scholarly journals 'Not Ready for Prime Time': Biometrics and Biopolitics in the (Un)Making of California’s Facial Recognition Ban

2021 ◽  
pp. 223-245
Author(s):  
Asvatha Babu ◽  
Saif Shahin
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Facial Recognition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Prime Time ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Social Discourse ◽  
Human Recognition ◽  
The Us

Facial recognition is one of the most contentious applications of artificial intelligence. In 2019, the US state of California passed The Body Camera Accountability Act (AB-1215), banning police from using facial recognition technology on body cameras for three years. This article traces the trajectory of AB-1215 as a social discourse from its first reading until it was signed into law through a close reading of legislative documents, industry reports, civil society releases, and media coverage. Specifically, we investigate why the ban, initially intended to be permanent, was reduced and identify the actors shaping the discourse surrounding the bill. While initial criticism of facial recognition from lawmakers and civil society emphasised its potential to exacerbate discrimination against minorities and people of colour, we find that these critics later shifted their justification for a ban on the low accuracy of the technology itself. This allowed proponents of using facial recognition, including manufacturers and police lobbies, to contend that the technology was not only more accurate than human recognition but could be improved in coming years – undercutting the need for a permanent ban. Drawing on our analysis, we conclude that opposition to algorithmic governance should be biopolitical rather than technology-centred to be effective.

The Powers of Testosterone: Obscuring Race and Regional Bias in the Regulation of Women Athletes

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2019) ◽  
pp. 83-120
Author(s):  
Katrina Karkazis ◽  
Rebecca M. Jordan-Young
Keyword(s):  
Women Athletes ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Sport Organizations ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Cultural Symbol ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Fair Competition

Using strategies from critical race studies and feminist studies of science, medicine, and the body, we examine the covert operation of race and region in a regulation restricting the natural levels of testosterone in women athletes. Sport organizations claim the rule promotes fair competition and benefits the health of women athletes. Intersectional and postcolonial analyses have shown that "gender challenges" of specific women athletes engage racialized judgments about sex atypicality that emerged in the context of Western colonialism and are at the heart of Western modernity. Here, we introduce the concept of "T talk" to refer to the web of direct claims and indirect associations that circulate around testosterone as a material substance and a multivalent cultural symbol. In the case we discuss, T talk naturalizes the idea of sport as a masculine domain while deflecting attention from the racial politics of intrasex competition. Using regulation documents, scientific publications, media coverage, in-depth interviews, and sport officials’ public presentations, we show how this supposedly neutral and scientific regulation targets women of color from the Global South. Contrary to claims that the rule is beneficent, both racialization and medically-authorized harms are inherent to the regulation.

Public perceptions of who counts as a scientist for controversial science

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 797-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianne Suldovsky ◽  
Asheley Landrum ◽  
Natalie Jomini Stroud
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Genetically Modified Organisms ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Us ◽  
Science Media

In an era where expertise is increasingly critiqued, this study draws from the research on expertise and scientist stereotyping to explore who the public considers to be a scientist in the context of media coverage about climate change and genetically modified organisms. Using survey data from the United States, we find that political ideology and science knowledge affect who the US public believes is a scientist in these domains. Our results suggest important differences in the role of science media attention and science media selection in the publics “scientist” labeling. In addition, we replicate previous work and find that compared to other people who work in science, those with PhDs in Biology and Chemistry are most commonly seen as scientists.

“The Only Thing I Am Guilty of Is Taking Too Many Jump Shots1”: A Deleuzian Media Analysis of Diana Taurasi’s Drug Charge in 2010

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy Liao ◽  
Pirkko Markula
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Media Analysis ◽  
Drug Control ◽  
Basketball Player ◽  
Control Procedure ◽  
Professional Basketball ◽  
Drug Test ◽  
Amateur Sport ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Media

In November 2010, the US media reported that basketball player Diana Taurasi tested positive for a banned substance while playing in Turkey. In this study, we explore the media coverage of Taurasi’s positive drug test from a Deleuzian perspective. We consider the media coverage as an assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Malins, 2004) to analyze how Taurasi’s drug using body is articulated with the elite female sporting body in the coverage of her doping incident (Markula, 2004; Wise, 2011). Our analysis demonstrates that Taurasi’s position as a professional basketball player in the US dominated the discussion to legitimize her exoneration of banned substance use. In addition, Turkey, its “amateur” sport and poor drug control procedure, was located to the periphery to normalize a certain type of professionalism, doping control, and body as the desirable elements of sporting practice.

Contesting Aristotle: Science, Theology and the Resurrection of the Body in Methodius of Olympus’ De Resurrectione and the Dialogue of Adamantius

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Dawn LaValle Norman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Parallel Text ◽  
Entire Text

Abstract The contest over the resurrection of the body used the scientific authority of Aristotle as ammunition on both sides. Past scholars have read Methodius of Olympus as displaying an anti-Aristotelian bias. In contrast, through close reading of the entire text with attention to characterization and development of argument, I prove that Methodius of Olympus’ dialogue the De Resurrectione utilizes Aristotelian biology as a morally neutral tool. To put this into higher relief, I compare Methodius’ dialogue with the anonymous Dialogue of Adamantius, a text directly dependent upon the Methodius’ De Resurrectione, but which rejects arguments based on scientific reasoning. Reading Methodius’ De Resurrectione with greater attention to the whole and putting it in the context of its nearest parallel text retells the traditional story of early Christian resistance to Aristotle. Methodius of Olympus’ characters, although they view scientific knowledge as subordinate to philosophy, see it as neutral in and of itself.

Les manifestes et les programmes littéraires en Afrique francophone subsaharienne : à propos de ‘l’invisibilité’ du corpus dans la critique littéraire

Literator ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laude Ngadi M
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Discourse ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The West ◽  
Francophone Africa ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Geographical Space

Manifestos and literary programs in French-Speaking sub-Saharian of Africa: About ‘invisibility’ of the corpus in literary criticism. Despite an abundant production, the corpus of literary manifestos and programmes from sub-Saharan Francophone Africa is relatively invisible in literary criticism. With the exception of a few studies, critical works devoted to the programmatic works of writers are rare. This article proposes some hypotheses that can explain why the body of literature of authors’ ideas in this space is generally ‘invisible’. The approach of the literary field, applied to the sociology of scientific production, makes it possible to highlight three main causes for this invisibility: the importance of identity and cultural discourse, which makes it impossible to delimit the geographical space of writers from sub-Saharan Francophone Africa, whose production and reception are dominated by that of their colleagues from the West Indies and the Caribbean; the omnipresence of political and social discourse which takes precedence over poetic reflection; the metalanguage of the manifesto due to the fact that writers are also generally literary critics.

The Justified Body: Hauerwas, Luther and the Christian Life

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Justin Nickel
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Stanley Hauerwas ◽  
The One ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
Ethical Significance ◽  
The Way

Stanley Hauerwas and others argue that Luther’s understanding of justification denies the theological and ethical significance of the body. Indeed, the inner, spiritual person is the one who experiences God’s grace in the gospel, while the outer, physical (read: bodily) person continues to live under law and therefore coercion and condemnation. While not denying that Luther can be so read, I argue that there is another side of Luther, one that recognizes the body’s importance for Christian life. I make this argument through a close reading of Luther’s reflections on Adam and Eve’s Fall in his Lectures on Genesis (1545) and the sacramental theology in ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’. For this Luther, disconnection from our bodies is not a sign of justification but rather the sin from which justification saves us. Accordingly, justification results in a return to embodied creatureliness as the way we receive and live our justification.

scholarly journals The Red Machine: The Dehumanization of the Communist Enemy in American Cold War Cinema

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oleg Riabov
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dual Model ◽  
Inanimate Object ◽  
Moral Exclusion ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Materials Used

This article deals with the US Cold War cinematographic construction of the Soviet enemy. The researcher focuses on the means of dehumanising the communist enemy, external and internal, by equating it to a machine. The author applies Nick Haslam’s dual model of dehumanization (2006), according to which dehumanization is visible in two main forms: animalistic, by associating members of the out-group with animals, and mechanistic, by associating them with a soulless machine. The materials used consist of US films from the “Long Fifties”, in which Hollywood, equating the enemy to machines, developed three plots: the robotic existence of individuals in a totalitarian society; the transformation of Americans into zombies by communists by means of Soviet science; and the body snatching of Americans by an alien mind, an allegory of a future communist occupation of the USA. The article demonstrates that dehumanization was implemented by directly labeling the representatives of the communist world as robots and by attributing to them a lack of emotions, consciousness, will, individuality, initiative, warmth, love, friendship, creative abilities, and even the ability to smile. Such an image of the enemy implied a moral exclusion, treating them as an inanimate object unworthy of empathy, including in the event of their destruction. The author points out that the use of mechanistic dehumanization was very effective. Essentialization of the differences between “us” and “them” occurred: the symbolic border between them is presented as a boundary between living and nonliving. The image of mortal danger was created: the “Red Machine” is strong and merciless, it cannot be moved to pity, and so it is permissible to destroy it. This image contributed to the legitimation of power: the political opponents of the authorities are represented as internal enemies who are anxious to turn Americans into obedient executors of someone else’s will and to deprive them of humanity. At the same time, the machine also has weaknesses, and it is possible to defeat it: since it is devoid of human creativity, it is clearly inferior to the free human spirit embodied in America.

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