Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement

Confronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example, I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global, technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: Facial Weaponization Suite, a series of masks and public actions, and Face Cages, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.

The honest broker; making sense of science in policy and politics

p.81-82

The honest broker; making sense of science in policy and politics

p.81-82

Family, community and politics: the fertile legacy of Michael Young

The Institute of Community Studies was set up by Michael Young in order to carry out research on politically relevant social issues, in a context free from direct political control. A research method was devised for it whereby researchers made their own values and objectives very explicit, while staying as close as possible in their reports to the concerns and language of respondents themselves. This method has often been criticized by professional sociologists: but it reflects quite well the nature of social knowledge. It has produced reports which help to increase public understanding of social processes, and provide useful guidance to policy makers. Professional sociology on the other hand has tried to develop a rigorously value-free method. As a result, though, it often seems to be tied implicitly to values shared among researchers but not more universally. Arguably this makes it harder for the general public to understand, and accept, its findings.

Philosophy and Politics in the 20th in Argentina. Readings of Italian Idealism

The transition from a positivist matrix to an idealistic one in Argentinean academic philosophy can be read as a result of a gradual and problematic pollution. It was, also, heavily traversed by considerations that exceeded the theoretical aspects. Based on the willingness to explore this transit, the article pays attention to one of the episodes of this contamination: how the Revista de Filosofía reads Croce and Gentile’s philosophy. Observing there some possibility of dialogue between positivist assumptions, with which the journal takes a position, and the idealism the article analyze how this dialogue and its limits were given from a political consideration. If the idealism was condemned, it is centrally owed to its performance during the first years of the government of Mussolini. If, meanwhile, it was some to rescue of that philosophy, it was that it contributed to think the revolutionary change.

'Ancient Enmities' and Modern Conflict: History and Politics in Northern Ireland

This article investigates the role of history and historical consciousness in deeply divided societies. It looks at the case of Northern Ireland. It argues that, while the conflict here is caused by contemporary divisions, perceptions of the past have had considerable influence. Recent years have seen efforts to change historical attitudes and this has aided political accommodation. An important lesson from the conflict in Northern Ireland points to the need to challenge such historical perceptions.

Confusing Culture and Politics: Ulster Scots Culture and Music

In Northern Ireland of the mid-1990s, many were caught off-guard by the comet-like arrival of a previously unarticulated Ulster Scots identity, replete with its own folk traditions. The article exploits the author’s position as Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1998 until 2003 to offer an auto-ethnographic reflection on the literature on cultural politics in Northern Ireland since the outbreak of the Troubles, informed by extensive fieldwork with arts administrators and with contemporary Ulster Scots musicians. The article gives a close reading and historical contextualisation of the Ulster-Scots musical revue On Eagle's Wing, which was developed during this period. The article uses the concept of "suture" articulated by Lacan and developed by Laclau, Mouffe, and Žižek to explain both the potential for Ulster Scots culture to enter political discourse out of a seeming vacuum and its subsequent difficulties, offering an original interpretation of the role of culture in the contemporary trajectory of Northern Ireland politics.