I am an Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Before that, I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing department.

My work asks how new media and its data become invested with ideals of precision, objectivity and truth – especially through aesthetic, speculative, and otherwise apparently non-rational means. I analyse the contemporary faith in “raw” data, sensing machines, and algorithmic decision-making, and of their public promotion as the next great leap towards objective knowledge.

My upcoming book, Technologies of Speculation: The limits of knowledge in a data-driven society (NYU Press, July 2020; previously titled Fabrications), asks what counts as knowledge in the age of big data, and how bodies are made into facts through the growing ubiquity of surveillance and tracking technologies.

My research (CV) has been published in journals such as Surveillance & Society and First Monday, and presented at academic and art institutions including MIT (audio here, 45 mins), Copenhagen Business School, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (audio here, 40 mins), and IKKM Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Shorter takes are also available on surveillance and machine vision (with Trevor Paglen, text, 5 mins), going beyond disinformation (video, 5 mins),  AI/deepfakes (video, 3 mins). For media interviews and other inquiries, please contact me via sun_ha [at] sfu.ca.

 

 

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