We're happy to announce the fifth and last webinar of our Innovation, Automation, and the Digital Economy Webinar Series! All welcome!
Hacking (for Creating and Severing) Ties
"Hacking" has been at the forefront of contemporary debates about the present and future governance of digital systems. Depicted ambiguously as a criminal and virtuous practice, the moral valence of computer hacking has oscillated constantly from the 1960s to the present. In this presentation I will discuss the core components of a book project on the nature of the social and technical ties among computer technologists who identify (and are identified by their peers) as hackers. Based on the ethnographic study of community spaces called "hackerspaces" in the Pacific Rim, I describe three interconnected processes that organize their contemporary experiences: spatialization, personification, and politicization of computing expertise. The goal is to offer an anthropological account of the practices of /commoning/ that support the "alterglobalization of hacking" through the circulation of technologists and technologies.
Luis Felipe R. Murillo is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at University of Notre Dame, where he also serves as fellow of the ND Technology Ethics Center and the Lucy Institute for Data and Society. His work has been dedicated to the anthropological study of computing with a focus on "open technologies" for addressing social and environmental issues. He has conducted long-term field research in the context of computer expert communities, free and open source technology projects, and, more recently, in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to study the promises and challenges of creating a commons in science and technology.
Registration:
This webinar will take place online via Zoom.
Please register HERE.
After registering, a separate Zoom registration link will be emailed to you.
This webinar series is supported by the research cluster "Technoscience, Society, and Environment" of the Research Center for Anthropology and Health (CIAS) at the University of Coimbra.
Webinar Convenors: Gonçalo SANTOS (University of Coimbra), Loretta LOU (Durham University), Yichen RAO (University of Michigan), James WRIGHT (Alan Turing Institute) and Jun ZHANG (City University of Hong Kong).
Bruna Coelho (Research Assistant)