Biometric Technologies

Geography ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Nguyen ◽  
Emily Kaufman

Since the turn of the 21st century, scholars have examined the technological advances and associated social implications related to the measurement and analysis of unique biological characteristics such as hand geometry and fingerprints, otherwise known as biometrics. Leading scientific journals like IET Biometrics have explored the scientific understandings and practical applications of biometric devices, such as the introduction of facial recognition technology into mass-market cell phones. Social science publications such as Surveillance & Society have investigated the social norms that inform the making of biometric technologies and their impacts on society. More specifically, these analyses have assessed the racialized, gendered, ableist, and classed contours of these emerging technologies that use the body as a metric. In fact, the earliest critical examinations of biometrics by scholars like Lyon and Pugliese focused on how normative understandings calibrated these emerging technologies to the white, able-bodied, cisgendered male body. Although additional scholars like Graham and Wood have demonstrated how digitizing surveillance through biometrics and other technologies intentionally has reinforced social inequities, they often fail to engage in analyses of race and gender. Since then, many scholars, especially women and women of color, have undertaken the study of biometrics to better understand how these technologies reinscribe power in global contexts. To do so, these scholars have added important historical, theoretical, and empirical insights that better account for how race, class, gender, ability, and other axes of social difference shape, and are shaped by, biometric technologies and their implementation. By examining the latest developments in biometrics and the aims of these technological innovations in India, Iraq, Mexico, Norway, the United States, and elsewhere, these scholars highlight and respond to critical absences in more conventional investigations of biometrics, which often ignore how power is enacted in and through these technologies. Browne’s extensive research, for example, has connected early practices of biometric branding to facilitate the transatlantic slave trade to contemporary biometric security practices in airports infused with gendered anti-Blackness. Other critical analyses examine the use of biometrics to police the poor, reinforce gender norms, pathologize disabled bodies, and regulate mobility from the diverse perspectives of those who design, implement, and experience these security practices. Through an exploration of the motivations, funding sources, and purposes of developing biometric technologies, this work takes seriously how biometrics are imbricated in the (re)constitution of power, (re)making of social difference, (re)articulation of spatialized power relations, and embodied experiences that often generate violence, anxiety, and dis-ease. In this bibliography, we organize these contributions around the who, what, where, when, why, and how of biometric systems.

Author(s):  
Nickie Coomer ◽  
Chelsea Stinson

Historically, Western hegemonic order has been established through cultivating and legitimating social categories of difference. Schools, among other institutions, reinforce difference through marking ability, race, and gender to signify which bodies are productive, deficient, or dangerous and therefore in need of control. This process of differentiation and control is evident in the social, political, and education contexts of disabled youth whose race, gender, and sexuality are read, controlled, and resisted through policy and pedagogy. Through the processes of hypervisiblity, pathologization, and underserving of Black girls in schools, and especially within special education, this animates the nexus of gender, race, and disability. Parallels are drawn to paradigms of the female body and femininity, where difference is constructed as inferior to the normative male body. Similarly, special education policy, practice, and literature conceptualize disability as subtractive difference, wherein what is considered a “deficit” relies on a subtractive interpretation of a normative body or a normative way of being. In this regard, disability, gender—and, crucially, race—are often thought of as a negative departure from a normalized embodiment. In special education, such normalized, essentialist approaches to gender, race, and disability contribute to the disproportionate overidentification of some social identities and the underidentification of others, most often along raced and gendered lines. Importantly, disabling processes are institutionalized in education through the mechanism of special education, which not only serves as an instructional and academic response to a student’s disability but also acts as an institutional process that determines a student as disabled. The determination of a student having a disability is mediated through law, policy, and interpersonal interaction between school professionals and parents and caregivers. Disproportionate identification has been the focus of research, and studies show that overidentification occurs most often in disability categories that are considered “subjective”: for instance, specific learning disabilities and emotional disturbances. Such identification has an impact on students’ learning; opportunities to interact with their peers in general education settings; access to high quality, challenging curriculum; and opportunities to engage critical thinking in educational activities that go beyond direct instruction. Disabling processes in schools related to the intersection of disability, gender, and race, in particular, are mediated by the local, cultural interactions of school personnel and are evident in the ways in which Black girls, in particular, are disabled in school.


Author(s):  
Timnit Gebru

This chapter discusses the role of race and gender in artificial intelligence (AI). The rapid permeation of AI into society has not been accompanied by a thorough investigation of the sociopolitical issues that cause certain groups of people to be harmed rather than advantaged by it. For instance, recent studies have shown that commercial automated facial analysis systems have much higher error rates for dark-skinned women, while having minimal errors on light-skinned men. Moreover, a 2016 ProPublica investigation uncovered that machine learning–based tools that assess crime recidivism rates in the United States are biased against African Americans. Other studies show that natural language–processing tools trained on news articles exhibit societal biases. While many technical solutions have been proposed to alleviate bias in machine learning systems, a holistic and multifaceted approach must be taken. This includes standardization bodies determining what types of systems can be used in which scenarios, making sure that automated decision tools are created by people from diverse backgrounds, and understanding the historical and political factors that disadvantage certain groups who are subjected to these tools.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Papanikolaou

The paper examines tax progressivity and income inequality using Census Bureau Current Population Survey (CPS) personal income data. The Kakwani index is used to derive tax progressivity for All, Male, Female, White and African American personal wage income of CPS respondents, respectively. The tax progressivity results show a tax system that is partly progressive and mostly regressive. Due to its regressive nature, the tax system did not display tax progressivity for the entire period under analysis for personal wage income respondents as well as when broken-down by race and gender in the United States for years 1996 to 2011.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
April L. Peters ◽  
Angel Miles Nash

The rallying, clarion call to #SayHerName has prompted the United States to intentionally include the lives, voices, struggles, and contributions of Black women and countless others of her ilk who have suffered and strived in the midst of anti-Black racism. To advance a leadership framework that is rooted in the historicity of brilliance embodied in Black women’s educational leadership, and their proclivity for resisting oppression, we expand on intersectional leadership. We develop this expansion along three dimensions of research centering Black women’s leadership: the historical foundation of Black women’s leadership in schools and communities, the epistemological basis of Black women’s racialized and gendered experiences, and the ontological characterization of Black women’s expertise in resisting anti-Black racism in educational settings. We conclude with a four tenet articulation detailing how intersectional leadership: (a) is explicitly anti-racist; (b) is explicitly anti-sexist; (c) explicitly acknowledges the multiplicative influences of marginalization centering race and gender, and across planes of identity; and (d) explicitly leverages authority to serve and protect historically underserved communities.


Author(s):  
Natasha N Johnson

This article focuses on equitable leadership and its intersection with related yet distinct concepts salient to social justice pertinent to women and minorities in educational leadership. This piece is rooted and framed within the context of the United States of America, and the major concepts include identity, equity, and intersectionality—specific to the race-gender dyad—manifested within the realm of educational leadership. The objective is to examine theory and research in this area and to discuss the role they played in this study of the cultures of four Black women, all senior-level leaders within the realm of K-20 education in the United States. This work employed the tenets of hermeneutic phenomenology, focusing on the intersecting factors—race and gender, specifically—that impact these women’s ability and capability to perform within the educational sector. The utilization of in-depth, timed, semi-structured interviews allowed participants to reflect upon their experiences and perceptions as Black women who have navigated and continue to successfully navigate the highest levels of the educational leadership sphere. Contributors’ recounted stories of navigation within spaces in which they are underrepresented revealed the need for more research specific to the intricacies of Black women’s leadership journeys in the context of the United States.


1996 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Krasner

Although Aida Overton Walker (1880–1914) belonged to the same generation of turn-of-the-century African American performers as did Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, Bert Williams, and George Walker, she had a rather different view of how best to represent her race and gender in the performing arts. Walker taught white society in New York City how to do the Cakewalk, a celebratory dance with links to West African festival dance. In Walker's choreography of it, it was reconfigured with some ingenuity to accommodate race, gender, and class identities in an era in which all three were in flux. Her strategy depended on being flexible, on being able to make the transition from one cultural milieu to another, and on adjusting to new patterns of thinking. Walker had to elaborate her choreography as hybrid, merging her interpretation of cakewalking with the preconceptions of a white culture that became captivated by its form. To complicate matters, Walker's choreography developed during a particularly unstable and volatile period. As Anna Julia Cooper remarked in 1892.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 1172-1184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis E. Phills ◽  
Amanda Williams ◽  
Jennifer M. Wolff ◽  
Ashley Smith ◽  
Rachel Arnold ◽  
...  

Two studies examined the relationship between explicit stereotyping and prejudice by investigating how stereotyping of minority men and women may be differentially related to prejudice. Based on research and theory related to the intersectional invisibility hypothesis (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008), we hypothesized that stereotyping of minority men would be more strongly related to prejudice than stereotyping of minority women. Supporting our hypothesis, in both the United Kingdom (Study 1) and the United States (Study 2), when stereotyping of Black men and women were entered into the same regression model, only stereotyping of Black men predicted prejudice. Results were inconsistent in regard to South Asians and East Asians. Results are discussed in terms of the intersectional invisibility hypothesis (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008) and the gendered nature of the relationship between stereotyping and attitudes.


ILR Review ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 420-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maury B. Gittleman ◽  
David R. Howell

Using 17 measures of job quality from the 1980 Census, the Current Population Survey, and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, the authors perform a cluster analysis that groups 621 jobs covering 94% of the work force into six job categories (termed “contours”), a job classification closely resembling those suggested by labor market segmentation theory. The distribution of employment over the period 1973–90 shifted sharply away from the two middle-quality contours toward the two highest-quality contours. The two lowest-quality contours show no decline in employment share in the 1980s. The declining relative position of employed black and Hispanic men stems from both a worsening job mix relative to white men and a sharp drop in the quality of low-skill jobs. Female workers experienced both a greater shift away from jobs in the lower-quality contours and higher real earnings growth within each job contour than male workers.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Lei ◽  
Rachel Leshin ◽  
Kelsey Moty ◽  
Emily Foster-Hanson ◽  
Marjorie Rhodes

The present studies examined how gender and race information shape children’s prototypes of various social categories. Children (N=543; Mage=5.81, range=2.75 - 10.62; 281 girls, 262 boys; 193 White, 114 Asian, 71 Black, 50 Hispanic, 39 Multiracial, 7 Middle-Eastern, 69 race unreported) most often chose White people as prototypical of boys and men—a pattern that increased with age. For female gender categories, children most often selected a White girl as prototypical of girls, but an Asian woman as prototypical of women. For superordinate social categories (person and kid), children tended to choose members of their own gender as most representative. Overall, the findings reveal how cultural ideologies and identity-based processes interact to shape the development of social prototypes across childhood.


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