On July 12-14 Stefania will be at X in Mountain View, in Silicon Valley, as one of the invitees to Sci Foo. Science Foo is a series of interdisciplinary conferences organized by O’Reilly Media, Digital Science, Nature Publishing Group and Google. It is an “unconference focused on emerging technology, and is designed to encourage collaboration between scientists who would not typically work together”. Stefania plans to propose a session on ‘decolonizing data’.

Niels and Stefania organized a panel in occasion of the Dutch Day of Sociology, which this year is hosted by the University of Amsterdam on June the 27th.

The panel, entitled Society rebooted. Digital infrastructure and its governmentality, featured an interdisciplinary conversation with, among others, Sally Waytt (Maastricht University) and Linnet Taylor (TILT).

On June 5th, Stefania was at the University of Hamburg, to give a public lecture for the Taming the Machines series. She talked about ‘People vs. Algorithms: Data Witchcraft and the Future of Data Activism. Check it out here. The video of the lecture is online.

We would like to thank the Amsterdam Center for European Studies (ACES – https://aces.uva.nl) for supporting interviews transcription at DATACTIVE with a small grant.

On April 9, Stefania was in Berlin to give a talk at the Magnus-Haus, the headquarters of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (German Physical Society), as part of the Physik und Gesellschaft series.
The talk was entitled /Error 404: Social Life Not Found/ – How to bring politics back into the datafied society, and was moderated by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Eberhardt.

Abstract
Datafication – or the process of rendering into data aspects of social life that have never been quantified before – has altered the way we experience ourselves and exercise our citizenship today. Blanket surveillance and privacy infringements, however, are making citizens grow aware of the critical role of information as the new fabric of social life. As the advent of datafication and the automation turn threaten social life as we know it, how can we re-invent citizenship? How can we bring progressive politics back, to inform, among others, technological development and public policies? In this talk I will reflect on how politics and citizen agency are re-designed in light of the challenges and possibilities of big data and machine learning.