Overview
In this talk, Dr Isabelle Higgins will begin with her recently completed PhD research in sociology that explores how children deemed eligible for adoption in the USA have their personal information shared in the public domain. This information, including first names, photographs, details of medical and trauma histories, and racial and gender identity, is shared online by a range of self-describe ‘adoption advocates’, including government agencies and private adoption agencies (Higgins, 2023). Agencies explain that they have designed these sites in an effort to increase the adoption of children classified as ‘hard to place’ on the basis of their age, disability or racial identity. Yet the sharing of personal data about children classified as ‘hard to place’ in the public domain raises serious privacy concerns.
These concerns are (re)articulated when one also considers how such children’s personal data is (re)shared and reused in relation to social media algorithms and forms part of generative AI training data. In many locations then, decisions are being made that incorporate, rely upon or draw upon the non-consensual personal data shared about children in state care. To complicate these realities further, some children are adopted by parents who work as social media influencers who monetise their children’s perceived alterity in their online ‘influencing’ work. Higgins’ research examines this disparate range of locations, arguing that together they can be viewed as locations in which intersectionally racialised regimes of power and inequality are (re)produced. To make this argument, she draws on insights from a range of sociological (and adjacent) traditions, including the sociology of ‘race’ and racism, decolonial thought, reproductive sociology, ‘race critical code studies’ and media and cultural studies.
In this talk, Higgins uses her PhD research, as well as some more recent research into the use of social media and algorithmic technologies by other online communities, such as those involved in online conspiracy theorising, to draw attention to the need for a historic and political economic analysis of everyday online realities experienced by distinct communities. Such an approach might complicate commonly mobilised discourses of ‘online safety’ or ‘digital wellbeing’, but ultimately highlights the complex and context specific ways that communities of users are making meaning and (re)producing structural relations of power in and through their activities online.
Speaker
Dr Isabelle Higgins is a Teaching Associate in Media and Culture and Sociological Theory at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge. Isabelle is interested in studying empirical sites in which intersecting racial, reproductive and digital inequalities are reproduced through the design and use of everyday technologies. She draws on a range of social theory to critically interrogate the nature of power and inequality reflected in such empirical locations. Isabelle has been the recipient of a range of awards and fellowships at all stages of her academic career. For the 2024 - 2025 academic year, she holds a Tech Policy Fellowship with UC Berkeley.
Details
This is a hybrid event, which will take place in-person in the Gatsby Room (Chancellor's Centre) and also on Zoom.
If you would like to attend online, please register for the Zoom link.
Refreshments will be available for the in-person audience.
Access
This event will take place in the Gatsby Room on the first floor of the Chancellor's Centre. It has step-free access with a lift and there is an accessible toilet located each floor of the building.
Wolfson Humanities Society
The Humanities Society organises regular talks spanning a wide range of topics which take place every Tuesday during term time - please sign up to their mailing list to keep up to date with their upcoming events.
