Ethico-political Implications Research Articles

Diversity and language technology: how language modeling bias causes epistemic injustice

It is well known that AI-based language technology—large language models, machine translation systems, multilingual dictionaries, and corpora—is currently limited to three percent of the world’s most widely spoken, financially and politically backed languages. In response, recent efforts have sought to address the “digital language divide” by extending the reach of large language models to “underserved languages.” We show how some of these efforts tend to produce flawed solutions that adhere to a hard-wired representational preference for certain languages, which we call language modeling bias. Language modeling bias is a specific and under-studied form of linguistic bias were language technology by design favors certain languages, dialects, or sociolects with respect to others. We show that language modeling bias can result in systems that, while being precise regarding languages and cultures of dominant powers, are limited in the expression of socio-culturally relevant notions of other communities. We further argue that at the root of this problem lies a systematic tendency of technology developer communities to apply a simplistic understanding of diversity which does not do justice to the more profound differences that languages, and ultimately the communities that speak them, embody. Drawing on the concept of epistemic injustice, we point to the broader ethico-political implications and show how it can lead not only to a disregard for valuable aspects of diversity but also to an under-representation of the needs of marginalized language communities. Finally, we present an alternative socio-technical approach that is designed to tackle some of the analyzed problems.

Mediating lifestyle movements: the ethical ecologies of digital veganisms

ABSTRACT This article sets out a framework, ‘ethical ecologies,’ for researching and conceptualizing the role of media in lifestyle movements. Understanding lifestyle movements is important due to their growing prominence as a site of ethical and political agency, and media are integral in materializing this agency. The framework I develop to research these movements combines three bodies of work: media ecological scholarship (which emphasizes relations between media and social contexts), app studies (which foregrounds the mediation of consumption practices), and feminist STS (which elucidates how infrastructures materialize ethical possibilities). Using digital veganism as a case study, I combine interviews, documentary analysis, participatory action research, and what I describe as a ‘historicized’ app walkthrough, to trace how the move away from grassroots activist-produced media – and widespread use of apps and social media to support vegan practice – is entangled with its dramatic popularization. Yet, while veganism more visible, its position as a holistic philosophy with connections to wider social movements has been troubled by a socio-technical emphasis on vegan eating practice. Through this analysis of digital veganisms, I elucidate how an ethical ecologies approach can be utilized to reveal shifts in the mediation of lifestyle movements that have profound ethico-political implications.

Workers as Human Beings: Recognising the imago Dei in the Neoliberal Workplace

ABSTRACT This interdisciplinary article reflects theologically on what it means to be treated ethically under regimes of Human Resource Management (HRM) in the neoliberal workplace. In replacing older models of personnel management, HRM has achieved a position of dominance that raises important pastoral and ethical questions about recognition of the personhood of workers. This article contends that because critical work on HRM within the social sciences has failed to fully engage with these fundamental questions, a turn to Black theological anthropology is invaluable in understanding the ethico-political implications of HRM. Arguing that lived experiences of “the worker” are commonly missing from theological reflection on work, it advocates the interdisciplinary use of empirical research methods from the social sciences to populate the theology of work with real workers.

The tensions of deepfakes

ABSTRACT In recent years, deepfakes have become part and parcel of contemporary algorithmic culture. It is regularly claimed that they have the potential to introduce novel modes of societal disruption, violence, and harm. Yet, over-emphasising the power of deepfakes risks occluding frictions, struggles, and logics that already persist in the digital landscape. Arguing for a conceptualisation of deepfakes as an assemblage of differential tensions in society, we explore how they represent both a rupture and a continuation of the variegated politics of the image in the social world. The paper analyses the tensions of deepfakes through three distinct case studies: bodies, politics, and ideas of objectivity. Ultimately, we argue that the tensions and ethicopolitical implications of deepfakes are not reducible to a problem that can be solved through a logic of algorithmic detection and verification.

Machine learning and the politics of synthetic data

Machine-learning algorithms have become deeply embedded in contemporary society. As such, ample attention has been paid to the contents, biases, and underlying assumptions of the training datasets that many algorithmic models are trained on. Yet, what happens when algorithms are trained on data that are not real, but instead data that are ‘synthetic’, not referring to real persons, objects, or events? Increasingly, synthetic data are being incorporated into the training of machine-learning algorithms for use in various societal domains. There is currently little understanding, however, of the role played by and the ethicopolitical implications of synthetic training data for machine-learning algorithms. In this article, I explore the politics of synthetic data through two central aspects: first, synthetic data promise to emerge as a rich source of exposure to variability for the algorithm. Second, the paper explores how synthetic data promise to place algorithms beyond the realm of risk. I propose that an analysis of these two areas will help us better understand the ways in which machine-learning algorithms are envisioned in the light of synthetic data, but also how synthetic training data actively reconfigure the conditions of possibility for machine learning in contemporary society.

The ethical night of libertinism: Beauvoir’s reading of Sade

This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir’s reading of the eighteenth century writer and libertine Marquis de Sade, in her essay “Must we Burn Sade?”; a difficult and bewildering text, both in pure linguistic terms and philosophically. In particular, Beauvoir’s insistence on Sade as a “great moralist” seems hard to reconcile with her emphasis, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, on the interdependency of human beings and her exhortation to us to promote other people’s freedom, as well as the aspiration of The Second Sex to equal relations between the genders. While earlier scholars addressed the ethico-political implications of Beauvoir’s essay, they insisted that the ambiguity so fundamental in her philosophy is denied by the Sadean hero, and that the Other can never be attained in his system. In this essay, I argue that Sade paradoxically emerges as an ethical model in Beauvoir’s text: as a writer, he assumes the ambiguity of the human condition in the extreme. Further, Sade reveals the potential of sexuality if it is explored in a form of eroticism that largely transgresses behavior constructed as normal: his writings open up new forms of existence, where, contrary to prevailing ideas, woman’s sexual freedom is claimed as equal to man’s, where genders are unstable and heterosexuality no longer the standard. Beauvoir’s fascination with Sade in this essay can be linked with the seemingly unresolvable asymmetry in the relation between men and women in The Second Sex: in his writings is revealed sexuality’s potential to subvert patriarchal norms and mystifications, and perhaps, in the end, even gender itself.

Governing by protection: Studying the problematization of whistleblower protection in the EU

Despite the proliferation of whistleblower protection legislation across the world, increasingly scholars report that these laws fail to fully protect the whistleblower. In this paper, I direct attention to the politics of whistleblower protection and suggest that the Foucauldian concept of problematization can help to clarify how legal regulation is involved in the exercise of political power. I situate my study in the EU context and the Whistleblower Protection Directive drawing on Carol Bacchi’s WPR approach. The study finds, that by mobilizing the engagement of workers in law enforcement, whistleblower protection works as a technology of power to rectify the problematics of EU government. I conclude by reflecting on the ethico-political implications of governmentalizing whistleblower protection in advanced liberal democracies.

Who owns “democracy”? The role of populism in the discursive struggle over the signifier “democracy” in Catalonia and Spain

ABSTRACT After the notoriety of the Catalan independence bid in the 2010s, the already extensive literature on Catalan nationalism has grown even further to offer multifarious explanations for the conflict over independence both within Catalonia and between Catalonia and Spain. This article draws on recent approaches incorporating populism – in its articulation with nationalism – as an essential theoretical and empirical tool to better describe the emergence and dynamics of the Catalan independence movement. The study argues that the prevailing populist construction of a sovereign ‘people’ in Catalonia led to a discursive struggle over the floating signifier ‘democracy’ between two majority blocs: the one governing Catalonia vis-à-vis the one governing Spain. This is followed by a discourse-theoretical analysis of each bloc’s attempts to endow the floating signifier ‘democracy’ with distinctive meanings. Each bloc, acting in line with their political interests and against the will of relevant minorities within their sovereign demarcations, discursively articulated alternative interpretations of what democracy ‘truly’ is, thus claiming democratic legitimacy for themselves while demonizing the opponent as ‘anti-democratic’. As a result, the insoluble conflict in Catalonia can largely be explained as a struggle with important ethico-political implications between two irreconcilable understandings of ‘democracy’: constitutional democracy versus majoritarian democracy.

Follow the breath: mindfulness as travelling pedagogy

PurposeThis article considers the ethical and political significance of mindfulness by treating it as a pedagogy – that is, as a way of cultivating particular human capacities in response to a specific situation. It puts forward an approach for evaluating its implications not by recourse to a predetermined moral meter, but by locating it within specific historical and geographical contexts as mediated biographically by individual teachers.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on Edward Said's concept of “traveling theory”, this article proposes an approach called “travelling pedagogy” that sensitises the researcher to how the interplay of temporal, spatial, and biographical factors shape reiterations of any pedagogy. It then uses this conceptual framework to explore how mindfulness has been taught by three of its prominent proponents: Thich Nhat Hanh, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and bell hooks.FindingsThe exploration of how mindfulness has been taught by the three prominent teachers featured in this article demonstrates how its ethico-political implications transform under varied conditions of urgency faced by these teachers, respectively: war and militarisation; scientific legitimacy; racialised and gendered capitalism. This points to how a historical approach might add nuance to the discussions and debates on mindfulness beyond overgeneralised hype on the one hand, and sweeping “McMindfulness” critiques on the other.Originality/valueThis article proposes a new conceptual framework for evaluating the ethical and political significance of mindfulness – and indeed any form of pedagogy – by tracking it at the nexus of history, geography, and biography. By conceiving of mindfulness as a travelling pedagogy, it also counsels a more worldly consideration of its implications beyond beatific celebration and patrician contempt.

Inmaterial Matters, or the Unconscious of Materialism: A Conversation with Elizabeth Grosz

In this conversation, which took place across several months in the year 2021, Elizabeth Grosz describes her position with respect to “new materialism” and “the material turn”: while she emphasizes the necessity of materialist thought in the current situation marked by a global pandemic, she also stresses the equal importance of what she calls “the incorporeal”: an excess in and of matter, materiality’s heterogeneous virtuality, differentiality and becoming-other. Grosz describes the incorporeal as mutually implicated with materiality in a way that eschews both monism and dualism. The conversation roughly follows five topics: 1. How does one conceive of ontology without fixity? 2. How does matter “make sense”? 3. Can we think sexual differences beyond cisgender binarism and oppositional dualism? 4. What are the ethico-political implications of a materialist thought predicated on becoming and immanence? 5. Is psychoanalysis compatible with materialism, and is there a materiality of the unconscious? In the course of this exceptional interview, Grosz discusses the works of Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Sigmund Freud, Luce Irigaray, Karen Barad, Friedrich Nietzsche, and of course Gilles Deleuze, among many others...

Immaterial Matters, or the Unconscious of Materialism: A Conversation with Elizabeth Grosz

In this conversation, which took place across several months in the year 2021, Elizabeth Grosz describes her position with respect to “new materialism” and “the material turn”: while she emphasizes the necessity of materialist thought in the current situation marked by a global pandemic, she also stresses the equal importance of what she calls “the incorporeal”: an excess in and of matter, materiality’s heterogeneous virtuality, differentiality and becoming-other. Grosz describes the incorporeal as mutually implicated with materiality in a way that eschews both monism and dualism. The conversation roughly follows five topics: 1. How does one conceive of ontology without fixity? 2. How does matter “make sense”? 3. Can we think sexual differences beyond cisgender binarism and oppositional dualism? 4. What are the ethico-political implications of a materialist thought predicated on becoming and immanence? 5. Is psychoanalysis compatible with materialism, and is there a materiality of the unconscious? In the course of this exceptional interview, Grosz discusses the works of Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Sigmund Freud, Luce Irigaray, Karen Barad, Friedrich Nietzsche, and of course Gilles Deleuze, among many others...

Estranged companions: Bed bugs, biologies, and affective histories

In recent decades, bed bugs have swept across wealthy industrialized nations. After near extirpation in North America and Northern Europe, the return of these insects has led to a significant level of public anxiety and cultural notoriety. Here, we undertake an analysis of human-bed bug relations in order to both better understand this contemporary resurgence and critically examine the concept of “companion species.” We argue for conceiving of bed bugs as “estranged companions,” and foreground the need to understand contemporary encounters between humans and the insects through distinct histories that have been shaped by the opening and closing of spaces between classed and racialized bodies and that have been dependent upon the development and deployment of particular technologies such as Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). Further, we argue that “estrangement” has wider conceptual purchase and contributes to a body of research that has countered a strain of scientism in theory that decenters “the human” by interrogating the relations between companion species, (bio)political interventions, and colonial histories. Estrangement contributes to this task by, first, foregrounding that relationships with all companion species are imbricated in situated histories and biopolitical regimes and, second, drawing attention to the differential ethico-political implications of these regimes.

Ethico-Political Aspects of Conceptualizing Screening: The Case of Dementia

While the value of early detection of dementia is largely agreed upon, population-based screening as a means of early detection is controversial. This controversial status means that such screening is not recommended in most national dementia plans. Some current practices, however, resemble screening but are labelled “case-finding” or “detection of cognitive impairment”. Labelled as such, they may avoid the ethical scrutiny that population-based screening may be subject to. This article examines conceptualizations of screening and case-finding. It shows how the definitions and delimitations of the concepts (the what of screening) are drawn into the ethical, political, and practical dimensions that screening assessment criteria or principles are intended to clarify and control (the how of screening, how it is and how it should be performed). As a result, different conceptualizations of screening provide the opportunity to rethink what ethical assessments should take place: the conceptualizations have different ethico-political implications. The article argues that population-based systematic screening, population-based opportunistic screening, and case-finding should be clearly distinguished.

Interspecies Bodies and Watery Sonospheres: Listening in the Lab, the Archives and the Field

In this text, the author brings together scientific interspecies communication experiments, artistic practice and feminist posthumanities to inquire into the transformative role of sound and listening. Departing from an archive with recordings of human-dolphin language experiments, this research attends to sound as evidence and listening as a situated knowledge practice, with ethico-political implications that trouble Western, visually oriented knowledge systems. By imploding interfaces into situations of shared surfaces, the author directs attention to the logics of the skin to bring forth matters of care and suggest how listening might contribute to more careful and attentive modes of knowing.

Recomposing Aesthetic Anxiety and Perforating Suburban Infrastructures: Informal Religious Meeting Places in Melbourne

ABSTRACT A permit for a Buddhist place of worship in suburban Melbourne was rejected by the local Planning Committee. The application by the Mirror of the Dhamma Society to hold small religious gatherings in a semi-detached single storey house in an area zoned General Residential was deemed inappropriate. The paper focuses on this event that circulated contagious global white affects of anxiety and fear in response to potential changes in the Australian suburban infrastructure. What escaped scrutiny, however, was state-sanctioned aesthetic judgements of appropriate suburban infrastructures that were underpinned by invisible but dominant social and cultural norms. This paper calls for undoing these norms, recomposing white affects, and remaking Australian suburbia in ways that veer away from stigmatising or exoticizing material expressions of cultural diversity in the built landscape. Responding to Felix Guattari’s call for a new aesthetic paradigm with ethico-political implications, I explore the possibilities for new suburban ecologies that transcend the secular/sacred binary. The paper is written from my shifting positionality as a first-generation migrant woman and Australian of Indian heritage who arrived in Melbourne 19 years ago. It is informed by my broad research agenda on everyday multiculturalism, grounded religiosity, and belonging in cities with white majority cultures.

The urban under erasure: Towards a postcolonial critique of planetary urbanization

In my engagement with the planetary urbanization thesis, I make three main interventions: (1) I emphasize the pioneering contributions that postcolonial and relational geographical approaches have made to planetary thought long before the recent planetary turn in urban studies; (2) I underscore the disconcerting ethico-political implications of planetary urbanization's will to map the “extended landscapes” of urbanization and its reduction of contemporary planetary condition to the imperatives of capitalist urbanization; and (3) I offer the deconstructive strategy of writing “under erasure” that puts both the city and urbanization under erasure to highlight the blind spots of planetary urbanization. Then to demonstrate the value of writing under erasure, I focus upon waste – as both material and semiotic artifact of capitalist urbanization – and offer a “supplementary reading” of Bangalore that sketches the multiple constitutive outsides of the city, which in turn make empirically evident the stakes of planetary urbanization's occlusions. I conclude by suggesting that proponents of planetary urbanization and urban studies more broadly embrace writing under erasure as a useful epistemological orientation to build better theories of the urban.

Elemental Aesthetics: On Artistic Experiments with Solar Energy

In recent years, geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethico-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental. In this article, we contribute to this work by considering the relation between the elemental and the aesthetic. More precisely, we argue for the importance to geographical thinking of the development of an elemental aesthetics attuned to the diverse ways in which the elemental is sensed in bodies and devices of different kinds as part of the distribution of ethical and political capacities. Our argument is developed via participatory engagement with the work of contemporary artist and architect Tomás Saraceno, central to which is the ongoing attempt to craft aesthetic works that mobilize the elemental energy of the sun to generate novel modes of sensing, traveling, and living in the air. Drawing on participatory research and engagement with Saraceno's Aerocene project, we show how his work helps us reimagine distributions of the capacity to sense the elemental. In the process, we reflect on some of the ways in which these experiments can inform the shape and orientation of geographical engagements with an elemental aesthetics.

Rhetorical Humanism vs. Object-Oriented Ontology: The Ethics of Archimedean Points and Levers

Archimedes of Syracuse has long provided a touchstone for considering how we make and acquire knowledge. Since the early Roman chroniclers of Archimedes’ life, and especially intensively since Descartes, scholars have described, sought, or derided the Archimedean point, defining and redefining its epistemic role. “Knowledge,” at least within modernity, is rhetorically tied to the figure of the Archimedean point, a place somewhere outside a regular and constrained world of experience. If this figure still leads to useful ways of thinking about knowing, we are left with the question of how different modes of making knowledge approach their “Archimedean” points. The question is especially important today as a renewed ontological enthusiasm sweeps through humanities disciplines that have grown wary, perhaps rightly, of epistemological skepticism. I distinguish here between epistemic approaches that focus on the firm ground of the Archimedean point, offering certitude a la Descartes, and approaches more oriented, like Archimedes himself, toward assemblages where “knower,” point, and lever are mutually implied. These approaches, elaborated in more detail below, comprise two opposing epistemic styles: a lever-oriented approach tends to foster an uncertainty with positive ethico-political implications and a point-oriented approach tends to foreclose it. Starting from the (contingent) assumption that our figuring is rhetorical all the way down, I describe these contrasting approaches as epistemic styles in order to highlight that who we are is at stake in how we think we know—even when we claim to sidestep epistemology altogether—and that in the entanglement of who we are and how we know, we owe much to all our others. Toward a New Rhetorical Humanism It is, at any rate, not the case that all styles of knowledge-making involve searches for an outside view of things or for firmness and cer tainty, to take two common ways of thinking about Archimedean points. Since antiquity, rhetorical theorists have regarded knowledge-making as the collection and examination of contingent points and effective levers,

The utopianism of John Locke's natural learning

This article focuses on John Locke's understanding of the student as a natural learner and on the ambiguous utopia of childhood that underpins this understanding. It draws a parallel between the educational utopia of natural learning and colonization, and then investigates ethico-political implications. Locke politicizes natural learning in ways that normalize exclusions at the level of intersubjective ethical relations and naturalize colonial expansion at the level of cosmopolitan right. Thought through to its implications, this claim leads to exploring connections between Locke's educational philosophy and his multiple and ambiguous utopianisms. Thus examined, the political operations of Locke's pedagogy bring to the fore the subtle though no less important performativity of Locke-inspired, modern educational utopianism that remains so far under- or non-theorized in educational philosophy.

Buddhism, Poststructuralist Thought, Cultural Studies: A Profession of Faith

This essay is a result of the author's research into Buddhism and poststructuralist theories on knowledge, self and ethics and attempts to articulate the ethico-political implications of his own practice of Vipassana (a form of Buddhist meditation) and interrogate what is called the politics of spirituality. He explores the role of faith within cultural studies by first contextualising the relevant discursive fields, then analysing Vipassana with a ‘religious’ Foucauldian approach oriented around the critico-political aims of Foucault's late work. This elucidates how Buddhist and poststructuralist thought share certain concerns, and identifies trajectories for further inquiry.