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- Convenors:
-
Ana-Maria Cirstea
(Durham University)
Elisabeth Kirtsoglou (Durham University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 7 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel explores how novel forms of biopolitical governance during the SARS-COVII pandemic were facilitated by AI and new technologies of control and surveillance, giving rise to cultures of resistance and countercultures of disbelief, mistrust and conspiracy.
Long Abstract:
In the context of managing the SARS-Cov II pandemic, technologies of governance proliferated and created new pathways of social control and surveillance. Digital contact-tracing was accompanied by other advanced technologies like thermal cameras and sensors, drones, and facial recognition. Once destined for military use and carceral surveillance, these technologies became mundane dispositifs that distinguished healthy from unhealthy bodies routinely forcing them to confess their symptoms. As public spaces were subjected to technopolitical control in an effort to contain the virus, AI facilitated the surveillance and securitisation of cyberspace in a similar effort to contain misinformation on Covid19. Algorithmic governance however, was soon found to extend itself beyond the management of the pandemic when data collected through China’s mandatory Alipay and Wechat Health Code was shared with local police. The ownership and blueprint of similar technologies of tracking and tracing often straddled between the state and private contractors, challenging democratic rules and norms of data protection. The implication of advanced technologies and AI in biopolitical governance rallied public imagination, created scepticism and eventually produced novel forms of discursive and practical resistance as well as countercultures of conspiracy and denial.
This panel invites papers from anthropologists, scientists, artists, and practitioners on the different uses and representations of technology during global health emergencies. It welcomes contributions that reflect on the imbrication of the biopolitical and the technopolitical, with an emphasis on emerging narratives and practices of resistance as well as countercultural articulations of disbelief, mistrust and denial.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 7 June, 2022, -Pradipa P. Rasidi (Independent Researcher)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to tie the studies of computational propaganda to studies of privatized violence in Global South. Tying the notion of "state of disorder" and "algorithmic blacbox", I propose "algorithmic disorder" by examining mobilization of cybertroops in Indonesia by political/economic actors.
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to examine the mobilization of cybertroops--known as "political buzzers" in vernaculars--by locating it in the multiplicity of concepts of disorder: the concept of disorder as a way of understanding violence and the state in Indonesia; and disorder in the concept of algorithmic blackbox as a way of understanding the opacity and secrecy of social media platform mechanisms. Enaged in political trolling and cyber harassment as one of cybertroops' modus operandi, this paper attempts to place political buzzers in the historical trajectory of the role of non-state apparatus in state-sponsored mobilization of violence. This paper frames various political buzzer digital attacks as part of mobilizing and normalizing violence—this time in cyberplace. This normalization of violence ties to the concept of algorithmic blackbox and the concept of atmosphere, which allows political buzzers to construct an atmosphere of fear: apart from digital attacks, they are also able to manipulate algorithms and monopolize the public's sense of place on social media platforms. This public sense of place is built through the ability of platform users on certain social media to relate their subjectivity to others in that one platform. Based on ethnographic research during the 2017 Jakarta election and ethnographic interviews in 2021 during the pandemic, this paper proposes the notion of "algorithmic disorder" by recognizing cybertroops as a twilight institution in the context of public and state relations in Indonesia, similar to various other non-state violence apparatuses in the Global South, within context of algorithmic black box.
Gitika Saksena (SOAS University of London)
Paper short abstract:
Taking India's contact tracing app Aarogya Setu as its field, this paper situates the research within Brian Massumi's conceptualization of Ontopower. The paper reflects on the app's materialisation within ever-shifting assemblages of knowledge practices, algorithms, and everyday negotiations.
Paper long abstract:
Aarogya Setu is a contact tracing app, developed and launched by the Government of India on the 2nd of April 2020. It was positioned at the forefront of the country's response to the COVID19 pandemic. Taking Aarogya Setu as the field, this paper situates the research within Brian Massumi's conceptualization of Ontopower (2015). The paper reflects on materialization of Aarogya Setu as a 'system [that is] an actual expression of an operative processual logic, as 'concretized in a historically specific apparatus' (Massumi, 2015, p.232). Subsequently, the incumbent discourses and narratives of the key or first order actors are studied to investigate the underlying knowledge practices that shape the project. I carried out a textual review of public culture artefacts including press releases, policy documents, media interviews, content posted on the app's official social media pages and official responses to app user reviews published on the Google Play store. Furthermore, the research adopted participatory observation in a webinar on Aarogya Setu hosted by an app project team member, as well as semi structured interviews with five respondents from India based in the National Capital Region and from the same socio-economic class, as its methodological praxis.
Letizia Bonanno (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the role that affects and emotions play during socio-political and economic turmoil, and how they often inform people's attitude towards state-led public health campaigns.
Paper long abstract:
In Greece, negative opinions about vaccines have been exacerbated in the context of populism and political polarisation after a decade of economic austerity. The 2008 economic crisis and its consequences on the organisation of health care resources and infrastructures and the revelations of corruption of both doctors and international pharmaceutical corporations have fuelled citizens’ distrust towards state institutions, doctors and public health interventions. As more restrictions are placed on those who refuse to vaccinate against Covid-19, uncanny alliances between far-right supporters, segments of the anarchist movement, far-left parties and the Orthodox church have unfolded, uniting against the “repressive” state that has transformed issues of public health into a matter of public order (Lynteris 2016). While surveys have extensively assessed individual attitudes and concerns about immunization risks and benefits (Kourlaba et al. 2021; Dardalas et al. 2020; Larson et al. 2018; Larson et al. 2016), I draw from anthropological scholarship that highlights the potential of affects and emotions as heuristics to investigate the political (Stewart 2007). In considering affects as a point of encounter between subjectivity, languages and the materiality of state-practices (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2015;Jansen 2014; Navaro -Yashin 2012; Aretxaga 2003, 2005), I ask what emotions, affects and imaginations of the body, self and the state underpin the differential uptake of vaccines in Greece. And I do so by exploring the multiple dimensions of vaccines as both biomedical technologies of governance and medical objects charged with affectivities, capable of (un)making both the social and political.
Ana-Maria Cirstea (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic research from the Covid-19 pandemic, this paper looks at how encounters with technology intersected with conspiracy narratives about the Covid-19 vaccine among Romanians in London. It then explores the uncomfortable political subjectivities informed by these intersections.
Paper long abstract:
As the Covid-19 pandemic advanced, governments used a hierarchy of technology to control the spread of the virus, with Covid-19 vaccines sitting at the top of this technological advancement and expertise. This paper looks at how encounters with technology bolstered conspiracy narratives about the Covid-19 vaccine among Romanians in London. Technologies of control were ubiquitous for my interlocutors during successive lockdowns, such as temperature screenings in supermarkets or contact-tracing QR codes. Many Romanians met these technologies with suspicion and tried to evade them. These experiences served as a springboard for hesitancy and scepticism, which developed into a range of conspiracy narratives and prophecies when the Covid-19 vaccine was announced in winter 2021. Conspiracy narratives spread in a gossip-like fashion among Romanians via social media and instant messaging apps. Operating within a transnational field between Romania and the UK, these narratives gave rise to uncomfortable political subjectivities where resistance to the vaccine became entwined with right-wing political values, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism. Vaccine resistance became a form of political resistance to the state – both British and Romanian – while remaining loyal to the Romanian nation and its perceived Orthodox roots. As they became disenchanted with the outcomes of their mobility, my interlocutors fervently embraced these ideological formations. Using technology as a way in, I illustrate how conspiracies around the Covid-19 vaccine led to a set of uncomfortable political subjectivities which will remain long beyond the pandemic.