▶ Video of Lecture

Kimberley Brownlee, Disobedience: The Rarest And Most Courageous Of The Virtues

Nathan Olmstead, We Are All Ghosts: Sidewalk Toronto

As the fabric of the city becomes increasingly fibreoptic, enthusiasm for the speed and ubiquity of digital infrastructure abounds. From Toronto to Abu Dhabi, new technologies promise the ability to observe, manage, and experience the city in so-called real-time, freeing cities from the spatiotemporal restrictions of the past. In this project, I look at the way this appreciation for the real-time is influencing our understanding of the datafied urban subject. I argue that this dominant discourse locates digital infrastructure within a broader metaphysics of presence, in which instantaneous data promise an unmediated view of both the city and those within it. The result is a levelling of residents along an overarching, linear, and spatialized timeline that sanitizes the temporal and rhythmic diversity of urban spaces. This same levelling effect can be seen in contemporary regulatory frameworks, which focus on the rights or sovereignty of a largely atomized urban subject removed from its spatiotemporal context. A more equitable alternative must therefore consider the temporal diversity, relationality, and inequality implicit within the datafied city, an alternative I begin to ground in Jacques Derrida’s notion of the spectre. This work is conducted through an exploration of Sidewalk Labs pioneering use of term urban data during their foray in Toronto, which highlights the potentiality of alternative, spectral data governance models at the same time it reflects the limitations of existing frameworks.

Nathan Olmstead
Urban Studies
University of Toronto

In this episode, Aden interviews Faisal Kamal, who is a PhD student in the department of Political Science at University of Toronto. His research examines state-religion relations in contemporary Pakistan and Bangladesh through the prism of constitutionalism, property, and religion. 

You can find more information about Faisal's work at https://www.mmg.mpg.de/person/95814/2553, and can follow him on Twitter @_faisalkamal

Ethics of Research (Ep. 4): Faisal Kamal, The Ethics of Conducting Research in South Asia

Samantha A. Noël, Tropical Aesthetics Of Black Modernism

The Ethics Of Humanism: Human Rights, Cosmopolitanism, And Resistance

Michael Randall Barnes, Whose Tweets? Our Tweets!: The Challenges of Online Protest

Workshop: Afrofuturism And The Law

Long before the film Black Panther captured the public’s imagination, the cultural critic Mark Dery had coined the term “Afrofuturism” to describe “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture.” Since then, the term has been applied to speculative creatives as diverse as the pop artist Janelle Monae, the science fiction writer Octavia Butler, and the visual artist Nick Cave. But only recently have thinkers turned to how Afrofuturism might guide, and shape, law. The participants in this workshop explore the many ways Afrofuturism can inform a range of legal issues, and even chart the way to a better future for us all.

Introduction: 
Bennett Capers (Law, Fordham)

Panel 1: 
Ngozi Okidegbe (Law, Cardozo), Of Afrofuturism, Of Algorithms
Alex Zamalin (Political Science & African American Studies, Detroit Mercy), Afrofuturism as Reconstitution

Panel 2:
Rasheedah Phillips (PolicyLink), Race Against Time: Afrofuturism and Our Liberated Housing Futures 
Etienne C. Toussaint (Law, South Carolina), For Every Rat Killed

Afrofuturism And The Law

Selected lectures and other events from the Centre for Ethics (C4E) at the University of Toronto and its Ethics of AI Lab.
Also from C4E: Let's Get Ethical, our podcast featuring conversations about ethics, from soup to nuts.

Kimberley Brownlee, Disobedience: The Rarest And Most Courageous Of The Virtues

C4eRadio: Sounds of Ethics

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