Peaks Krafft: Three Components Of My Critical Technical Practice: Personal Responsibility, Pluralist Epistemology, And Collective Action

The ERC Research Project The Arts of Autonomy and the Amerika-Institut at the LMU invite you to a workshop with Dr. Peaks Krafft (University of the Arts London) entitled “Three Components of My Critical Technical Practice: Personal Responsibility, Pluralist Epistemology, And Collective Action.” Responding to how power relations are organized, embedded, and perpetuated in information technologies, Dr. Krafft will explore ways such power relations can be re-organized and challenged through critical, creative, and activist practice. 

The workshop will be held via Zoom on Wednesday May 5th, from 16:15 – 17:45 CET. Dr. Krafft will give a c. 30 minute talk, which will be followed by a Q&A session and discussion. The workshop will be held in English. To register, please send an email to: [email protected]

Dr. Peaks Krafft (they/them) is Senior Lecturer and MA Internet Equalities Course Leader at the UAL Creative Computing Institute. They undertake critically-oriented computer science research, academic organising, and community organising, especially recently on four issues in higher education and tech: social impacts of technology; personal and institutional accountability; anti-racism in organisations, and conflicts of interest from tech funding. Dr. Krafft’s work is animated by an interest in who and what is missing when we talk about or are involved in data science and computing. How do we move beyond the terms equality, diversity and inclusion, to build counter-power to the modes of oppression in society that are replicated within tech? For many who are marginalised, the status quo remains a central barrier to being present and progressing in the fields of computer science and data science. They are equally occupied with how work is organised in tech and higher education, as with doing work in these sectors.

Dr. Krafft received their PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017, completed their postdoctoral work at the University of California Berkeley and University of Washington, and was previously faculty at the University of Oxford. Dr Krafft participates in several tech justice groups including NoTechForTyrants, United Tech and Allied Workers, and the Movement for Anti-Oppressive Computing Practices. They have published and presented extensively on topics including participatory change in digital institutions, data visualisation, AI, casualisation, and ethics. Dr. Krafft co-directs the Critical Platform Studies Group (CritPlat), an international research collective which interrogates and intervenes on structures of power that are produced or reproduced by software.

For more information on The Arts of Autonomy, visit www.artsautonomy.net

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under theEuropean Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 852205).