“Thinking, writing and imagining across a range of texts, disciplines, histories, and genres unsettles suffocating and dismal and insular racial logics.”

-Katherine McKittrick

In this lecture, Katherine McKittrick, professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, will trace the historical-spatial incompatibility between algorithmic logic and black life. She will share how self-replicating knowledge systems create hierarchy from difference, revealing how certain arrangements, situations, and bodies are measured and abstracted from their layered context. In Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021), McKittrick brings us back to this layering. She extends an invitation to complicate the numbers which arise, by drawing upon narratives which weave together “the song, the groove, the poem, the novel, the painting, the sculpture…”

This event is part of the series Recipes for a Technological Undoing, an extracurricular course offered to students at the Sandberg Instituut and Rietveld Academie. Programming includes public lectures, workshops, and discussion sessions. The technologies to be undone are those that claim to predict social outcomes; those that perpetuate a hierarchy or preference based on race, gender, sexuality, or physical ability. This initiative is organized by Ladipo Famodu, Lauren Fong, and Alec Mateo.

Katherine McKittrick is professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle and edited and contributed to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Her research is interdisciplinary and attends to the links between theories of liberation, black studies, and cultural production. Professor McKittrick’s monograph, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021), is an exploration of black methodologies.