Co-Hosted By: TD Management and Data Analytics Lab (TDMDAL) and Institute for Gender and the Economy
Topic: Your Computer is On Fire (The MIT Press, March 9 2021)
Livestream Details: Rotman Events will email registrants the link to the page where you can watch the livestream.
14-day Catch-up Viewing: Unable to attend the live event due to scheduling conflicts? Not to worry. You can access the full recording on-demand for two weeks after the live event.
Ticket & Book: Your registration fee includes access to the livestream, a hardcover copy of Your Computer is On Fire and shipping fees. The book will be shipped to registrants after the event.
Please note: The stated registration fee for this event only applies to customers residing in Canada and the U.S.A. If you are registering for this livestream from outside of these countries, please contact events@rotman.utoronto.ca regarding your registration as shipping fees vary depending on your location.
Event Summary
Techno-utopianism is dead: Now is the time to pay attention to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.
How do we dismantle systems of oppression in technology? To answer this question, we’ve convened a panel of authors of essays in the book Your Computer is on Fire. They will sound an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley-led tech obsession. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix—and control—society.
We will talk about the history of how our human and computational systems overlap, showing why technologies that centralize power tend to weaken democracy and perpetuate inequities. These practices are often kept out of sight until it is too late to question the costs of how they shape society. We will also explore paths for action to understand and solve technological problems that are often ignored or misunderstood.
About Our Speakers:
Janet Abbate is a Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and serves as co-director of the graduate program of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society in Northern Virginia. Abbate’s work focuses on the history, culture, and policy issues of the internet and computing. Abbate’s current research investigates the historical emergence of computer science as an intellectual discipline, an academic institution, and a professional identity.
Mar Hicks is Associate Professor of History at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Hicks is an author, historian, and professor doing research on the history of computing, labor, technology, and queer science and technology studies. Hicks’ research focuses on how gender and sexuality bring hidden technological dynamics to light, and how the experiences of women and LGBTQI people change the core narratives of the history of computing in unexpected ways.
Kavita Philip is President's Excellence Chair in Network Cultures at the University of British Columbia and Professor of English. Philip’s research and teaching in Global South histories and sociologies of science, computational technologies, environment, network cultures, media, and politics crosses geographic boundaries and ranges across scholarly disciplines.
Sreela Sarkar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University. Sarkar’s ethnographic research studies the institutional and cultural politics of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) initiatives in global India, specifically those directed at IT and soft skills training for marginalized youth in the urban peripheries of New Delhi. Sarkar’s work unpacks popular notions of the “digital divide” and “access” in the context of complex histories of religion, gender, class and caste.
Moderator: Dr. Sarah Kaplan is Director, Institute for Gender and the Economy, Distinguished Professor of Gender & the Economy and Professor of Strategic Management at Rotman. She is a co-author of the bestselling business book, Creative Destruction as well as Survive and Thrive: Winning Against Strategic Threats to Your Business. Her latest book, The 360° Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation was published in September 2019. Her research has covered how organizations participate in and respond to the emergence of new fields and technologies in biotechnology, fiber optics, financial services, nanotechnology and most recently, the field emerging at the nexus of gender and finance. Her current work focuses on applying an innovation lens to understanding the challenges for achieving gender equality.
Questions: events@rotman.utoronto.ca, Megan Murphy