Papers by Lindsay Weinberg
Johns Hopkins University Press eBooks, 2024
Frontiers: The interdisciplinary journal of study abroad, Aug 31, 2022
This article analyzes the impact of experiential and inquiry-based learning exercises in a 2019 T... more This article analyzes the impact of experiential and inquiry-based learning exercises in a 2019 Toronto study abroad course on smart cities for first-year students. The course treated the city as a text to be read, analyzed, and unpacked. Students engaged with the disciplines of urban studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and surveillance studies in order to assess Toronto's smart city initiative while exploring firsthand how technology and urban planning currently structure the lived experiences of Toronto's inhabitants. Ultimately, students came to understand how data analytics order, pattern, and structure the complexity of urban life in ways that can be inclusionary and exclusionary, democratic and autocratic. They gained an appreciation for why a range of stakeholders with disparate social and economic power perceive smart city initiatives differently, and they theorized what it might mean to live in a wise city that accounts for history, ethics, and power.
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
This survey article assesses and compares existing critiques of current fairness-enhancing techni... more This survey article assesses and compares existing critiques of current fairness-enhancing technical interventions in machine learning (ML) that draw from a range of non-computing disciplines, including philosophy, feminist studies, critical race and ethnic studies, legal studies, anthropology, and science and technology studies. It bridges epistemic divides in order to offer an interdisciplinary understanding of the possibilities and limits of hegemonic computational approaches to ML fairness for producing just outcomes for society’s most marginalized. The article is organized according to nine major themes of critique wherein these different fields intersect: 1) how "fairness" in AI fairness research gets defined; 2) how problems for AI systems to address get formulated; 3) the impacts of abstraction on how AI tools function and its propensity to lead to technological solutionism; 4) how racial classification operates within AI fairness research; 5) the use of AI fairnes...
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, Mar 12, 2018
When confronted with limited labelled samples, most studies adopt an unsupervised feature learnin... more When confronted with limited labelled samples, most studies adopt an unsupervised feature learning scheme and incorporate the extracted features into a traditional classifier (e.g., support vector machine, SVM) to deal with hyperspectral imagery classification. However, these methods have limitations in generalizing well in challenging cases due to the limited representative capacity of the shallow feature learning model, as well as the insufficient robustness of the classifier which only depends on the supervision of labelled samples. To address these two problems simultaneously, we present an effective low-rank representation-based classification framework for hyperspectral imagery. In particular, a novel unsupervised segmented stacked denoising auto-encoder-based feature learning model is proposed to depict the spatial-spectral characteristics of each pixel in the imagery with deep hierarchical structure. With the extracted features, a low-rank representation based robust classifier is then developed which takes advantage of both the supervision provided by labelled samples and unsupervised correlation (e.g., intra-class similarity and inter-class dissimilarity, etc.) among those unlabelled samples. Both the deep unsupervised feature learning and the robust classifier benefit, improving the classification accuracy with limited labelled samples. Extensive experiments on hyperspectral imagery classification demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Westminster Papers in Culture and Communication, 2017
Tim Cook's message to Apple customers, regarding Apple's refusal to provide the FBI with a backdo... more Tim Cook's message to Apple customers, regarding Apple's refusal to provide the FBI with a backdoor to the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, typifies the corporate appropriation of privacy rights discourse. In light of this appropriation, I propose a reconsideration of the sovereign subject presupposed by privacy rights discourse through a comparative approach to the US and EU's treatments of privacy rights. I then apply feminist theories of the non-sovereign subject, which challenge liberal democratic discourse's construction of the subject by emphasising social interdependence. I argue that critical scholars of surveillance and the digital economy need to address the fact that the digital economy is predicated on the subject's non-sovereignty, where individuals can be fragmented and combined into the mass collection of data. I conclude with a discussion of how the nonsovereignty of the subject under commercial surveillance could also provide the grounds for the socialized redistribution of big data profits.
Lateral, 2017
Critical studies on logistics and supply chain management often focus on the transformations in t... more Critical studies on logistics and supply chain management often focus on the transformations in the organization of labor that result from an emphasis on the circulation of commodities. However, target marketing and practices of leisure-time surveillance are not generally framed as part of the shift in capital’s emphasis on circulation. If part of logistical management is about the displacement of labor to the underdeveloped world, it is equally about monitoring circulation and demand in the overdeveloped. This paper argues that situating target marketing as a technology of logistical management emphasizes the importance of information in not only intensifying and maximizing the productivity of supply chains and reducing labor costs but also increasing the likelihood of a return on capitalist investment through the management of market choices. The paper begins by framing target marketing as part of the historical trajectory of the revolution in control described by James R. Beniger...
This article examines universities’ adoption of WellTrack—a self-tracking mobile phone applicatio... more This article examines universities’ adoption of WellTrack—a self-tracking mobile phone application modeled on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques—as a solution to reported increases in the prevalence and severity of student mental health conditions. Drawing from a feminist materialist perspective that understands discourse and the material word as co-produced, this article argues that the app’s design, marketing, and reception are deeply intertwined with the political rationality of neoliberalism, which centers self-responsibility and the market economy. The article first situates the development of the WellTrack app within larger institutional and political shifts towards digital education governance. It then contextualizes the app’s use within the history of college mental health services in the United States, revealing how longstanding socio-medical discourses concerning student wellness individualize structural and systemic factors of ill health. Through close reading and im...
This article examines university researchers’ capture of student images on US college campuses fo... more This article examines university researchers’ capture of student images on US college campuses for training facial recognition technology, and situates this project within universities’ broader historical alignment with militarism and racial injustice. It argues that feminist STS ethics provides a framework for not only challenging the ways that university research inquiry actively contributes to oppressive power structures, but also for reimagining university research ethics for a greater engagement with questions of justice. The article identifies the limitations of dominant institutional ethics and privacy rights discourses for centering justice considerations, and instead outlines an intersectional feminist approach to university research ethics that reimagines the relationship between research processes, power, and social impacts.
Author(s): Weinberg, Lindsay | Advisor(s): Meister, Robert; Freccero, Carla | Abstract: This diss... more Author(s): Weinberg, Lindsay | Advisor(s): Meister, Robert; Freccero, Carla | Abstract: This dissertation argues that personalization—the web of technologies and cultural practices that generate information about consumers to market goods and services to target audiences—is part of a larger cultural and economic transformation under digital capitalism. Building on the Frankfurt School’s analysis of the mass culture industry, I use immanent critique to highlight the contradictions embedded in the celebratory rhetoric of digital media: its promises of customized, tailored, and interactive content, in contrast to the homogeneity and standardization of mass culture. I draw from Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on Societies of Control” to argue that personalization technologies are actually predicated on “dividuation,” the mass collection of data where individual subjects are fragmented into demographic data, preferences, and search habits for predicting future consumer behavior. Through dis...
Tim Cook’s message to Apple customers, regarding Apple’s refusal to provide the FBI with a backdo... more Tim Cook’s message to Apple customers, regarding Apple’s refusal to provide the FBI with a backdoor to the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, typifies the corporate appropriation of privacy rights discourse. In light of this appropriation, I propose a reconsideration of the sovereign subject presupposed by privacy rights discourse through a comparative approach to the US and EU’s treatments of privacy rights. I then apply feminist theories of the non-sovereign subject, which challenge liberal democratic discourse’s construction of the subject by emphasising social interdependence. I argue that critical scholars of surveillance and the digital economy need to address the fact that the digital economy is predicated on the subject’s non-sovereignty, where individuals can be fragmented and combined into the mass collection of data. I conclude with a discussion of how the non-sovereignty of the subject under commercial surveillance could also provide the grounds for the socialized redistri...
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2021
This article examines universities' adoption of WellTrack-a self-tracking mobile phone applicatio... more This article examines universities' adoption of WellTrack-a self-tracking mobile phone application modeled on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques-as a solution to reported increases in the prevalence and severity of student mental health conditions. Drawing from a feminist materialist perspective that understands discourse and the material word as co-produced, this article argues that the app's design, marketing, and reception are deeply intertwined with the political rationality of neoliberalism, which centers self-responsibility and the market economy. The article first situates the development of the WellTrack app within larger institutional and political shifts towards digital education governance. It then contextualizes the app's use within the history of college mental health services in the United States, revealing how longstanding socio-medical discourses concerning student wellness individualize structural and systemic factors of ill health. Through close reading and immanent critique of the marketing and media reception of the WellTrack app's introduction into universities, the article provides an account of how universities are socializing students to relinquish data to private firms in exchange for health services. Students are encouraged to engage in constant self-examination and strive towards a vision of student wellness that precludes an analysis of the structural conditions and intersecting oppressions contributing to poor student mental health. These conditions are social and pervasive, requiring institutional analysis and critique of the university itself.
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2020
This article examines university researchers' capture of student images on US college campuses fo... more This article examines university researchers' capture of student images on US college campuses for training facial recognition technology, and situates this project within universities' broader historical alignment with militarism and racial injustice. It argues that feminist STS ethics provides a framework for not only challenging the ways that university research inquiry actively contributes to oppressive power structures, but also for reimagining university research ethics for a greater engagement with questions of justice. The article identifies the limitations of dominant institutional ethics and privacy rights discourses for centering justice considerations, and instead outlines an intersectional feminist approach to university research ethics that reimagines the relationship between research processes, power, and social impacts.
Impost: A Journal of Creative and Critical Work, 2018
Lateral, 2019
Critical analyses of domestic technological culture have emphasized the impact of domestic techno... more Critical analyses of domestic technological culture have emphasized the impact of domestic technologies on intensifying women’s labor and reinforcing its privatization within the home, all the while being marketed as laborsaving devices. Drawing from the ways the marketing of domestic technologies framed the home as a space in need of technological administration, this article offers a Marxist feminist analysis of online surveillance during leisure time, examining how the marketing of technologies for both domestic labor and online leisure helps produce relationships between subjects and technologies that double as vehicles for capital accumulation. The article argues that we should look to the history of domestic technological design to understand the ways online surveillance and data collection are used to produce revenue and impact consumer behavior, given that both domestic technologies and contemporary information technologies work to rationalize non-waged time. The article begins with the Taylorization of the home popularized in 1912, followed by the rise of domestic technologies in the 1950s, in order to demonstrate how the ideological framing of the home as a space in need of rationalization informs the marketing of today’s personalization technologies. The marketing of personalization technologies reproduces the racialized and gendered logic of machine subordination that framed domestic technologies for the home in the 20th century. The article concludes with a discussion of how Marxist feminism is a useful theoretical framework for understanding and developing a political response to online data collection, given that both the domestic sphere and online leisure time are traditionally understood to be outside the workday, and therefore supposedly outside the scope of capitalist workplace relations of surveillance and exploitation.
Tim Cook’s message to Apple customers, regarding Apple’s refusal to provide the FBI with a backdo... more Tim Cook’s message to Apple customers, regarding Apple’s refusal to provide the FBI with a backdoor to the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, typifies the corporate appropriation of privacy rights discourse. In light of this appropriation, I propose a reconsideration of the sovereign subject presupposed by privacy rights discourse through a comparative approach to the US and EU’s treatments of privacy rights. I then apply feminist theories of the non-sovereign subject, which challenge liberal democratic discourse’s construction of the subject by emphasising social interdependence. I argue that critical scholars of surveillance and the digital economy need to address the fact that the digital economy is predicated on the subject’s non-sovereignty, where individuals can be fragmented and combined into the mass collection of data. I conclude with a discussion of how the non-sovereignty of the subject under commercial surveillance could also provide the grounds for the socialized redistribution of big data profits.
This paper demonstrates how target marketing provides valuable point-of-sale and point-of-interac... more This paper demonstrates how target marketing provides valuable point-of-sale and point-of-interaction insights, and argues that the labor theory of value is untenable for understanding the conditions of leisure-time surveillance and data aggregation. It then provides a close reading of an Amazon affiliated fulfillment center exposé in order to examine precisely how the information produced during leisure-time surveillance can intensify the exploitation of fulfillment center labor. Target marketing is part of a larger apparatus that aggregates data for the purposes of assigning risk, differentiating prices, and managing supply chains and labor costs.
Book Reviews by Lindsay Weinberg
Lindsay Weinberg reviews Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano (eds.) 2017. The Spectacle 2.0: Re... more Lindsay Weinberg reviews Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano (eds.) 2017. The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism. London: University of Westminster Press.
This review traces the paradoxical logic of surveillance as both “seeing” and “not seeing” throug... more This review traces the paradoxical logic of surveillance as both “seeing” and “not seeing” throughout the chapters of Feminist Surveillance Studies. While surveillance works to visualize a subject that can be objectified, commodified, and controlled, it simultaneously attempts to make its own violence invisible. The review concludes by discussing what a feminist methodology for surveillance studies might look like in conversation with the push to distinguish the field.
This review frames Simone Browne’s essential text for the study of racializing surveillance as a ... more This review frames Simone Browne’s essential text for the study of racializing surveillance as a work of counter-periodization. Browne’s situating of blackness in relation to the historical development of surveillance helps to center the continuities between earlier modes of monitoring, overseeing, and policing subjects and newer modes of surveillance. Weinberg also details the implications of Browne’s text for future studies of surveillance and for modes of resistance against its logics.
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Papers by Lindsay Weinberg
Book Reviews by Lindsay Weinberg
Higher education increasingly relies on digital surveillance in the United States. Administrators, consulting firms, and education technology vendors are celebrating digital tools as a means of ushering in the age of "smart universities." By digitally monitoring and managing campus life, institutions can supposedly run their services more efficiently, strengthen the quality of higher education, and better prepare students for future roles in the digital economy. Yet in practice, these initiatives often perpetuate austerity, structural racism, and privatization at public universities under the guise of solving higher education's most intractable problems.
In Smart University, Lindsay Weinberg evaluates how this latest era of tech solutions and systems in our schools impacts students' abilities to access opportunities and exercise autonomy on their campuses. Using historical and textual analysis of administrative discourses, university policies, conference proceedings, grant solicitations, news reports, tech industry marketing materials, and product demonstrations, Weinberg argues that these more recent transformations are best understood as part of a longer history of universities supporting the development of technologies that reproduce racial and economic injustice on their campuses and in their communities.
For anyone concerned with the future of surveillance on higher education, Smart University empowers readers with the knowledge, tools, and frameworks for contesting and reimagining the role of digital technology on university campuses.