Kamala Visweswaran (UC San Diego)

No video of talk was recorded per the speaker’s request.

The Algorithmic Turn

From today’s vantage point, we find it hard to imagine a world without algorithms and what they do for us, even as the Cambridge Analytica scandals force a reckoning with the shadow capture of large data sets and what that does to us. In this talk I pose a counter-factual for thinking about the perils of fast knowledge in slow time.

About the Speaker

Kamala Visweswaran writes in the fields of feminist theory and ethnography, South Asian social movements, ethnic and political conflict, law and human rights,  transnational and diaspora studies, and comparative South Asia/Middle East studies. She has held fellowships at the University of Chicago Humanities Institute, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies.  She is the author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minnesota, 1994) and Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference (Duke, 2010); and the editor of Perspectives on Modern South Asia (Blackwell, 2011), and Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East (Pennsylvania, 2013). Her current book under contract with Duke University Press is “A Thousand Genocides Now: Gujarat in the Modern Imaginary of Violence.”