Agency, 13 Nov 2019
Published: 10 November 2019
13 November, 2019
2pm-4pm
Venue: 250 Gilbert Scott (Main Building)
Speakers :
Security and Privacy in the age of Ubiquitous Computing
Dr Mohamed Khamis (Lecturer, Computing Science)
Description: New ubiquitous technologies are introduced every day. Today, depth sensors, eye trackers, thermal cameras, and more can be bought by anyone from online shopping websites for a fraction of the price they used to cost a few years ago. While these sensors and cameras come with many benefits to their users, they also come with significant implications on privacy and security. For example, anyone can buy a thermal camera from Amazon.co.uk for <£150 and use it to take thermal images of a cash machine’s keypad after a user have entered their password. The recorded images would then clearly show which keys were pressed, thereby revealing the user’s password. How can we deal with the growing privacy and security threats of ubiquitous technologies? How can we design solutions that can be used by non tech savvy users? What can the average user do to protect their privacy? I will talk about the need for adopting an empirical approach in addressing risks to privacy and security that are imposed by ubiquitous technologies, and underline the importance of designing security solutions are highly usable.
What is the 'future of work'? - a rhetorical perspective
Dr Lavinia Hirsu (Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, Composition and English as a Foreign Language (Culture, Literacies, Inclusion & Pedagogy)
Description: In this short presentation, I will explore the "future of work" from a rhetorical perspective, raising a few theoretical and methodological questions. To illustrate these, I will refer to a recent project that I have been part of entitled Workers by self-design: Digital Literacies and Women’s Changing Roles in Unstable Environments. I will share key themes that emerged from this project and some of the most important aspects that demand further research and interdisciplinary perspectives.
The Unremembered Self: Agency and Digital Memory
Professor Andrew Hoskins (Interdisciplinary Research Professor in College of Social Sciences - Global Security)
Description: Individual, personal memories, are said to be important because they make us human. But individual memories have always been influenced by factors external to the self, and that has long been the conundrum of Memory Studies, the shifting balance of the relationship between memory in the head and memory in the wild. And it is media that have long been said to extend and strengthen individual, group and societal memory. But today, digital media and technologies mess up this relationship. The idea that memory in the wild simulates memory in the head, through artificial intelligence and machine learning, gives us the self-learning and self-leading archives of social media, a memory that is beyond living memory, and a myriad of ways of being unforgotten. So this paper asks, what are the prospects for agency in human remembering and forgetting under these conditions?
First published: 10 November 2019