Hancock Lecture: Artificial figures: gender-in-the-making in algorithmic culture
Join us on 16 November for the 2023 Hancock Lecture. Dr Thao Phan from Monash University will explore how, in the making of AI systems and technologies, gender too is being made.
Digital assistants with feminised voices, deceptive female robots, all-male research groups: gender forms a fundamental part of how we imagine the systems, fields, and figures we call ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). While gender unquestionably shapes and structures scientific objects and knowledge, rarely do we consider how these phenomena have the capacity to shape gender in return. In these contexts, gender is often reduced to a predetermined, preformed category; already made rather than something that is constituted through the practice of science or technology making itself.
In her lecture, Dr Phan will examine key figures in AI’s cultural history — from foundational figures like Alan Turing and the Turing Test to cultural and commercial figures like Apple’s Siri and Amazon Echo — and will demonstrate the role the humanities can play in understanding our past and reshaping our technological futures.
Dr Phan will also outline the critical contribution fields like feminist science and technology studies (feminist STS) can make to public debates on AI, algorithmic cultures, and beyond.
Her lecture centres on questions of power, politics, and identity in today’s algorithmic culture. It asks: how are more-than-human systems reconfiguring the terms of all-too-human categories like gender, race, and class? How does gender influence how new technologies are made intelligible, mediating the expectations of a user, consumer, or audience? And finally, how might these encounters with AI reveal the artifice of gender as a system that is tied to the realm of the artificial as much as it is to nature and what we call ‘the natural’?
This event is being held in association with the 54th Annual Academy Symposium, Between humans & machines: exploring the pasts & futures of automation. To find out more and register for this special event click here.
Event details
Hancock Lecture: Dr Thao Phan, Monash University
Title: Artificial figures: gender-in-the-making in algorithmic culture
Lecture Date: 4.00pm, 16 November 2023
Venue: Kaleide RMIT Union Theatre
Return to the Hancock Lecture Website
