Project: Reimagining public values in algorithmic futures
| Acronym | REIMAGINE ADM (Reference Number: CHANSE-726) |
| Duration | 01/09/2022 - 01/09/2025 |
| Project Topic | Recent scholarly work argues that digital developments around automated decision-making (ADM) and algorithmic systems have led to negative social impacts that are undermining democratic processes and strengthening inequalities. While this work explores harms and problems arising from ADM systems, our project offers a complementary and corrective perspective with a focus on the role of public values within these systems. The novelty of our project lies in mobilizing anthropological and sociological perspectives to examine how values are deployed in situated practices rather than in the abstract. Our ambition is to develop new methods and comprehensive frameworks for exploring values in socio-technical systems. Rather than starting from scratch, we will reinvigorate existing empirical cases, ranging from ADM in insurance, healthcare, public infrastructure and activism by focusing on their relationship to public values. The project offers an empirically grounded perspective: observing the people behind algorithms, what they do when they build, promote and evaluate these systems. We focus on moments of alignment and tensions, which then reveal ways in which individuals and societies prioritise and negotiate between competing values. The research process is arranged into three collaboratories – cases, methods and alternatives. With the term collaboratory, a neologism combining laboratory and collaboration, we emphasize the experimental and participatory nature of our work, which includes ongoing dialogue with stakeholders. The collaboratories cut across three research themes which will unite the cases: 1. bridging and comparing public values in empirical cases 2. challenging and operationalizing values in action, and 3. rethinking and reimagining algorithmic futures. By consolidating empirically informed and imaginative ways of addressing values, our project promotes societally sensitive understandings of algorithmic systems and futures. |
| Network | CHANSE |
| Call | Transformations: Social and Cultural Dynamics in the Digital Age |