S
pring 2025 Nellie Y. McKay Lecture in the Humanities:
Wendy Chun
Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
This Nellie Y. McKay Lecture in the Humanities delves into the history of keypunch operators in North America by combining personal reflection and critical theory. Keypunch operators—people (mainly female) who translated documents into computer-readable cards—have been key to the rise of modern large-scale computation, but surprisingly little has been written about them. By the 1970s, these women were mainly immigrants, chosen both for their “nimble fingers” and basic English skills, which prevented them from entering more lucrative jobs. Intertwining her mother’s experiences, the history of Korean-Canadian immigration and critical ethnic studies, Professor Wendy Chun shows how this story of both exploitation and empowerment, boredom and joy resonates with current labor conditions.
This event will be of interest to those who want to learn more about the history and social context of labor practices and exploitation in relation to technological innovation. This topic has important implications for contemporary ‘ethics of technology/AI’ issues as well, for example with respect to exploitative tech industry labor conditions faced by content moderators, data labelers, and warehouse workers.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at the Simon Fraser University School of Communication. Dr. Chun is the author of Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), and Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), as well as numerous articles and edited collections. She has received fellowships from various foundations and institutes, including the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She was Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades.
Currently, Dr. Chun leads SFU’s Digital Democracies Institute which was launched in 2019. The Institute aims to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation by fostering critical and creative user practices and alternative paradigms for connection. It has four distinct research streams all led by Dr. Chun: Beyond Verification which looks at authenticity and the spread of disinformation; From Hate to Agonism, focusing on fostering democratic exchange online; Desegregating Network Neighbourhoods, combatting homophily across platforms; and Discriminating Data: Neighbourhoods, Individuals and Proxies, investigating the centrality of race, gender, class and sexuality to big data and network analytics.
Click here for more information.
The Uncertainty & AI group at IRH is also hosting a smaller and more interactive lunch and discussion event with Professor Chun on Monday, April 7, from 12:00 – 1:30 pm for graduate students and invited faculty. Please RVSP by Friday, March 21 by clicking this link.
Event co-sponsored by the The Center for the Humanities, UW–Madison and the Uncertainty and AI Group (Un-AI) interdisciplinary research team’s funding from the College of Letters & Science and the Institute for Research in the Humanities seed program, “The Humanities Respond to Global Challenges.”