Critical Data & AI Lecture Series #6. Queer Data Studies

Lecture by Patrick Keilty, University of Toronto.

Abstract

Data, perilous and powerful, is both a worldmaking and a dismantling force. The collection of data about queer lives and bodies, the consequences of data analysis for queer subjects, and considerations of privacy and consent often present ethical dilemmas even as queer data expands our understanding of who and what counts. Gathering wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversations into one rich volume, Queer Data Studies challenges readers to rethink how the extraction, circulation, modeling, governance, and use of data affects queer subjects and, at the same time, to consider how the power of data might be harnessed in the service of queer ethics. Contributors take a capacious approach to data, drawing from a range of sources, including stories, sounds, medical data, police data, maps, and algorithmic modeling.

Bio

Patrick Keilty is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Professor Keilty's research interests can be divided into two areas: the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries and the materiality of sexual media. He has published on embodiment and technology, data science, the history of technology, cataloging, archives, design and experience, graphic design, temporality, and sexual taxonomies. His work spans visual culture, sexual politics, science and technology studies, media studies, information studies, political economy, critical theory, and theories of gender, sexuality, and race.

His research projects have been generously supported by multiple grants from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). His writing has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Information Society, Porn Studies, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Uncertain Archives (MIT Press, 2021), and elsewhere. His editorial work includes Queer Data Studies (University of Washington Press, 2023), co-lead editor of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience (2017 – 2019); Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (Litwin Books, 2013); the special “Traversing Technology” issue of Scholar and Feminist Online; the special “Reconfiguring Race, Gender, and Sexuality” issue of Library Trends, and the forthcoming Handbook of Adult Film and Media (Intellect, 2025). He is currently writing a monograph about the politics of technology in the sex industries. 

About the lecture series

The Critical Data and AI Lecture series is organized by Louis Ravn and Nanna Bonde Thylstrup as a joint venture between the research projects AI REUSE (DFF) and Data Loss: The Politics of Disappearance, Destruction and Dispossession in Digital Societies (DALOSS, ERC Stg).