Composite Bodies: Gender, Race, and Technology

Date: 

Wednesday, September 16, 2020, 5:00pm

Location: 

Online, Harvard WGS

Event Info

Michele Goodwin is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar, Chancellor's Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine and host of the podcast On the Issues with Michele Goodwin
Caroline Light is Senior Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University
Patricia Williams is University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University

In a moment where our collective health depends on technological innovation – including “contact tracing” through the collection and storage of cell phone data – visual, biometric, and other forms surveillance collect us as pinpoints of data. Composite Bodies takes up questions of technology, surveillance, embodiment, and power from an intersectional feminist lens. Through critical engagements with law, philosophy, art, history, bioethics, criminology, and advocacy, this series will address how the machine measurement and tracking of bodies is reconceptualizing notions of privacy while complicating the boundaries of the body as an integrated whole, reproducing and reinforcing biases based on race, class, gender, and other historically disabling taxonomies.

See also: Harvard