Paul Dourish, Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine
Friday, November 7th, 2025 1:30 - 3:00pm
Abstract
For several years, my students and I have been examining different aspects of the ways that data and data technologies have come to be central to the operations of local government. The stories that data tell, though, very distinctly depending on one’s perspective, and indeed the abilities to tell those stories — the forms of authority that they demand— present challenges in themselves. In this talk, I’ll present a tour of the ways that these questions have manifested themselves in a series of (largely) ethnographic encounters over the last ten years or more, with an eye towards their likely evolution in the face of (sigh) emerging interests in AI.
Biography
Paul Dourish is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. His research draws from anthropology, STS (Science and Technology Studies),and other humanistic social sciences to examine the contexts in which digital practices emerge and evolve. Much of the work revolves around what we might call "data imaginaries" -- data and technologies not just as things in the world, but as objects that live in the cultural imagination. Theoretically, most of the work he draw upon emerges from a pragmatist tradition (symbolic interactionism, say, or practice theory) although there is a distinct whiff of early British cultural studies to it too, along with hefty pinches of organizational science, feminist epistemology, and decolonial critique.