HSOC Speaker Series

Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football

Monday, Sept. 8, 4 – 5 p.m. | Scholar's Event Theatre, Price Gilbert Library

Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology & Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is a Black feminist anthropologist and ethnographer whose ethnographic research uses sport to theorize race, kinship and care, gender, and the performing body.

College football, with its prestige, drama, media, and money, is a core feature of the sporting landscape in the U.S. However, the promises of an “amateur” system that offers a “free” education contradict the reality. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Prof. Canada will describe how this system particularly harms the Black men who are demographically overrepresented on gridirons across the country. In this talk, she will highlight how she engages multiple audiences in her ethnographic writing, which details how Black college football players tackle the systems that structure their everyday lives, and who helps them do it.

Techno Eugenics, Scaling Surveillance, and Trans-Generational Resistance to AI Authoritarianism

Monday, Oct. 13, 4 – 5 p.m. | Crosland G120, Wilby Classroom

Anita Say Chan is a professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching interests include globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the “periphery”, science and technology studies in Latin America, and feminist and decolonial approaches to technology. 

The insidious legacy of eugenics lives on in the expansive techno-surveillance, algorithmic authoritarianism, and data-driven discrimination of Big Tech and AI companies today. This talk illuminates the throughline between the 19th century's radically authoritarian, White supremacist eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. This talk traces how the AI-driven models of Big Tech are built on data that exploit women, immigrants, and other minoritized populations, amplifying social hierarchies and AI predictions of majoritarian outcomes as the most probable, “ideal” futures. But this talk also covers trailblazing efforts of feminist and immigrant activists from a century ago who resisted dominant institutional research norms and developed alternative data practices that continue to inspire global justice-based data initiatives today. By looking to the past to shape our future, this talk charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness around today's AI present, rooted in global justice and unapologetically humanistic methods.

Financial Estrangement: Debt Collection, Precarity, and Pathways to Institutional Detachment

Monday, November 10, 4 – 5p.m. | Crosland G120, Wilby Classroom

Marie-Lou Laprise is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. Her work at the interface of AI, finance, law, and sociology asks how data-driven technologies are reconfiguring flows and distributions of information and wealth, in financial markets and beyond. 

Fred Wherryis the Class of 1917 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also an affiliated faculty member in African-American Studies. He founded the Debt Collection Lab and the Dignity + Debt Network where he works on issues of economic justice.

Why are indebted Americans more likely to mistrust courts and the legal process? Drawing on an original probabilistic survey of 2,115 American adults, this project explores how indebted Americans who have been contacted by a debt collector are more likely to believe that the legal system is unfair and to feel either detached or estranged from it. These negative beliefs are more prominent for Black Americans compared to Whites, even after controlling for financial hardship, voting behaviors, and other demographic characteristics. Our results reveal that over half of Americans report that a close friend or family member has ever been contacted by a debt collector, and over a quarter report that their household has been contacted in the past year. We develop the concept of financial estrangement to explain the experience of public distrust in the context of financial precarity and how predatory inclusion leads to a growing sense of disconnection for people living in an increasingly financialized society. Our concept of financial estrangement brings together concerns from economic sociology, law and society, criminal justice, and race and inequality, and applies them to the context of the marketplace for consumer debt.