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About 40 University of Michigan students, faculty and staff gathered in Weiser Hall Tuesday afternoon to hear U-M alum Whit Pow, New York University associate professor, lecture on the intersections of randomness, determinism and identity in computer science and computational media.
Pow was invited by Sheila Murphy, associate professor of film, television, and media and of the Digital Studies Institute. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Murphy said she extended the invitation to Pow due to her enthusiasm for their interdisciplinary research.
“Pow’s work is just really exciting and kind of brings together a couple of interests of mine,” Murphy said. “(Pow) situates the study of games in a longer history of computing— not just looking at games, but examining them in a complex way, in relation to other fields and even to art.”
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Pow discussed how their undergraduate experiences and passion for experimental film evolved into a focus on how marginalized groups interact with technology and media.
“I realized over the course of my undergraduate — taking a little bit of time off between undergrad and my Ph.D. — is that what I really loved about experimental film is how Queer people, people of Color, women, Black and Indigenous people have been using the film camera in a way that was never designed or intended to be used,” Pow said. “I realized that many, many, many marginalized people are actually doing that with other types of technologies.”
Pow emphasized the active role that marginalized communities have played in shaping technology to challenge oppressive systems.
“Queer and trans people, people of Color, Black and Indigenous people, we have been using technology in ways that are resistive,” Pow said. “(We) have been pushing against how technology should be used, pushing against ideas about surveillance … and critiquing technology for actually having this undercurrent.”
In their analysis of technology, Pow said computers often function under rigid frameworks that overlook the complexities of human experiences.
“Computers are deterministic systems, or computers are composed of sets of rules, and those rules always create predetermined outcomes,” Pow said. “That’s actually not (how) the real world works. … This idea of you put in one thing and it always will result in these other things is kind of a very constructed idea.”
They also critiqued the reliance on correlation in statistical analysis, asserting that it was intentionally designed to be mistaken for causation. Pow explained that statistical analysis findings were often exploited to support eugenicist agendas, and the first random number table was influenced by eugenicists like Karl Pearson and Francis Galton. Pow emphasized the need for a more thorough critical examination of the historical and ideological foundations of statistical methods.
“It turns out that the first published random number table and early statistics were actually founded by eugenicists,” Pow said. “There’s something really important about the way these strategies of quantifying large populations of people can … sound quite insidious.”
Pow said they felt it was important to examine computational studies alongside the study of marginalized identities, arguing that these fields are often unjustly separated.
“One of the things I’m trying to do in my work is to show that these ideologies — these ideas and concepts about race, as well as the structuring of gender and sexuality — have always been present in the history of computing,” Pow said.
In an email to The Daily, Rackham student Nikesh Kumar wrote that the lecture shifted his perspective on the institutionalization of technology.
“Coming from tech background, I never questioned (statistical processes) because technically that seemed (an) apt way to do it, but when I view it from the lens of social justice, it definitely seems a lot institutionalized,” Kumar wrote.
When asked about the significance of Pow’s work, Murphy emphasized that the history of computers has often excluded marginalized voices, making Pow’s current inclusion crucial.
“It is a history that’s deeply about the people involved in making it, involved in developing it and involved in using it and that those people come from all different backgrounds,” Murphy said. “There are people who have been left out of it that really need to be part of it, and that’s important work.”
Daily Staff Reporter Jenna Hausmann can be reached at jenhaus@umich.edu.
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