In the Second of DOS Distinguished Speaker Series, Prof Lucas Introna, Lancaster University will be discussing his ongoing stream of research and conceptual work exploring digital governance. Registration for this event is free and will open via Eventbrite in the new year.
Location: Picture Gallery, Founder’s Building, RHUL Egham Campus
Abstract
In this presentation I want to explore digital governance as a new form of governance that aims to govern effects based on correlations. I will argue that this form of governance is a dramatically different form of governance that effectively hides the political and ethical and acts to displace or defer problems deemed unsolvable in some form. I will illustrate this mode of governance by reviewing my work on governing academic writing through plagiarism detection systems and consider the way machine learning is being used to govern a variety of problems such as recruitment and policing. In each case I will attempt to show what digital governance does, ethically and politically, and why I believe it is necessary for society to be critical of these practices. I will conclude with some questions about how we might respond to these digital governing practices, individually and collectively.
Biography
Lucas is professor of organisation, technology, and ethics at Lancaster University. His research interest is the entanglement of the social and the technical, especially with regard to the ethics and politics implicated in such entanglements. He is co-editor of Ethics and Information Technology. He has published on a variety of topics such as sociomateriality (Organisation Studies), algorithms (Theory, Culture & Society; Science, Technology & Human Values), governmentality (Organisation Studies), ethics (Theory, Culture & Society), philosophy of technology (Philosophy in the Contemporary World), information and power (Management, Information & Power, Palgrave 1997), privacy (Journal of Business Ethics) and surveillance (Surveillance & Society). He teaches courses in ethics, reflective practice, and organisational change management.
