Algorithms, artificial intelligence and agency
Event details
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Wednesday 27 May 2026 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm
Description
The Social Inequalities and Social Order Research Cluster's Seminar on Algorithms, artificial intelligence and agency will take place at 13.00-14.00 on the 27th of May 2026 (Wednesday) at Seminar Room 5, The Wave, the University of Sheffield. We will have two presenters, Tom Wright and Nabila Cruz.
Constructive algorithmic resistance: building alternative digital infrastructures in times of crisis
This talk outlines the conceptualisation of constructive algorithmic resistance as an emergent practice of responding to the social, political, and ethical crises of contemporary algorithmic governance. The talk moves beyond normative understandings of algorithmic resistance to conceptualise a new form of ‘constructive’ algorithmic resistance: an ethical, generative practice through which collectives develop alternative socio-technical infrastructures that enable, in different ways, users to regain control of their online experience. Drawing on data collected via semi-structured interviews and extended document analyses from across three interconnected subcases, the article demonstrates how the motivations for constructive algorithmic resistance are rooted in moral and affective responses to perceived contemporary crises. Constructive resistance, therefore, emerges in practices of designing, maintaining, and governing alternative digital infrastructures which include decentralised platforms, privacy-preserving algorithms, and community governance mechanisms, enabling participants to move beyond the confines of technological corporate control. The talk ultimately proffers a new mode of algorithmic resistance as a generative, rather than purely oppositional, practice that is enacted through the ongoing negotiation between human agency and systemic limits. By examining these sites of constructive resistance, the talk explores how claims to crisis can constitute an affective and intellectual framework through which resistance can be structured, informed and foreclosed.
Tom Wright is a postdoctoral research associate within the School of Information, Journalism and Communication at the University of Sheffield. His current project - Control Shift Escape - investigates the core conceptual tenets that undergird contemporary articulations of digital well-being in order to imagine new ways of being well that exist beyond individual responsibilisation and self control. He completed his PhD in the School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations in March, 2026.
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