Information Trust Institute University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Lecture Abstract:
This talk examines the rising demand for biometric identification technologies during the period of political-economic neoliberalization in the United States since the 1970s. I argue that the turn to biometric identification is a response to a conflicting set of demands to individualize and to classify, to include and to exclude, to protect and to punish, to monitor and define parameters, and to otherwise govern populations in the face of their radical destabilization under the wrenching neoliberal reforms instituted in the U.S. and across the globe during the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Speaker biography:
Kelly Gates is Assistant Professor of Communication and Science Studies at University of California, San Diego.  Her research focuses on the social and political dimensions of new media and information technologies.  Her book, Our Biometric Future: The Pursuit of Automated Facial Recognition, is forthcoming from NYU Press.