Fellowship at IAS in Amsterdam

Beaulieu appointed as Fellow 2023-2024 at Institute for Advanced Studies, Amsterdam

Prof Dr Anne Beaulieu will explore how interfaces can support epistemic diversity in the context of a joint Fellowship with the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) and the Data Science Centre (DSC) of the University of Amsterdam.

The fellowship will foster collaboration with colleagues from the UvA, participation in IAS and DSC activities and a contribution to IAS’ and DSC’ programming through a kick-off lecture and interdisciplinary meetings on interfaces.

Contributing to beneficial disruptions in knowledge production

Anne Beaulieu will explore whether creating new kinds of interfaces can help diversify users and do more justice to existing diversity in data. This work will contribute to the efforts of the IAS and DSC to explore how  the science system can come up with surprising theories, wild ideas, new methods and innovative techniques that help to deal with major societal challenges and wicked problems. The hope is that novel knowledge infrastructures that include better interfaces can support team science and interdisciplinary work, and contribute to beneficial disruptions.

Building Knowledge Infrastructures for Liveable Futures

Current knowledge infrastructures serve a narrow set of users and purposes. Data intensive knowledge infrastructures tend to increase homogeneity and standardisation rather than complexity and diversity. They also tend to erase friction and elide omissions in data, and to foreground data as seamless, presenting themselves as maximally productive. In addition, current knowledge infrastructures focus on interoperability, automation and transparency and aim to organize data in ways that primarily enable computation (Peterson and Panofsky 2021), whereas we know that digital and data-intensive environments can also support uses other than algorithmic learning and classification, such as exploration or projection (Wouters and Beaulieu 2006; Wouters et al. 2013). These alternative approaches are important to cultivate. When values such as heterogeneity, diversity and recomposition come to the fore, data intensive resources can powerfully support the needs of a greater variety of users and concerns (Whitelaw and Smaill 2021; Beaulieu 2024), create new digital public spaces (Anderson 2013), and increase their potential in helping to address wicked problems.