A Brave New World in the Production of Ecological Knowledge: Challenges for Algorithmic Governance in Knowledge Citizenship

Proliferating citizen science endeavors in the last decade have sought to intervene in numerous sites around the production of ecological, environmental, and public health data in various parts of the globe. At the same time, there are also increasing attempts at the automatic aggregation of large-scale disparate data through the employment of densely deployed in situ wireless environmental sensors, model simulations, crowd-sourcing tasks, and embedded networked system that enable studies to produce unprecedented amounts of such data, and to incorporate them in various spatio-temporal scales.

Concerns about the employment of algorithms in governance are myriad within the literature, often characterized as being within continuums of (at least) five different axes, viz., datafication and surveillance, agency and autonomy, transparency and opacity, depolitisation and repolitisation, and bias and fairness.

What conceptual challenges do these concerns pose to the dream of employing these technical and scientific advancements for the protection of ecological, environmental, and public health goals, and for the democratization of contemporary knowledge?

About the Speaker

Naveen Thayyil is Associate Professor of Humanitites and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Naveen's research interests lie at the intersection of law and STS (science and technology studies), in three fields- legal and political theory, environmental law, and technology regulation. His interests lie in theorising how categories of law, technology and society shape each other, coupled with instrumental engagements around issues of regulation of technology for the protection of public health, environment and related rights that seek to 'democratise' society.