Coding While Black: Artificial Intelligence, Computing, and Data in a Racialized World with Charlton McIlwain and Stephanie Dinkins
WHERE:
Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts
Washington Place New York, NY , USA
WHEN: Monday, February 26, 6:30pm — 8:30pm
Race is inscribed in every detail of our lives, determining where and how we live, speak, write, move, sense and encounter one another. So it stands to reason that the technologies that mediate, as Ta-Nehisi Coates might say, “between the world and me,” are also generated by the constraints and expectations of race. In this conversation, Charlton McIlwain (Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt and co-author of Beyond the Hashtags: Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice) and Stephanie Dinkins(Artist and Associate Professor of Art at Stony Brook University whose practice sits at the nexus of artificial intelligence (AI) and socially engaged practice)discuss what artificial intelligence, big data, hashtags, Internet memes, and digital assistants tell us about being Black in the 21st century — and what they might portend for our future.
Charlton McIlwain is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and human Development. His recent work focuses on the intersections of race, digital media, and racial justice activism. He recently wrote Racial Formation, Inequality & the Political Economy of Web Traffic, in the journal Information, Communication & Society, and co-authored, with Deen Freelon and Meredith Clark, the recent report Beyond the Hashtags: Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice, published by the Center for Media & Social Impact, and supported by the Spencer Foundation. He is currently working on the book Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. He also founded the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies to promote innovative work at the intersections of race and new media technologies. You can read more about his work here.
Stephanie Dinkins is an artist and professor at Stony Brook University interested in creating platforms for ongoing dialog about artificial intelligence as it intersects race, gender, aging and our future histories. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to develop deep-rooted AI literacy and co-create more culturally inclusive equitable artificial intelligence. Her art is exhibited internationally at a broad spectrum of community, private and institutional venues by design. She is the 2016/17 Artist-in-Residence at NEW INC, a cultural incubator supporting innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship across art, design, and technology. Dinkins holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is also an alumna of the International Center of Photography, the Independent Studies Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Artist in the Marketplace Program of the Bronx Museum of Art.
Are the Benefits of Urban Greening Equitably Distributed and Perceived?
WHERE:
1 Washington Place
5th Floor New York, NY 10003
WHEN: Tuesday, January 10, 12:30pm — 2:00pm
We are excited to be hosting an informal seminar with Isabelle Anguelovski from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona on January 10 here at the Urban Democracy Lab. Her recent work on environmental gentrification, which you can view here, intersects beautifully with our Democratizing the Green City Initiative. Melissa Checker will be our interlocutor.
WHERE:
Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall
West 12th Street New York, NY , United States
WHEN: Wednesday, April 12, 4:00pm — 5:30pm
How did the Brazilian government of President Dilma Rousseff reconcile its commitment to provide ‘social and welfare rights’ and ‘balance the budget?’ When the country’s economy was growing at record rate, this tension between ‘social equality’ and ‘fiscal authority’ remained manageable and benefited citizens from all walks of life and across the political spectrum. However, following the 2015 economic debacle, it became exceedingly difficult for President Rousseff’s government to deliver on both. In response to this situation, politicians and citizens alike became politically factionalized, socially polarized and increasingly intolerant and uncivil in their everyday interactions, even among family members and long-time friends.
To defuse these and other socio-economic and political problems, President Rousseff’s government implemented a series of wide-ranging reforms, including trimming some of the social programs that had provided impoverished citizens (one in four) with new opportunities. During her talk, President Rousseff will discuss the challenges that her government faced, its accomplishments and limitations, some of the difficult decisions and choices that it made and how these, in turn, have alleviated some problems while at the same time generating new ones that have yet to be resolved.
In recent years “leaderless” social movements have proliferated around the globe, from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, the Americas, and East Asia. Some of these movements have led to impressive gains: the toppling of authoritarian leaders, the furthering of progressive policy, and checks on repressive state forces. They have also been, at times, derided by journalists and political analysts as disorganized and ineffectual, or suppressed by disoriented and perplexed police forces and governments who fail to effectively engage them. Activists, too, struggle to harness the potential of these horizontal movements. Why have the movements, which address the needs and desires of so many, not been able to achieve lasting change and create a new, more democratic and just society? With the rise of right-wing political parties in many countries, the question of how to organize democratically and effectively has become increasingly urgent.
Drawing on ideas developed through the well-known Empire trilogy (co-written with Antonio Negri) Michael Hardt, offers a timely proposal in Assembly (2017) for how current large-scale horizontal movements can develop the capacities for political strategy and decision-making to effect lasting and democratic change.
Co-sponsored by Urban Democracy Lab, Urban Humanities Collaborative, NYU American Studies, and NYU Metropolitan Studies
Standing Rock, The 7th Generation, & An Economics for Us All — An Albert Gallatin Lecture with Winona LaDuke
WHEN: Tuesday, April 25, 6:30pm — 8:30pm
Presenters: Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and Gallatin School of Individualized Study, co-sponsored by the Urban Democracy Lab
Indigenous Organizational Hosts: NYU Native American Indigenous Students’ Group, American Indian Community House, and American Indian Law Alliance
Winona LaDuke
The essence of the problem is about consumption, recognizing that a society that consumes one third of the world’s resources is unsustainable. This level of consumption requires constant intervention into other people’s lands. That’s what’s going on.
On the 96th day of the Trump Era, we welcome Anishinaabekwe activist, writer, and political leader Winona LaDuke to help us understand this moment in history and speak about ongoing efforts toward social, cultural, and environmental justice. LaDuke will address the interrelated issues of energy, food sovereignty, Native Rights, and an economics for the 99%. And she’ll offer ideas about what we can do to come together, address climate justice, and move North America toward a sustainable, post-carbon economy.
Tuesday, April 25, 2017, 6:30-8:30PM NYU Law School, Tishman Auditorium
Vanderbilt Hall, 40 Washington Square South
Are the Benefits of Urban Greening Equitably Distributed and Perceived?
We are excited to be hosting an informal seminar with Isabelle Anguelovski from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona on January 10 here at the Urban Democracy Lab. Her recent work on environmental gentrification, which you can view here, intersects beautifully with our Democratizing the Green City Initiative. Melissa Checker will be our interlocutor.
Are the benefits of urban greening equitably distributed and perceived? An inquiry into new dimensions of environmental gentrification in the Global North and South
Abstract: Local activists engaged in contemporary environmental justice struggles not only fight against traditional forms of hazardous locally unwanted land uses (LULUs), they also organize to make their neighborhoods livable and green. However, urban environmental justice activism is at a crossroads: As marginalized neighborhoods become revitalized, outside investors start to value them again and invest in green amenities. Yet vulnerable residents are now raising concerns about risks of environmental gentrification and displacement. Their fear is linked to environmental amenities such as new parks, remodeled waterfronts, healthy food stores, and projects branded as climate-resilient. In this presentation, I examine how recent green urban redevelopment trends translate into possibly the ultimate urban environmental justice tragedy through new dynamics of marginalization accompanying green projects or amenities. Through case studies in the Global North and South, I analyze how specific projects developed under the label or discourse of green infrastructure planning, urban sustainability planning, or sustainable local food systems, might become GREENLULUS – Green Locally Unwanted Land Uses – for socially vulnerable urban residents because such agendas and projects create new patterns of reinvestment, and often speculation, exclusion, and displacement.
Bio: Isabelle Anguelovski is a social scientist trained in urban studies and planning (PhD MIT, 2011), non-profit management (Harvard University, 2004), international development (Université de Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne, 2001), and political studies (Science Po, 2000). Her research is situated at the intersection of urban planning and policy, social inequality, and development studies. Her recent projects examine the extent to which urban plans and policy decisions contribute to more just, resilient, healthy, and sustainable cities, and how community groups in distressed neighborhoods contest the existence, creation, or exacerbation of environmental inequities as a result of urban (re)development.
Isabelle is currently a Senior Researcher and Principal Investigator at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) where she coordinates the research line Cities and Environmental Justice and directs the
Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability, a research laboratory carrying comparative and interdisciplinary research, developing new teaching methods and courses, and promoting learning on justice and inclusion for planning sustainable, green, and healthy cities. She is also affiliated with IMIM, the Hospital del Mar Research Institute in Barcelona. Since June 2016, Isabelle is coordinating the ERC funded project GREENLULUS (2016-2021), which examines the social and racial impact of urban greening in 20 cities in Europe and 20 in the United States.
Our planet is becoming one of city-dwellers. The boundaries between the “urban” and “not-urban” exist less in the present, in our lived experience, than in historical memory, literary invocation, and theoretical musings. Yet as cities and their populations expand at dramatic rates, neither urban infrastructures (such as electricity, sanitation, housing, and transit) nor political and legal systems (such as democratic inclusion and the protection of human rights) have kept the pace. Rather, our cities struggle with deepening poverty and inequality, ecological insecurity, and uneven economic development, all of which threaten our very existence. Building from Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “right to the city,” Balakrishnan Rajagopal argues that we need to look to international human rights discourse for a new language and approach to this critical moment. He also offers concrete examples of how this new orientation can work and how global social movements are offering visions for an inclusionary and sustainable urban future.
Balakrishnan Rajagopal is Associate Professor of Law and Development at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and founding Director of the Program on Human Rights and Justice at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the founder of the Displacement Research and Action Network. He is recognized as a leading participant in the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Network of scholars and is one of its founders, and is recognized as a leading global commentator on issues concerning the global South. He has been a member of the Executive Council and Executive Committee of the American Society of International Law, and is currently on the Asia Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch, the International Advisory Committee of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights and the International Rights Advocates. He is a Faculty Associate at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and has been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC, the Madras Institute of Development Studies and the Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University and a Visiting Professor at the UN University for Peace, University of Melbourne Law School and the Washington College of Law, the American University.
Co-sponsored with the Gallatin Human Rights Initiative
Cultural Criticism through Humor: Distinguished Faculty Lecture with Sayed Kashua
WHEN: Thursday, March 10, 6:30pm — 8:30pm
Co-sponsored with NYU Gallatin
Novelist, columnist, and screenwriter Sayed Kashua is renowned for using his humorous, tongue-in-cheek style to address the issues faced by Arabs in Israel. With dry wit, precise metaphor, and seemingly innocent subjects, he sheds light on the complex, sometimes despairingly painful, reality of life in modern Israel.
Sayed Kashua is the author of three novels: Dancing Arabs, Let It Be Morning, and Second Person Singular, which won the 2011 Bernstein Prize. In 2004, Kashua was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize in Literature. He is the writer and creator of the hit Israeli TV shows Arab Labor and The Screenwriter. In the satirical weekly column for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Kashua writes in Hebrew and addresses the problems faced by Arabs in Israel who are caught between two worlds. In 2009, he was the subject of the documentary Sayed Kashua: Forever Scared.
The Gallatin Distinguished Lecture Series is a forum that honors the School’s commitment to interdisciplinary study and excellence in intellectual, civic, and aesthetic endeavors. The Gallatin DFL Series features speakers whose work or practice has made an outstanding contribution in one or more of these areas.
Living Breakwaters, by the landscape architecture firm SCAPE, aims to thicken New York City’s coastline with oyster reefs in order to mitigate storm surges from rising sea levels and increasingly destructive weather patterns. Infrastructure is here imagined as a connector rather than barrier, and more specifically, as the platform upon which multiple human and nonhuman actors are set into motion and interactions are expected to evolve over time. This talk considers such an endeavor relative to both the emergent discourse of “resilient urbanism,” and a rich vein of critical practice by artists that has probed urban infrastructure, including various transformations to the contemporary city and their intended and unintended, visible and invisible, repercussions. Note: This is a brown bag lunch lecture & discussion
EMILY ELIZA SCOTT is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, and former park ranger. Her work focuses on contemporary art and design practices that engage pressing eco-geo-political issues, often with the intent to actively transform real-world conditions. Currently a postdoc in the architecture department at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), she teaches on subjects ranging from the concept of “post-nature,” to architecture in the expanded field, to the emergent physical and imaginative geographies of climate change. Her writings have appeared in Art Journal, American Art, Third Text, and Cultural Geographies among other journals and edited volumes. Her first book, Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics, coedited with Kirsten Swenson, was published by University of California Press earlier this year. She is a founding member of World of Matter (2011-), an international art and research platform on global resource ecologies, and the Los Angeles Urban Rangers (2004-), a group that develops guided hikes, campfire talks, field kits, and other interpretive tools to spark creative explorations of everyday habitats.
SHANNON C. MATTERN is an Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Her research and teaching address how the forms and materialities of media are related to the spaces (architectural, urban, and conceptual) they create and inhabit. Her most recent book, Deep Mapping the Media City (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) argues that our global cities have been mediated and intelligent for millennia. She’s a columnist for Places, a journal focusing on urbanism and landscape, where she writes about media, cities, and architecture.
On The Road From Debt to Freedom: Lecture with Ken Ilgunas
The goal was as simple and straightforward: to get out of debt as fast as humanly possible. In his travel memoir, Walden on Wheels, Ken Ilgunas lays bare the existential crisis of graduating with thousands of dollars of debt. Guided by the frugality and philosophy of Thoreau, Ilgunas narrates his journey across the country and years spent living out of a van in a Duke University parking lot. In this lecture, Ilgunas will discuss his journey and what it can teach us about the cost of higher education today.
