The Material Force of Categories*: Assessments, Algorithms and Infrastructures of Categorisation

Saturday, 11th of March, 10:30am-5:00pm

The Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square

**REGISTRATION IS ESSENTIAL**

This one-day symposium looks at how assessment and categorisation can play an active role within decision-making structures. The event is interested in examining how socio-technical system produce categorisations—particularly categorisations of intelligence, risk, and the subject—in ways that can then be operationalised within broader institutional and epistemic frameworks. The symposium is interested in how such categories are produced through a range of psychosocial, statistical, and technical modes of assessment, including: psychometric and psychological testing, risk assessment tools, and machine learning.

Organised by Sasha Bergstrom-Katz and Tomas Percival to coincide with Psychotechne at the Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck.

Details and location to be sent to registered attendees

Schedule:

10:30-11:00 am - Conference opening

11:00-12:30 pm - Panel 1: Inventing Intelligence

Margarita Aragon (Birkbeck): Intelligence testing, race-making and confinement in the early 20th century UK
Simon Jarrett (Birkbeck): The search for science: trying to define intellectual disability from 1700 to Binet
Ageliki Lefkaditou (University of Oslo): Between change and stability: Producing the Norwegian standard of the Stanford – Binet intelligence scale, 1920s–1930s

12:30-1:00 pm - Psychotechne exhibition visit, Peltz Gallery

1:00-2:00 pm - Lunch (provided)

2:00-3:00 pm - Panel 2: Metrics in Mental Health

Eoin Fullam (Birkbeck): Diagnosis in Chatbot Therapy
Becka Hudson (Birkbeck/UCL): Constructing and caring for the disorder: personality disorder, recovery and risk in UK prisons

3:00-3:15 pm - Break

3:15-4:30 pm - Algorithms that Act

Ramon Amaro (Het Nieuwe Instituut): Where All Things Are Bound by Race and Data
Anthony Faramelli (Goldsmiths): The Fascist Drive: (Post)Media Pedagogy and Social Subjection

4:30-5:00 pm - Closing Remarks

For more information regarding the event or exhibition, please contact: abergs02@mail.bbk.ac.uk or t.percival@gold.ac.uk

Psychotechne is curated by Dr Sarah Marks and is a collaboration with the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health (CIRMH).

This symposium is supported by the Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund, Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, the School of Arts, Birkbeck and the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health.

*Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Inside Technology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. P 3.

The Material Force of Categories Symposium