https://perdu.nl/nl/r/black-method-curiosity-and-wonder/
Students of the Amsterdam Sandberg Instituut organize a lecture series and the first event is Thursday October 21, 2021 in Perdu, Kloveniersburgwal 86, Amsterdam, 8 pm:
Reading and discussion of Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick. Part of the extracurricular course Recipes for a Technological Undoing offered to students at the Sandberg Instituut and Rietveld Academie, organized by Ladipo Famodu, Lauren Fong, and Alec Mateo.
“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 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…”

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.

The programme will be in English
Programme starts: 18:00
Doors open: 17:30
Tickets live: €10,50 / €7,50 (CJP/Stadspas/Students)
Livestream: €7,50
Required: proof of vaccination (QR code via the CoronaCheck-app, paper proof of vaccination, yellow vaccination booklet, valid proof of vaccination for those vaccinated outside of the Netherlands), negative test result (max. 24 hours old), or proof of recovery. Please show this at the door.
Buy your ticket here: https://tickets.voordemensen.nl/perdu/event/560.
This event is part of the series Recipes for a Technological Undoing. 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.
Recipes for a Technological Undoing invites students to work across disciplines to generate new understandings of how artists and designers can combat techno-determinism. We seek to unravel the assumption that technological progress in the way it has manifested was inevitable and will continue to be so. Undoing the structures that seek to quantify, rank, capture, and predict our endless ways of being.
The technologies we wish to undo are those that claim to predict social outcomes, those that perpetuate a hierarchy or preference based on race, gender, sexuality, or physical ability. In the lectures, we will learn how these preferences are encoded in the technologies themselves. And build from a history of science that centers a white, Western epistemology.
We will learn how the disciplining of knowledge – the separation of the arts and humanities from the sciences – enables automated bias.