Data Walk: Accessibility and our hidden digital infrastructure

Join Louise Hickman and Alison Powell for a walking tour of Cambridge, exploring accessibility and data infrastructure in our cities.

REGISTRATION NOW FULL – due to the popularity of this event, we are hoping to run more data walks in future.

In-person walking tour

12pm BST

Saturday April 2 2022

This Cambridge Festival event is a walking tour of Cambridge city centre, exploring both the accessibility of our built environment and highlighting our often unseen, physical digital infrastructure that we have come to rely upon.

About Louise Hickman

Louise Hickman is a Research Associate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

Her academic work focuses on the automation of accessibility for disabled people, as well as on questions of social justice and processes of exclusion that are driven by the politics of austerity.

She uses an interdisciplinary lens, drawing on critical disability studies, feminist labour studies, and science and technology studies to consider the historical conditions of access work and the ways access is co-produced through human labour, technological systems, and economic models and conditions.

Louise previously worked as a senior research officer for the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science and for the Ada Lovelace Institute’s JUST-AI Network on Data and AI Ethics. She continues to co-convene the JUST AI’s working group on rights, access and refusal.

An academic, artist and activist, she earned her PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego in 2018, and held a postdoctoral position in the Feminist Labor Lab at UC San Diego.

About Alison Powell

Dr Alison Powell is the Director of the JUST AI network. She is Associate Professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics where she established the MSc program stream in Data & Society.

Her research examines how people’s values influence the way technology is built, and how ethics in practice unfolds in technology design contexts. Alison experiments with participatory and public engagement methods to investigate how we generate knowledge about technology, citizenship, and our futures.

Her previous projects include the Horizon 2020-funded VIRT-EU, which examined ways to develop ethics in practice among Internet of Things developer communities, and Understanding Automated Decisions, which considered the possibility and consequences of explaining how algorithms work using design methods and an interactive public exhibition.

Alison’s work integrates creative and practice-based methods with social scientific approaches from both quantitative and qualitative traditions to uncover new spaces for ethical practice. Her book Undoing Optimization: Civic Action and Smart Cities will be published in early 2021 by Yale University Press.

Alison also shares her insights about how people make knowledge about the city through ‘data walking’ – see www.datawalking.org – and her public writing at http://www.alisonpowell.ca