The Centre for Networked Media and Performance (CNMAP) at McMaster is please to invite attendance at its 2019 symposium: Critiquing the Platform: Power, Principles, and Transformative Possibilities. The symposium takes place Friday 3rd May 2019, from 9 AM until 5:30 p.m., in the black box theatre of L.R. Wilson Hall at McMaster University. The event features a keynote by Dr. Michelle Murphy and three thematic panels (see below for panel descriptions). Catered breakfast and lunch will be provided.

Panel I: Platforms and Power (coordinated by Sara Bannerman with contributions from Christina Baade, Rena Bivens, Merlyna Lim, Leslie Regan Shade, Tamara Shepherd, Andrea Zeffiro), 9:45 – 11:45 a.m.: Platforms and algorithms play increasingly important roles in many aspects of our lives, including the discovery of cultural works. This has significant implications for life opportunities and employment (whose content is distributed and prioritized?), the star system (who is promoted and how?), politics (which and whose perspective is dominant?), international relations (whose view of the world is dominant?) and social relations (how are inequities in representation reproduced or addressed?). For these reasons, platform accountability is now in the forefront of public concern. How should platforms and algorithms be held to account? What research approaches and methods can be used to do this? This panel will draw together researchers in Canada to explore and discuss the research approaches and methods they use for studying platforms and holding platforms to account. The goal of this panel is to highlight, study and share the methods by which researchers can examine, gain insight into, challenge, and transform the power of algorithms and platforms. The panel will take a roundtable format, with panelists responding to questions such as:
• Discuss a research design that can disrupt the current structures of platform power
• What type of research on platforms and algorithms would you like to see more of?
• What barriers do researchers face in conducting research on platforms and algorithms?

Panel II: Platforms for Principled Engagement: Problematic Collaboration Repertoires (coordinated by Paula Gardner with contributions from Awo Abokor, Peter Cockett, Phil Cote, T.L. Cowan, Amber Dean, and Jasmine Rault), 1 – 2:15 p.m.: University researchers engaging in partnerships and collaborations often work from a position centering personal research interests, discrete worldviews, western epistemologies of knowledge creation, constrained methods of data capture and analysis, and top down organizational practices. Claire Bishop challenges us to rethink participation as necessarily ‘good” contending instead that participation should explore antagonisms in social relations, and foment discomfort. Kim TallBear offers a feminist indigenous alternative, where researchers work the “standpoint” of’ women, traditional cultures, and other marginalized subjects” to counter the lauding of ‘objectivity’ standpoints. Gayatri Spivak cautions us that the choice to choose an ‘ethical’ approach often betrays a position of privilege; this prohibition is reflected in how Michelle Murphy reads care and responsibility as non-innocent practices in research and feminism that circulate orientations within larger “non-innocent formations”— capitalist and colonialist logics and repertoires. Panel members explore the histories and dynamics that give rise to uneven university-community collaborations, and discuss their experiences seeking to undo dynamics propped up by systems, platforms, habits and repertoires.

Panel III: Political Dimensions of Code Art and Software Production (coordinated by David Ogborn with contributions from Ramsey Nasser, Luis N. del Angel, Allison Parrish, Ari Schlesinger, and Alejandro Tamayo), 2:45 – 4 p.m.: Platforms are political not only in their deployment (ie. the uses to which they are put) but also in their production, which is mediated by the exigencies of “code” (ie. the ensemble of notations, practices, and cultural formations that set a computational event in motion). Such exigencies can be revealed, and sometimes changed, when codework intersects with the increasingly entwined resistant imaginaries of art and open-source software. This panel examines diverse, contemporary ways in which ethical and political questions arise at this juncture, and takes the form of five short individual presentations followed by general discussion.

To see the full schedule and to register to attend the symposium, please see here: https://2019-cnmap-symposium.eventbrite.ca

Some symposium sessions will be live-streamed here: http://bit.ly/cnmapMcMaster

The symposium venue is wheel-chair accessible. For questions and assistance please contact David Ogborn .