Read about and register for upcoming Critical Tech Talks below.
Ecomedia and the Cost of Technological Progress
Cajetan Iheka
Monday October 7, 2024 | 4:30pm EST
The affordance of technology is the improvement of human lives and societies. Advancements in technology have contributed to improved life and efficiency for human societies. But what is the cost of technological innovation and who bears the brunt? Communities of color in the West and global south societies have often suffered the consequences of technological progress. This talk turns to ecological media produced about extraction in Africa to highlight the exacting cost of innovative progress across the continent and the rerouting of low-tech infrastructure to reconstitute the fragmented social.
Cajetan Iheka is Professor of English at Yale University, where he specializes in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and postcolonial literature. He serves as director of the Whitney Humanities Center, chair of the Council on African Studies, and head of the Africa Initiative at Yale. Professor Iheka is the author or editor of four books, including Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Naturalizing Africa won the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2020 First Book Prize of the African Literature Association. His African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021) received six book prizes and honors, including the 2022 African Studies Association Best Book Prize, the Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award of the International Studies Association.
Respondents
Paul Ugor is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of Modern African Literatures and Cultures, Anglophone Postcolonial World Literatures, Cultural Studies, Global Black Studies, and New Media Cultures in the Global South. He is the author of Nollywood: Popular Culture and Narratives of Youth Struggles in Nigeria (2016) and co-editor of several collections including, Youth and Popular Culture in Africa: Media, Music, and Politics (2021) and African Youth Cultures in the Age of Globalization: Challenges, Agency, and Resistance (2017).
Adwoa Appiah, BSc (KNUST), MSc (Oxon), EMBA (Univ of Ghana) is a PhD candidate in Sustainability Management at the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment, Enterprise, and Development (SEED). She has previously worked with leading financial institutions in Africa including the African Development Bank and Ecobank where she gained experience in environmental management and sustainability as well corporate and transaction banking. Her research interests are in sustainability management with emphasis on sustainable banking, sustainable finance and climate governance. Her current research focuses on commercial banks in Africa’s contribution to sustainability and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Moderator
Marcel O’Gorman is a University Research Chair, Professor of English, and Founding Director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), where he teaches courses, leads collaborative projects, and directs workshops in digital design and the philosophy of technology. The CML is located inside the Communitech Hub in Kitchener, where its role is to disseminate a philosophy of “tech for good.”
Perspectives on Accelerating AI Adoption
Distinguished Panel
Tuesday June 25, 2024 | 4:00pm EST | In-person at Communitech Hub
Join us to explore the impact of the Voluntary Code of Conduct on the Responsible Development and Management of Advanced Generative AI Systems. The code, introduced by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Industry, aims to foster public trust in AI technologies, intending to accelerate adoption. This engaging panel discussion featuring education leaders, computer science researchers and industry experts will explore the broader implications of accelerating AI adoption beyond economic impacts. Speakers will share insights, hopes and concerns about the potential societal changes, ethical considerations and regulatory challenges that come with AI.
Humility as a Value in Engineering and Design
Kari Zacharias
Friday March 22, 2024 | 4:00pm EST | Virtual and in-person
Couldn’t join us live? Catch up on the recording of this event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7TBe5PceBs
Responsible, sustainable, and equitable technological design requires a culture of engineering whose values reflect these intended design outcomes. In this talk, I use the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer – the Rudyard Kipling text that forms the basis of the iron ring ceremony – as a space to explore changing understandings of humility as an engineering value. While humility has long been positively associated with engineering practice, the humble engineer portrayed in Kipling’s poetry is a different figure than the engineer humbled by technology who is often presented in contemporary discussions of the iron ring and the Ritual. I argue that our understanding of engineering humility has implications for the ways that we think about and enact responsibility in engineering and technological design. Connecting recent discourse around the Ritual to the idea of humility, I suggest that engineers can work towards responsibility, sustainability, and equity in design by practicing humility as respect of other ways of knowing, doing, being, and making.
Kari Zacharias is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Engineering Professional Practice and Engineering Education at the University of Manitoba. Her work focuses on the intersections between engineering knowledges and other disciplines and knowledge cultures. She has a background in engineering and in science and technology studies, and she is a founding member and co-facilitator of the Retool the Ring group.
Dr. Zacharias will be joined by two respondents, Dr. Jennifer Howcroft and Naomi Paul.
Jennifer Howcroft is a Lecturer in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Her research encompasses technical and pedagogical research areas. Her pedagogical research focuses on engineering education, in particular engineering design, holistic engineering education, empathy, and values. Her technical research is predominantly focused on sensor-based human movement analysis encompassing signal analysis, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence techniques.
Naomi Paul (She/Her) is a Métis woman who grew up here in Waterloo region. This is outside of the Georgian Bay Métis Community, which is her family’s hometown. She is currently pursuing her PhD in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, where she completed both her undergraduate and master’s degrees in Systems Design Engineering as well. Naomi’s research focuses on bridging Indigenous and Western knowledge within STEM, recognizing that Indigenous Perspectives have long been excluded from education, but will play a crucial role in our progress towards reconciliation.
How to Build Anything Ethically
Suzanne Kite
Tuesday November 21, 2023 | 11:30am EST | Virtual
Couldn’t join us live? Catch up on the recording of this event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK-TbocBwHE&t=71s
This discussion of ethical decision making when building technologies in a ‘Good Way’ includes two examples. First, I illustrate how the protocol for building a Lakota sweat lodge can act as a framework for building a physical computing device. Next, I provide an example of how multiple streams of protocol are necessary to build an AI system as a confluence of ethics. Some ideas proposed here are not currently possible, some are possible if investment is made in the necessary research, and some are possible but only through a radical change in the way technology companies are run and the pyramid of compensation for the exploitation of resources is reversed.
Suzanne Kite is an award-winning Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and academic. Her scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology (the study of beinghood in Lakȟóta), artificial intelligence, and contemporary art and performance. She creates interfaces and arranges software systems that engage the whole body, in order to imagine new ethical AI protocols that interrogate past, present, and future Lakȟóta philosophies.
On Black Media Philosophy and Beyond
Armond R. Towns
Wednesday September 20, 2023 | 5pm EDT | Virtual and in-person
Couldn’t join us live? Catch up on the recording of this event: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=whWeYuLfc1g
Much of the contemporary research on race in communication media studies begins with media representations. However, for this talk, Armond R. Towns will focus on the relationship between the modern research university, race, and the development of communication and media studies in the early and mid-twentieth century, with a focus specifically on US and Canadian communication and media studies. Like the modern university, the discipline of communication and media studies, Towns argues, has a difficulty with understanding non-Western life. This talk is a beginning conversation on how to push toward new forms of understanding humanity beyond Western life. The topic of who counts as human is crucial in a context where big tech aims to control the future of so-called humanity and the AI race closes the gap between human and machine communications.
Armond R. Towns is an associate professor in Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Communication. His research brings together Black studies, cultural studies, and media philosophy. His book, On Black Media Philosophy, was published in 2022 with the University of California Press. He is also the co-founder and inaugural editor of the journal, Communication and Race. Currently, he is developing a project on the relationship between the history of communication studies and the history of Black studies, focusing specifically on the development of both fields in U.S. and Canada.
Produced by the Critical Media Lab at the University of Waterloo, Critical Tech Talks is a series of honest dialogues about technological innovation. From data harvesting to the conflict minerals in our smartphones, critical thinking is shifting the momentum towards positive change – towards Tech for Good®. Each of the university’s six faculties will co-host a techno-critical speaker and invite Waterloo students and local tech sector members to participate in an on-stage dialogue and lead a post-event discussion online. The series is sponsored by Communitech, the Office of Research at the University of Waterloo, and the faculties of Arts, Environment, Engineering, Health, Math, and Science.
Past events: Our first round of Critical Tech Talk spanned six events from Fall 2021 to Spring 2023. Please see the event recordings and speaker details from our first series on this page. Catch up on the second series of talks that began in Fall 2023 on the current page.