The Sociology and Social Anthropology Seminar Series in Lund presents: Francis Lee, Chalmers University.

The Politics and Practices of AI: Outlining an Analytical Strategy for Ethnographic Sociology in the Age of Machine Learning

In this seminar Lee will discuss a new paper on the practices and politics of classification with artificial intelligence. The paper discusses four moments with AI where the practices and politics of classification come to the fore in the design and engineering of machine learning. Drawing on insights about classification and taxonomies from Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Alain Desrosières, Geoffrey Bowker, and Susan Leigh Star the paper identifies some ways in which the politics of machine learning is constituted in practice. Lee proposes a path forward for methodological and analytical strategies that can allow the social sciences and humanities to start disentangling the complex practical, statistical, mathematical, and computational politics of machine learning. The aim is to devise a strategy that allows sociology to “stick with the trouble” of producing facts and artifacts in the age of machine learning.
 
Francis Lee is an associate professor and researcher at Chalmers University’s Division of Science, Technology, and Society who works in the interdisciplinary tradition of Science and Technology Studies. His primary research interest is focused on social and cultural aspects of digitalization and knowledge production, and his work draws on sociology, media studies, anthropology, history of science, and cultural studies. In his work he has written about knowledge production in the biosciences, epistemic standards in education, and exclusion in socio-technical processes.

All are welcome including students!

The Seminar Series

The Sociology and Social Anthropology Seminar Series (Allmänna seminariet) invites international and national researchers to present and discuss on-going research. Each presenter talks for about an hour, followed by about an hour's discussion.

Find more research seminars in this series this spring at soc.lu.se/en/research.