Lecture Series Diversity, Gender & Intersectionality

‘Norms’ in the sense of efforts to find the right measure, to establish rules for appropriate behaviour and to define social, cultural, geographical and aesthetic boundaries between one's own and the other or the foreign are an integral part of cultural history. These rules find expression in the most diverse media and arts, for example as visualisations, but also in literature, in various discourses or in popular and everyday practices. It is true for all areas that the actors involved let themselves be guided by standards, confirm them, but also creatively or subversively thwart them. Thinking of social order as the implementation of norms and normality initially makes the category of the normal appear as a paradigm of modernity. However, the associated contexts of domination and oppression (e.g. pogroms, repression, stigmatisation) turn out to be long-established cultural patterns for the defence and disciplining of the non-normal.

The multidisciplinary lecture series "Normality - Images, Discourses, Practices" would like to take up the discussion on the meaning of normality and on the functioning of normalisation processes and ask about concrete processes of the genesis and shaping of regulations, patterns and schemes producing normality. A decidedly cultural-scientific, media-theoretical and cultural-aesthetic perspective will be pursued. The entire spectrum of human ideas of order and standardisation techniques will be addressed, from the specifics of historical disciplinary and stabilisation measures to current examples of a postmodern power of normalisation.

The opening lecture provides an overview of the historical genesis of normalisation processes and outlines the common theoretical framework in which the other lectures in the lecture series will examine 'normality' in more detail using exemplary artefacts, images, discourses, media and practices in both diachronic and synchronic perspectives.

For intersectionality studies oriented towards the present, it is self-evident to assume that inequality and discrimination are social phenomena to be overcome and combated. But was this also true for societies in the European Middle Ages? Was the social inequality that prevailed at that time perceived as unjust, or as normal because it was supposedly 'natural'? How did the people concerned react to discourses and practices that we would call discriminatory today? Selected examples of negatively constructed Jewish alterity will be used to explore this question.

What are we obliged to do - and what goes beyond that? What role does "the normal" play in the justification of norms? Or in other words: how normative is normality? These questions are philosophically particularly interesting in places where we transgress, perhaps must transgress, the boundaries of the normal, where norms are violated in order to set new ones, where we move from the ordinary to the extraordinary. At the latest, James O. Urmson's essay "Saints and Heros" (1958) philosophically revived the debate on the question of the systematic place of outstanding actions. The author argues that all moral philosophies that assume a trichotomous division of actions into "commanded", "forbidden" and "permitted" cannot adequately describe the actions of saints and heroes; for this, another category is needed, namely that of supererogation. Based on the questions raised in Urmson's text about the systematic place of moral exceptionality in ethics, I will look at normality from the perspective of exceptionality in my lecture and, using recent research contributions on the sense and nonsense of (moral) heroism, examine how normality and normativity relate to each other here.

France is considered the country of human rights; with the motto "liberty, equality, fraternity", the republic underlines its self-claim to equal rights. However, the realities often look different, not least for the French integration model, which relies on assimilation. Migrants and even post-migrants repeatedly come up against the limits of the uniforming-norming system that relies heavily on social reproduction. A fact that ultimately makes postmigration appear as a-normative and a-normal. The fact that this is especially true for (post-)migrant women is illustrated by exemplary literary texts by (post-)migrant women authors from France.

There is probably no other topic that is currently (and has been for some years) so heated in public discourse as linguistic gendering. Sometimes there is even talk of a social camp formation and division into gender supporters and gender deniers. Starting from the question of how linguistic norms can be defined linguistically, the lecture will discuss the current norms on linguistic gendering: What does the official orthography say, what recommendations does the Duden give and how are the language guidelines, e.g. at universities, designed? Based on this, linguistic gendering is placed in the context of general developments in language change. The questions of how the massive socio-symbolic charge of gendering came about and how the German language will possibly develop further with regard to gendering will be the focus of this lecture.

In German didactics, there has been a lively discussion about the standardisation of subject-specific educational goals and the associated secondary consequences with regard to the setting of learning goals for German lessons since the far-reaching "PISA shock". On the one hand, standardisation is seen as a danger of trivialising and reducing teaching to the merely standardisable; on the other hand, it is emphasised that the turn to empiricism and monitoring has only made glaring deficiencies and inequalities visible and made new intervention concepts possible.

Using examples and results from empirical classroom research, this lecture will take a look at the tension between normality (as a quantitative-statistical concept) and normativity (as a phenomenon of setting) and show that we have to struggle with irresolvable paradoxes in this regard when it comes to teaching language competences.

With the 'Corona crisis', the advertising industry in 2020 also found itself in a crisis situation: 'Is it allowed to advertise in these times as if nothing had happened?', 'How can we continue to advertise in these times at all?' More or less implicitly, a problem with normality is articulated here, certainly in the sense in which it was theoretically founded by Jürgen Link in normalistic thinking.

The lecture deals with TV commercials that ran from the end of March to the end of August 2020 and address the Corona situation. By means of exemplary observations, it offers some observations on how, on the one hand, the Corona situation has affected the challenges that advertising has to face as a text type, and how, on the other hand, this itself changes again in the course of 2020, describable precisely as (re)normalisation.

Gender fluidity is not a phenomenon of modernity. For example, the famous hermaphrodites were already known in antiquity. Against this background, the lecture will address the reception of these older traditions in Christian art of the early modern period. Finally, it will be discussed whether these older phenomena can also be described with the contemporary concept of queerness, or where the differences are to be found.

A mistake is considered a deviation from what is right. To speak of a mistake, it is therefore necessary to define "right" and "wrong". Not only in the technical sphere are norms set that must be adhered to, but also in the social sphere. From a historical perspective, the lecture asks about gender-specific attributions of mistakes and the associated setting of norms: How are images of "right" and "wrong" femininity/masculinity formed through the attribution of mistakes?
The lecture will cover a broad cultural-historical arc, ranging from primal narratives about Adam and Eve to a focus on technical errors and gender attributions to glitch feminism. The lecture is thus based on a broad concept of mistakes. Themes include sins and moral misconduct, mistakes in technical processes and concepts of mistakes as resistance to the mainstream.

Both Rosa von Praunheim's "Not the Homosexual is Perverted, but the Situation in which He Lives" (FRG 1971) and, over 20 years later, Sönke Wortmann's "Der bewegte Mann" (FRG 1994) present a homosexual subculture and thus provide a mainstream audience with insights into the life plans of gay men that were marginalised or at least little known at the time of the films' production. The lecture aims to show how in both films a gay life is constructed as an "other" that is categorised and evaluated from the perspective of an "own" through audiovisual mediation throughout the plot. In this context, special attention will be paid to the hyperbolic staging of gay lifeworlds and their characters in the lecture: Both films travesty and parody (time-specific) gay specifics and construct a gay self-image in the case of von Praunheim and a gay image of others in the case of Wortmann. In the chronological sequence of these two images, the lecture considers whether and, if so, how gay lifestyles are evaluated by the films as normal or still evaluated as "different" in the majority culture.

In the late medieval Frederick of Swabia, the title character meets the dwarf queen Jerome, who wants Frederick for a husband and keeps him temporarily in captivity: The result is the daughter Ziproner, who follows the fugitive Frederick in later years and gains admission into his human family. The unusual figure of the female dwarf poses a riddle in an eccentric family constellation, for on the one hand Ziproner fits surprisingly smoothly into the courtly dynastic order, although on the other she is set apart from the noble community by markers of distance and strangeness. The novel arranges the overlapping of gender and species differentiations with the intrinsic spatiality of the dwarf world in a field of tension of ambivalent power and minor relationships. At its centre is the dwarf queen Jerome, who transgresses courtly norms and enforces love against the dominant gender order. Her extraordinary power turns into powerlessness in her relationship with the human man and breaks with an assumed bodily norm that makes the smallness of the noble-beautiful dwarf woman a problem. On the basis of the narrative and visual representation in the illustrated Heidelberg manuscript (cpg 345, circa 1470), the lecture examines which cultural and narrative processes of adaptation, equalisation and norming enable the integration of dwarf women into the aristocratic human world and where these processes reach their limits.

Modern agriculture is very successful in that food security is guaranteed in a calculable way and agriculture harmonises with industrialisation. However, the field of agriculture is at the same time marked by numerous polarising challenges ranging from price pressure and animal welfare to soil, water and climate protection. Both the successes and the problems are closely linked to the regime of industrialised agriculture. This is accompanied by a dilemma: the normality of industrialised agriculture, which is almost invisible to the public and provides food security at historically low food prices, is incompatible with increasing demands for soil protection, water conservation, climate adaptation and the remuneration of qualified personnel - but these demands can be ignored less and less. What is needed is a transformation of the normality of agriculture, which necessarily implies a change in its social location.

The lecture traces the development towards the normality of industrialised agriculture from a socio-theoretical perspective, discusses the increasingly visible costs of this normality and points out challenges and development requirements.

Art is the subject of images. Images are viewed, designed, reflected upon, communicated. The discourse on which images are the subject of discussion in reception, production and reflection in education, changes with varying dynamics. Essential conceptions of images or perspectives on the world of images persist. A critical reflection on the canon of images in curricula, media and textbooks for art education seems necessary in view of new social, art-theoretical and art-pedagogical discourses.

The lecture poses questions about normative ideas of images on the basis of the historical and current canon of images in art education and develops ideas for overcoming prevailing conceptions.

Whether as a "dying race" (vanishing Indian), "noble" or "bloodthirsty savage", the literary, cinematic and artistic representations of mainstream American (and international!) society(ies) have frozen Native Americans in a static past for four hundred years. Against this backdrop of cultural imagination and appropriation from outside, it seems an oxymoron, an abnormality, to imagine indigenous peoples as part of future worlds. Indigenous futurisms, which go against this long-established Western norm, have emerged in the last decade as a broader artistic movement expressing Indigenous perspectives of the past, present and future in the context of science fiction and related subgenres in visual art, literature, film, comics, online games and other media forms. These perspectives often reflect indigenous forms of knowledge, traditional narratives, historical or contemporary political narratives and cultural realities. Indigenous futurisms are part of what Gerald Vizenor has called Native Survivance, a combination of ethnic survival and (often subversive) resistance. They challenge the centuries-long appropriation of indigenous cultures by the dominant society(ies) and at the same time diversify the frame of reference of the science fiction genre. As such, they contribute to processes of decolonisation. This paper examines the visual art of indigenous painter Ryan Singer (Navajo) at the intersection of pop art, activism and indigenous futurism. By focusing on Singer's artistic engagement with the fictional characters and settings of the Star Wars franchise, Singer's works are read as questioning the prevailing norm, as pop art acts of cultural and political decolonisation. This is evident, for example, when Singer (re)appropriates Princess Leia as Hopi Princess Leia (2009) because her hairstyle in Star Wars was originally adopted from the Hopi women's tradition, when Star Wars characters engage with Navajo gaming traditions, or when the artist uses an iconic Star Wars character in (De)Colonized Ewok (2019) to critique the forced assimilation of Native American children in boarding schools during the 19th and 20th centuries.

As a highly modern form of early technological mass entertainment, the circus is a paradigmatic study of what constitutes entertainment. Contrary to the persistent caveat that entertainment is only a temporary escape from everyday life, the circus offers a highly complex model that helps to reflect the social and cultural context by deliberately transgressing the assumptions that establish normality in that context. Contrary to the conventional reading, however, entertainment does not simply consist in breaking norms and conventions, but in the fact that the act of transgression, as a ritualised one, is in turn subjected to fixed norms.

In medieval ethics, the medieval doctrine of natural law plays a central role. Its core idea is the justification of moral norms by means of the concept of a natural right that is to be understood in a non-positivist way, i.e. that is naturally obvious to every human being. But what does nature mean here at all and to what extent can it become normative in practical terms? The medieval thinkers adopt a concept that has its roots in Stoic philosophy and Roman law, but work out more strongly than these traditions that natural law is to be understood as the law of reason, because knowledge of natural rights is communicated to man through his reason. In the background a double concept of nature can be found, insofar as man is not only an animal creature, i.e. endowed with natural drives and instincts, but primarily a nature of reason - with normative implications.

Emojis have become an indispensable and at the same time constantly contested attribute of everyday digital communication. The annually adopted additions to the pictorial vocabulary, in which both international media corporations and private users participate, reflect different ideas about social and cultural 'norms' and 'normality'. The lecture will focus specifically on gender identities and their normalisation in emoji discourses, including the ongoing debates on gender icons and their global reception.

‘Norms’ in the sense of efforts to find the right measure, to establish rules for appropriate behaviour and to define social, cultural, geographical and aesthetic boundaries between one's own and the other or the foreign are an integral part of cultural history. These rules find expression in the most diverse media and arts, for example as visualisations, but also in literature, in various discourses or in popular and everyday practices. It is true for all areas that the actors involved let themselves be guided by standards, confirm them, but also creatively or subversively thwart them. Thinking of social order as the implementation of norms and normality initially makes the category of the normal appear as a paradigm of modernity. However, the associated contexts of domination and oppression (e.g. pogroms, repression, stigmatisation) turn out to be long-established cultural patterns for the defence and disciplining of the non-normal.

The multidisciplinary lecture series "Normality - Images, Discourses, Practices" would like to take up the discussion on the meaning of normality and on the functioning of normalisation processes and ask about concrete processes of the genesis and shaping of regulations, patterns and schemes producing normality. A decidedly cultural-scientific, media-theoretical and cultural-aesthetic perspective will be pursued. The entire spectrum of human ideas of order and standardisation techniques will be addressed, from the specifics of historical disciplinary and stabilisation measures to current examples of a postmodern power of normalisation.

The final lecture deepens the overview of the historical genesis of normalisation processes as well as the theoretical approaches taught and summarises the exemplary artefacts, images, discourses, media and practices presented from the perspective of different disciplines on the framework topic 'normality' in a synopsis.

We renamed the chair of “Comparative development and Cultural studies with a focus on Southeast Asia” to “Critical Development Studies—Southeast Asia”. This is the outcome of an intense intellectual, political and yet intimate process over the last three years. In 2019 a group of international students from the MA Development Studies program reported the shock of experiencing racism in study groups and when looking for shared housing. While confined to online teaching, during class one student found the courage to share their experience of a racist incident on public transport in Passau, the perpetrator humiliating him before vanishing into anonymity. These distressing and painful aggressions urged us to start reflecting on our responsibilities and capabilities, as a chair at the university, to act upon discrimination and racism which still permeate higher education. Building upon feminist political ecology (FPE), post-development, decolonial theory and new area studies, we engaged in a process of learning, unlearning and relearning building up to “Principles of Critical Development Studies: A Minifesto”. We present here a collection of small but significant ideas and hope the commitment to pluralism will help shape the teaching practice and learning environment of the university as a whole.

Literature

Principles of Critical Development Studies SOA – Minifesto ASIEN

Laksmana, Dimas Dwi, Enid Still, and Martina Padmanabhan. 2021. We need to talk about racism. An invitation to join a conversation about racism at the University of Passau. A statement of the Chair of Comparative Development and Cultural Studies – Southeast Asia on: Decoloniality and empathy: Towards education that matters in our time.

We explore the theory and practice of intersectionality and decoloniality with regard to the case of the University of Passau to understand its importance for higher education and research. Drawing on feminist theory and research praxis we explore intersectional approaches to understanding social relations at our university from different standpoints and how this is interwoven into decoloniality. Based on student projects and our joint learning in winter term 21/22 we introduce to intersectionality as a concept and practice and how social movements have mobilised an intersectional perspective both before and since the term was coined. We investigate our own experiences as international and German students at the intersections of gender, age, caste, ethnicity, race and class through autoethnography and a net-mapping exercise. By doing so, we encounter how intersectionality as a lens operates to destabilise colonial ways of seeing. By presenting the results of the research and teaching project, we demonstrate why intersectionality is important to the political process of decolonising our very own University of Passau.

Literature

Bhambra, G. K. (2014) ‘Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues’, Postcolonial Studies. Taylor & Francis, 17(2), pp. 115–121. doi: 10.1080/13688790.2014.966414.

Icaza, R. and Vázquez, R. (2018) ‘Diversity or Decolonisation? Researching Diversity at the University of Amsterdam’, in Bhambra, G. K., Gebrial, D. and Nişancıoğlu, K. (eds.) Decolonising the University, London: Pluto Press, pp 108-128

Session in German

In this lecture the concept of intersectionality and the critique of racism in the practice will be shown. As a platform for the critique of racism, the magazine "of Color" stands for the empowerment and representation of Bi_Poc and is addressed to Bi_Poc and to everyone who wants to learn about the critique of racism. In July 2022 the second print edition about the concept of intersectionality was published. How does the concept of intersectionality in the practice look like? Where are the limits of the intersectional work of "of Color"? What is the vision behind this platform? These questions will be discussed and answered in this lecture.

Session in German

We experience the world intersectionally and at the same time we see others as members of a category - man, woman, black, young, old. Many of these categories are binary and the debates around people who are trans* (trans* gender, trans* race) highlight that very many people in Western culture are unsettled by ambiguity. Research shows that racialised thinking is so deeply socially embedded that even people who are blind from birth perceive others as racialised subjects. The visual "evidence" of human differences that Western culture, including science, relies on, must therefore be rethought.
So can we see in a way that resembles our own intersectional experience as bodies in the world? To answer this question, we need to understand how social categories emerge from visual clues and the extent to which categories shape our visual perception. In the search for ways to see differently - intersectionally - I draw on both academic, interdisciplinary sources and artistic practice in my talk. This can help us to make 'seeing through culture' explicit and thus open the space for more intersectionality.

CANCELLED

Session in German

We all live in a society that has (re)produced racist practices and discourses for centuries. Therefore, it is almost impossible not to have racist knowledge. However, recognising this (learned) knowledge, bringing it into one's own consciousness and reflecting on it repeatedly is possible and the goal of racism-critical practice. But can this knowledge ever be completely discarded?
This lecture offers an introduction and overview of racism-critical migration education and its development. The focus will be on current positions, previous discourses and the interplay between theoretical points of contact and practical educational work in the immigration society.

ONLINE

While almost a century has passed since WEB Du Bois wrote about the global colour line and it is 50 years since Guyanese Marxist scholar and activist Walter Rodney wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, it is only very recently, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, that many organisations involved in international development have begun talking for the first time about racism in development. Much of this discussion has not gone beyond considering the need for greater diversity among the personnel of these institutions who are located in the Global North. In this lecture, I suggest that racism needs to be understood materially, and as operating globally, structuring the global inequalities and patterns of exploitation, extraction and accumulation within which development is embedded, and inseparable from ongoing processes of imperialism. I consider some of the forms of embodied racialised violence in development, which are always also gendered. And I suggest that we must recognise sources of resistance to these racialized structures of global capital accumulation in political and social movements taking place across continents, in which other kinds of worlds are being envisioned and fought for.

Session in German

As a "Christmas present", we will discuss with Passau citizens and students their concrete approaches to anti-racist solidarity. Till Hoffmann from Passau, organiser of the Eulenspielfestival, reports on his involvement in the Bellevue de Monaco in Munich, a house project with refugees that has nationwide appeal. Perdita Wingerter, chairwoman of the active and multi-award-winning association „Gemeinsam leben und lernen in Europa“ (Living and Learning Together in Europe) in Passau gives insights into what anti-racist work can look like on the ground in our small university town. Together with them we discuss where there is still room for improvement at the University and in the city and what needs to be done to make Passau safe for everyone.

Session in German

Session only online

Racism is political and the political is shaped by racism. In many parts of German society, homogeneity advocates and diversity enthusiasts are irreconcilably opposed to each other. Lorenz Narku Laing analyses the post-homogeneous society and shows that racist politics are part of the core business of homogeneity advocates. His postcolonial critique examines the deeper reasons for this and at the same time provides a critical intervention in (political) scientific research. It becomes clear that racism is much more than discrimination and disadvantage: Racism is a political ideology.

Session in German

Based on an analysis of exemplary work materials of the school subject geography, it will be shown to what extent stereotypes can be reproduced and sometimes categorised in the sense of postcolonial othering even and especially in lessons that stand for global learning and education in sustainable development. Based on this, the necessity and potential of education critical of racism and postcolonial perspectives in the classroom are reflected upon. Selected interview excerpts with teachers will be used to outline the extent to which awareness of various dimensions of discrimination should be raised, especially in the first phase of teacher training at university. In doing so, intersectional interrelations with other areas will also be addressed.
Trigger warning: In the first part of the lecture, few examples (text and image) are shown that can evoke negative emotions.

Session in German

Based on empirical surveys of welcome initiatives within the framework of the BMBF joint projects "Welcome Culture and Democracy in Germany", the brochure "Democracy and Participation in the Migration Society" that was developed in the project will be discussed. The analysis of the post-migrant German society and the embedded racism, sexism and heteronormativity represent the methodological starting point of the lecture. How can racism, sexism and heteronormative orientations be unlearned? How is this unlearning connected to raising awareness and acknowledging privileges? In the lecture, a multimethod, racism-critical, and diversity-sensitive approach is presented and discussed as an anti-essentialist approach.

CANCELLED

Can Higher Education respond to the possibility of an ethical life that is not structurally implicated with the suffering and the consumption of the life of earth and others? In this lecture, I will set some of the elements of decolonial feminism that can help us to address the erasure of experiences that can teach us about overcoming the destruction of the earth and of ways of knowing and forms of knowledge.

After a semester with current and theoretical input on anti-racism and intersectionality, we will have the chance to discuss possibilities and needs for shaping the University together with Vice President Prof. Dr. Christina Hansen. The specific occasion is the Diversity Audit that the University is currently undergoing. This is a concrete window of opportunity to address structures and processes, but also informal routines and speechlessness in the face of multi-layered discrimination. Prof. Dr. Karsten Fitz and Prof. Dr. Karin Stögner, who have each organised successful lecture series on intersectionality from the sociological and Americanist perspectives, are also involved. We want to use all the insights, flashes of inspiration and productive rage from the passionate lectures and debates at "Walk the talk" to spark short- and long-term change at our University and beyond in our city, and to dream on with our eyes wide open. We are counting on YOUR contribution, wherever you stand on this topic.

The aim of this lecture is to present some issues related to intersectionality and identity debates in Brazil. We will see them against the background of their historical development, from the 1970s onwards, and how they became a heated topic in Brazilian politics nowadays. To understand these debates, that is, the uses (and abuses) of gender, race, and, more recently, intersectionality, we will pursue two analytical levels: how the terms develop and are challenged both in the broader public discourse and in academic and intellectual venues. We will disentangle the traps and potentialities of contested issues that are at the heart of many controversies which are not exclusive to Brazil, but that here acquire particular traits and implications. 

English language translation will be provided.

Panelists: 

• Prof. Dr. Florian Lemmerich, University of Passau;
• Miriam Rateike, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems;
• Theresa Tran, Lufthansa Industry Solutions;

Moderation: Isabella Graßl, University of Passau

The kick-off event is organized by the MINT Women's Network of the University of Passau in cooperation with Femtec Alumnae e.V..

The unequal treatment of equal facts as well as the equal treatment of unequal facts often happens unconsciously on an individual level - and remains unrecognized. Self-learning algorithms that evaluate corresponding decisions, however, will quickly recognize the underlying patterns and carry the corresponding schematization into the masses where they become obvious. In the case of trivial discriminatory features, this can be detected and corrected - but there are also cases of indirect and covert discrimination, where the consequences may not be immediately apparent even to those reviewing or monitoring the algorithm. For the users of corresponding algorithms, but also for those who create specifications or have to monitor or subsequently enforce them, the question therefore arises as to when and how unequal treatment can or must be avoided in advance or, conversely, whether state sanctions are imposed or redress must be provided. The underlying trade-off is by no means trivial: if even a non-learning algorithm can have unrecognized (indirect) discriminatory consequences, one would hardly impose due diligence obligations on developers or operators.

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Michael Beurskens, University of Passau

Artificially intelligent systems have become an integral part of our everyday lives. They influence us more than many people realize. Novel machine learning methods, especially multi-layered artificial neural networks, have helped new product categories such as voice assistants, self-driving cars or chatbots to become widespread in recent years. Many companies, but also end users, are not aware that these systems are not free of biases and susceptible to specific manipulation attempts, this is called bias effects. In my lecture, I critically question the hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the savior of a digital and automated society. Based on recent studies, relevant expert statements and a detailed practical example, I illustrate that besides the performance of artificially intelligent systems, other quality characteristics such as robustness against discrimination tendencies and unintentional misbehavior will play an important role.

Speaker: Claudia Pohlink, Telekom Innovation Laboratories

This lecture will be held in German will take place.

Natural Language Processing is a branch of computer science that deals with the automated processing of human language, in text or speech data. Typical tasks include, for example, performing automatic spelling and grammar checking, automatically extracting information from large amounts of data (text mining), or performing linguistic communication with a user (e.g., voice control). Machine learning is often used to efficiently overcome such challenges and to provide the computer with the best possible understanding of human language. What happens when social stereotypes are hidden in language models is what this talk deals with. There will also be a brief background on machine learning and bias in AI systems at the beginning.

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Mascha Kurpicz-Briki, Bern University of Applied Sciences

This lecture will be held in English.

Comprehensive technologisation is changing the many areas of human life. With the use of technology, our understanding of the human being and the body is changing at the same time. How does technology influence how we understand human beings? The lecture puts a special focus on the topic of 'diversity' in technologisation and treats it from an anthropological and ethical perspective.
Where is diversity lacking in technologisation and how can it be promoted? On the one hand, it shows how a lack of diversity represents a challenge in technological processes, and on the other hand, it highlights how technology can also be an opportunity for more diversity. It argues for a more inclusive, relational understanding of people and bodies. In addition to techno-feminist approaches and perspectives on gender and intersectionality, the focus is also on the human-animal-world relationship within the framework of a critique of anthropocentrism. Following critical posthumanism and Donna Haraway's figure of the "cyborg", it is shown that in the course of technological developments, traditional categories such as 'woman'-'man', 'human'-'animal'-'machine' or 'nature'-'culture' become blurred.

Speaker: Anna Puzio, University of Münster, Munich School of Philosophy

This lecture will be held in German.

The lecture will focus on the types of harms brought upon by the development or deployment of narrow AI systems as well as the way those harms are taken into account, both by existing laws and stakeholders (notably businesses). The adopted perspective will mix ethics of AI systems (ethics and philosophy), applied ethics, business and human rights as well as European law.

Speaker: Imane Bello, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris

This lecture will be held in English.

Discourses around artificial intelligence are closely linked to the projection of ethnic and gender characteristics onto digital technologies. We are familiar with such discourses from classics of AI films as well as from current discourses on assistance systems like Alexa and co., and they also form a central point of reference for feminist theory. Within these discourses, dichotomies such as 'nature vs. culture', 'emotionality vs. rationality', or 'power vs. powerlessness' are on the one hand reproduced in technical contexts, but on the other hand also subverted, which provides opportunities for their cultural renegotiation. Accordingly, the lecture will start with a look at corresponding topoi in AI film, contrast them with poststructuralist theorizing, and on this basis critically discuss the medial interfaces of AI in everyday contexts (work, care, family) as well as their marketing. Special attention will be given to the question of what reflective competence might mean in this context.

Speaker: Dr. Martin Hennig, University of Tübingen

This lecture will be held in German.

At the MINT Women's Network Meeting on January 24, 2022, we will discuss together with Die Juristinnen* and external legal experts, interfaces between legal tech and AI, the influence of AIin the legal industry, and AI and ethics. A special focus will also be on the topic of discrimination by AI, with particular attention to discrimination against women by AI. In addition, we want to talk about possibilities to design a feminist AI and exchange ideas with all participants.  You are welcome to send questions to the MINT Women's Network in advance, which we will try to answer during the virtual event.

Registration for participants of the University of Passau via StudIP, external registrations please send to: mint-frauen@uni-passau.de.

This lecture will be held in German.

Data-driven technologies are shaping our everyday lives. Big data analytics and artificial intelligence play a key role here. Can algorithms contribute to more fairness or discrimination? And what role does diversity in artificial intelligence play in developing inclusive technologies? Mina Saidze, Forbes 30 under 30 founder of Inclusive Tech, will answer these and other questions as well as present practical examples.

Speaker: Mina Saidze, Founder of Inclusive Tech

Artificial intelligence applications and products are already influencing the everyday lives of millions of people, for example through the use of voice assistants or by making suggestions when shopping online. AI tools and services recommend medical treatments, translate documents into hundreds of languages, decide on loans, make recommendations when recruiting employees, reintegrating the unemployed into the labor market, or make predictions about the recidivism of offenders, to name just a few. Many of these systems aim for greater objectivity than could be expected from human decision makers in the past. Some of these systems do serve their purpose. However, it is now known that several AI systems discriminate or have discriminated in the past against people with dark skin or on the basis of gender, for example.

Often, the problem lies in incorrect or missing training data, inadequate testing, or lack of quality control. A 2019 study by the New York-based AI Now Institute also concludes that the AI industry is facing a diversity crisis. The study worries that AI system developers are unconsciously perpetuating bias. Discrimination against minorities and misogyny are found not only in the composition of developer teams or in the culture of companies, but also in the systems themselves. As an example of misogyny, we look here at voice assistance systems such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google's Assistant, in addition to facial recognition software. A Unesco report from 2019 comes to the following conclusion regarding voice assistants: "The association of a female voice with traits such as patience, submissiveness and low-complexity responses may turn them into feminine traits in societal perception. It is also still completely unclear how voice assistants will affect children's understanding of roles and behavior in the long term."

Scientific investigations of AI systems and resulting indications of misinterpretations or problematic decisions by AI systems have already led to some improvements. The proposals of algorithmic decision-making systems are not always comprehensible to those affected. Increasingly, therefore, there are calls for transparency and fairness of the systems. Last but not least, the EU Commission's regulatory proposals also aim in this direction. AI systems themselves cannot distinguish between meaningful and meaningless outcomes, between fair and discriminatory outcomes. They have no consciousness and cannot "think" in a larger social, political or humanitarian context. Therefore, it is not enough to leave the solution of the problems to the tech companies alone. These issues do not only concern the tech industry, governments or NGOs. For AI systems to be used for the good of humanity, the critical voice of every individual, every person whose life AI tools and services affect, is needed.

Speaker: Prof.  Dr. Gudrun Schiedermeier, Landshut University of Applied Sciences