Research Seminar Series: James Maguire, Kristoffer Albris, Samantha Breslin, Christopher Gad and Matthew Carey
Digital (mis)trust: Ethnographic Encounters with Computational Forms
Speakers: James Maguire, Kristoffer Albris, Samantha Breslin, Christopher Gad and Matthew Carey, Business IT Department/Computer Science Department, IT University of Copenhagen and SODAS/Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
This special issue is driven by a curiosity about the role of computational forms – practices, logics, technologies, and infrastructures – in social life and how they mediate issues of trust and mistrust: designated (mis)trust. Through a series of ethnographic encounters, its contributors describe how (mis)trust is rendered as an issue of concern by various actors as it is problematized, conceptualized, narrated, and designed for. In doing so, the papers analyse the work (mis)trust does in these settings, with a focus on the role of computational thinking within public discourses on democratic elections, the use of computational technologies in establishing bureaucratic order, the computational practices at play in the production of coding subjectivities, and the computational artefacts that assure data circulations within digital infrastructures.
Join the special issue editors and three of its contributors to discuss some of the above issues at the research seminar. After an introduction to the issue by James Maguire and Kristoffer Albris, two of the contributors will present their articles in short format. Based primarily on ethnographic fieldwork in an undergraduate computer science program in Singapore, Samantha Breslin's article explores what it means for computer science students to write ‘good code,’ and how that relates to ideas of trust in the computer science discipline. Christopher Gad's paper explores some possible inflections of the concept of trust in the ‘age of digitalization’ by examining its articulation by computer scientists doing research on digital voting and by contrasting these articulations with a Science and Technology Studies (STS) analysis of trust in the Danish voting process. Finally, Matthew Carey, who has written an afterword for the issue, will provide some closing remarks.
Read the papers here:
James Maguire and Kristoffer Albris. Digital (mis)trust: Ethnographic Encounters with Computational Forms https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2024.2407853?src=exp-la
Samantha Breslin. Computing trust: on writing ‘good’ code in computer science education. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2023.2258887
Christopher Gad. Trusting elections: complexities and risks of digital voting in Denmark. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2023.2246991
Matthew Carey. Afterword: the evolution and (mis)use of (mis)trust. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2024.2407860?src=recsys
Biographies
James Maguire is Associate professor at the IT University of Denmark.
Samantha Breslin is Associate professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
Christopher Gad is Associate professor at the IT University of Denmark.
Kristoffer Albris is Associate professor at the Department of Anthropology and SODAS, University of Copenhagen.
Matthew Carey is Associate professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen.