Athena thousands of years ago, especially Western mainstream academia has now become a global business and servant of capitalism. Researchers (you and me) are part of the publication production machine, the goal of which is to increase the revenues of for-profit publishers like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and Springer Nature. By serving this goal, we collect prestige points for our universities and ourselves, which in turns helps our universities to hire more publication-producers and extend our own lifetime as reliable manufacturers. 

It should surprise none that the present state of art, combined with rapidly developing technologies and increasing societal pressures, has led to a crisis of the academic institution. To maximize productivity and optimize costs across organizations, researchers find themselves in permanent battle royale where frequently measured outcomes define research topics, country of residency, and job security. Very logical consequences of this chaos are paper mills, predatory publishers, scientific fraud, numerous problematic research practices as well as the general lack of interest in (and/or time for) making actual scientific progress. 

All that said, in this talk I imagine a positive scientific future where things are better. I talk about what can be done to make things better, and regardless of whether that utopia is possible, I talk about why it’s worth believing in it and working for it.

University of Tampere

Matters of Solidarity: Trials, errors, and re-imaginations of public good 

This talk focuses around the question of how to imagine social justice in the current world of uncertainties. The talk draws on my own research, learning through trials and errors, exploring the ways in which digital culture may operate as a space of solidarity of strangers as well as a site of growing surveillance and inequality. 

These insights are connected to larger questions of democracy in current technologized ecosystem: political economy of platforms, mechanisms of datafication, policies and power to define participation and decision-making practices, their implications to individuals in different life situations and to societies at large. 

Bedsides my own work I draw attention to movements and manifestations of digital and anti-racist justice that pay attention to situatedness, experience and collaboration as relevant avenues for creating alternatives. 

Focusing on concepts of solidarity, imaginative politics and public good, I discuss the challenges to combine contextual robust knowledge with ideas of justice to be able to constitute possibility in the material dimensions of our life worlds.  

Deakin University, Melbourne

(Re)imagining different data futures 

Our everyday lives are shaped by the data that is produced about us (and by us) through digital technologies. With the rise of data, comes the spectre of data profiling and tracking, predictive analytics, the amplification of inequalities and the commercialisation of public-school systems. People of all ages will now need to critically engage with data as it has become central to the way we are perceived in and by the world. While critical data researchers are well aware of these issues, they are less known by the general population and those in positions of power and policymaking. So how can we encourage critical understandings of data when it is already embedded in everyday life?  

In this talk, I use the work of visual artists to inspire new interpretive frameworks that challenge the role of data and digital technologies in our lives. Artists such as Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen and Baden Pailthorpe grapple with the complexities of the increasing digitisation of everyday life. I explore works by these artists to show how creativity can be a useful method to defamiliarise, problematise and reimagine our relationship to digital technologies. In doing so, the experimental, ambiguous and indeterminate qualities of contemporary art can be used to rebut the certainties of binary code and its relationship to capital. I show how these themes have resonated through my recent projects investigating the datafication of the home and the school – in particular the importance of materialising or revealing digital infrastructures and contextualising these in people’s lives. 

Moving from exploring the critical methodologies that artists provide, I conclude the talk by drawing connections to critical data literacies. I argue that the literacies tradition can offer a powerful foundation to address issues of data justice and privacy, algorithmic bias, dataveillance, and disinformation. I conclude by providing a way of organising our responses to these persistent challenges, while also advocating for a literacies approach to evaluating digital technologies as texts for deconstruction, critical evaluation and reimagination.