Warwick-VUB workshop: Rights as Methodology?

Researching at the Intersections of Law, Technology, Knowledge and Society 

One day workshop co-organised by CIM (Warwick University) and LSTS (Vrije Universiteit Brussels)

Brussels, June 14, 2019

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) will visit Brussels for a joint workshop co-organised with the Research Group for Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) at the Free University Brussels.

The one day event has been designed to facilitate exchange between early career researchers, academic staff and affiliated academics in the two research centres, and will take the form of a series of discussions focused on shared research themes at the intersection of data, science, law & society.

Themes

PhD students and researchers from both centres will give presentations on themes of shared interest in the following broad areas:

Data subjects & methodology: how are data subjects conceived of and operationalised in today's data-driven research on society and culture? How can the access rights of data subjects be deployed for purposes of research in contemporary societies?

Data access & methodology: how do problems of ownership, access, and exposure surface in data-driven research on society and culture today? What are the implications for methodological strategies of the re-purposing of technology and data in social and cultural research?

Data democracy & methodology: Is the automation of content production, disclosure and assessment in contemporary digital architectures enabling new forms of bias? what forms of public knowledge are threatened, contested and re-inscribed in data architectures through automation and computational methodologies?

The workshop explicitly leaves open the question of what are the precise relations between law and methodology in our research on data-intensive society and culture. Instead, we will treat the exploration and specification of these relations as a workshop task.

Speakers

Simone Casiraghi (VUB)
Loup Cellard (Warwick)
Laura Drechsler (VUB)
Olga Gkotsopoulou (VUB)
René Mahieu (VUB)
Helena Suarez Val (Warwick)
Alessia Tanas (VUB)
Richard Terry (Warwick)
Ine van Zeeland & Jonas Breuer (VUB)

Respondents

Rosamunde Van Brakel (VUB)
Niels van Dijk (VUB)
Laurence Diver (VUB)
Gloria González Fuster (VUB)
Mireille Hildebrandt (VUB)
Joris Van Hoboken (VUB)
Noortje Marres (Warwick)
Cagatay Turkay (City/Warwick)
Michael Castelle (Warwick)
Naomi Waltham-Smith (Warwick)

About the Centres

 LSTS is a research leader in legal and ethical aspects of digital transformations, with a special focus on issues of privacy, trust, security and democracy, and the Centre has recently led funded projects on accountability of machine learning, new sources of personal data and citizen profiling.

 CIM research champions innovative and experimental forms of knowledge production through a sustained focus on methodology, with current projects focusing on smart city research, machine learning, personalisation in medicine, visualisation, digital pay, environmental sensing, and real-world testing of intelligent technology.

The workshop is made possible by  EUTOPIA –Institutional Partnership between University of Warwick (UK) – Vrije Universiteit Brussel (BE)