About this event
Researching Algorithmic Life – A Conversation on Method and Substance, with Professor Louise Amoore FBA and Dr Sophia Goodfriend
Algorithmic technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, are transforming our lives – for better or for worse. How can social scientists and researchers of human societies adequately investigate their transformative effects? How can we grapple fully with the technical in the social and social in the technical? What does this mean for our political and social theoretical concepts and understandings of human society? In this conversation we bring together 2 scholars who have spent years researching these questions in very different contexts. They will each reflect on a recent scholarship they have completed which examines different facets of algorithmic life, and how they met the challenges of researching algorithmic lives (and deaths). Papers by the two authors (open access) are linked below. The conversation will be chaired by Professor Nehal Bhuta, Edinburgh Law School and the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life.
Professor Louise Amoore FBA is Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life and professor of human geography at Durham University, UK. Louise is known for her pioneering research on the politics and ethics of AI, biometrics, and machine learning technologies. She is the author of Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Duke, 2020) in which she examines how algorithms interact with the data attributes of people, objects, and scenes, and how AI systems could be held accountable through engagement with the conditions of their operation. In her book The Politics of Possibility (Duke, 2013) she traces how contemporary state security, border controls, and biometrics have shifted from the calculation of statistical probability to a novel form of algorithmic possibility.
Dr Sophia Goodfriend is an anthropologist whose research examines the impact of automation on military conflict. Her first academic book project is an ethnographic account of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) has impacted what it means to wage and live with war in Israel and Palestine. Alongside her academic work, Dr Goodfriend works as a writer and civil society consultant. Her popular writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, the Boston Review, the Baffler, 972 Magazine, and Jewish Currents, among other publications. Dr Goodfriend received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University, an MA in social sciences from the University of Chicago, and was previously a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative.
Background readings (recommended but not required):
Louise Amoore et al, Politics of the Prompt: Government in the Age of AI, Economy and Society (2025), open access.
Sophia Goodfriend, Algorithmic State Violence: Automated Surveillance and Palestinian Dispossession in Hebron's Old City , International Journal of Middle East Studies (2023), open access.
This event is supported by the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life, the Edinburgh Centre for International Global Law and the Centre for Technomoral Futures.
If you are unable to register for any reason, please contact Nehal Bhuta: nehal.bhuta@ed.ac.uk