CDH Open: Queer(ed) Data and the Limits of Logic

Kristen Schuster a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Southampton. Her research draws blends gender theories and critical studies of men and masculinities to conceptualise new methods for engaging with histories of information systems and computing. Through collaborative research, she has developed interdisciplinary partnerships that creatively engage with communities of practice across the GLAM sector. More recently, she has begun to focus on developing ethnographic methods that explore post-humanism and masculinities.

Kristen's central goal is to re-situate data within the material conditions we routinely navigate and through this develop novel discursive entanglements with data as both concept and material artefact. In foregrounding the material and embodied qualities of data, she contends that it becomes possible to bring together historiographies and cultural critiques of technologies that show and tell us how data exists as a direct result of human intervention and propose a queer(ed) critique of data that disrupts the underpinning neoliberal and techno-capitalist discourses of digital literacy and technology.

Using Judith Thompson’s thought experiment ‘The Unconscious Violinist’, she will critically reflect on the queer potentiality of data and think through the possibilities and implications of abandoning the infrastructures and beliefs that would coerce us into sustaining someone else’s privilege at the expense of our own freedoms. Thompson’s thought experiment will contextualise a central provocation in her paper: what if, instead of working around systems that demand we fit into certain categories, we look at the ways normative systems demand conformity and cry foul when we don’t conform in the ‘right’ ways? In reflecting on this provocation, she will imagine and propose the possibilities of queered logics through more nuanced relationships with data.

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Image: Lone Thomasky & Bits&Bäume / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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