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The Limits of Identity: How Race and Gender Constructs in Biometric Technology Narrow Who We Are

3D-rendered human face with a web of data points that capture and map human facial features with precision, showcasing the intersection of technology and identity.
Brittany Fields March 18, 2025
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This article provides a brief look into the ways identity can be constrained with regard to biometric technology.  It discusses technological limitations where biometric identification systems may fail to represent a person’s full identity, including bias in recognition as well as the inability to capture complex and changing human characteristics.  It also touches on political dimensions, where legal systems and governments may place limits on how identity is recognized and documented, particularly in the case of gender recognition. (read more...)

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Two hippos on the grassy banks of the river

Experimental Methodologies for Listening to the Present: An Interview with Alejandra Osejo-Varona

Alejandra Osejo-Varona, Karina Aranda, nicolás gaitán-albarracín March 13, 2025
Este contenido también está disponible en español.
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This Women’s History Month, we are publishing an interview with Colombian anthropologist Alejandra Osejo-Varona (Rice University). Her ethnographic work is influenced by Latin American feminist epistemologies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), so we thought it would be valuable to share her perspective on multimodal ethnographic research. Nicolás Gaitán-Albarracín and I conducted this interview via videoconference. In this conversation, Osejo-Varona tells us how she collaborates with different scientific communities to explore new ways of listening to the beings that live underwater. Technologies such as microphones, hydrophones, algorithms, model maps, and spectrograms allow us to imagine other ways of relating with the species living in rivers, especially those cataloged as “invasive” in socio-ecosystems of Colombia. These new methodological approaches open forms of collaborative and interdisciplinary work to construct new sensitivities and empathies capable of envisioning other human and non-human worlds. (read more...)

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The Politics of Civic Education 

Elif Memis March 11, 2025
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Cast Your Vote (CYV), a civic education game, aims to teach conscious voter behavior to youth, simulating a fictional election campaign. Reflecting on the relationship between humans and technology, I argue that both curriculum design and the educational software the curriculum informs are political. Critically analyzing CYV’s scenario, I discuss how representation politics shape CYV’s civics curriculum and the gameplay it provides. Focusing on CYV creators’ inclusion and exclusion decisions on societal issues, I offer some suggestions to produce a more inclusive and relevant educational experience for marginalized communities.   (read more...)

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What are “Walking Simulators,” Ethnographically?

Yifan Xia March 4, 2025
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“Gaming” is conceptually branching out. It “virtually” overlaps with museum visuals and actively engages with lived cultures and heritage. Both developments point out that perhaps even with the prevalence of computation, there is still something we can learn from sociocultural anthropology, especially the anthropological ways of writing cultures – ethnography. (read more...)

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Responsible AI in Action: Beyond Policy Regimes

Cheryl Hagan February 27, 2025
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Work on Artificial Intelligence writ large has moved past laudatory excitement to one of vast critique. This recent scholarship has demonstrated the various racist and sexist biases embedded within algorithmic systems (Benjamin, 2017; Browne 2015; Noble, 2018). More recently, scholarship into AI has sought to define AI as part of longer histories of colonial exploitation and extraction (Couldry and Mejias, 2019). Others have argued for postcolonial or decolonial AI which is “about interrogating who is doing computing, where they are doing it, and, thereby, what computing means both epistemologically (that is, in relation to knowing) and ontologically (that is, in relation to being)” (Ali 2016, 20). Geographer Louise Amoore also defines AI not as the objective and all-encompassing thinking machine AI proponents claim, but instead an always already partial aperture. This method of doing ethics is not about claiming transparency, but about acknowledging the ways in which ethics, for humans and algorithms, is always emplaced and partial (Amoore, 2020). (read more...)

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The Cyborg is Dead: The Node Rises

Katrina Nicole Matheson February 25, 2025
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This essay uses the demise of the cyborg candidate to challenge faith in social constructionism without an examination of how authenticity sows meaning.  I begin by revisiting the cyborg as an entry point to feminist social science, drawing a connection to Kamala Harris as the cyborg’s political manifestation, and placing both in an epistemic context defined by algorithmic logic.  In part 2, I propose the node as a theoretical successor to the cyborg, however representative of a new way of thinking that I call matrix thinking. (read more...)

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Two screenshots depicting two different technical error messages from the July 2024 Cloudstrike Outage. The image on the left is of the Sainburys mobile landing page and the image on the right is from the Ladbrokes mobile site.

Major Internet Outages are Getting Bigger and Occurring More Often: A Reflection on the CrowdStrike IT Outage

A.R.E. Taylor February 18, 2025
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At 09:30 a.m. BST on 19 July 2024, IT systems around the world suddenly ground to a halt. Without their computer systems, pharmacies, doctors’ surgeries, airports, train providers, and banks, among other critical services, were unable to operate. Websites and entertainment platforms went offline. Supermarket deliveries were cancelled. Retailers’ payment systems were unable to process transactions. Emergency services were disrupted. TV Channels were unable to air. (read more...)

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Several prototypes are against a black background. Some have soft plastic casing.

Disruptions in Grace: Embracing Mutation and Disability in Nature through Art

Emery Vanderburgh February 6, 2025
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Gripping tightly onto a walking stick, I slowly and precariously make my way through the forest. Careful not to catch my prosthetic foot on the exposed roots, I’m scanning the ground when I see a disfigured branch, gnarled, with burls and nodules on it. These masses—called “galls”—are a common growth mutation that can be caused by various factors: bacteria, insects, and rapid changes in weather. I grew up on a fruit tree farm, so I’ve seen this before, but a different familiarity, like a kinship, spurred me to take the branch home. I soon became obsessed with the idea of “tree tumors” and the aesthetics of mutation in nature as a beautiful and intriguing expression of disease and disability. They evoked memories of the way seeing my medical scans eased the abject fear of my cancer – even though the scans felt alien and depersonalized from me, they offered a concrete visual anchor that demystified my diagnosis. (read more...)

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