Programme
2.15 pm: Sally Haslanger: Addressing Structural Injustice, Changing Social Systems: What Can We Do?
3-3.15 pm: Break
3.15 pm: José Van Dijck: Governing Platform Societies: A geopolitical perspective on digital infrastructures and democracy
The lectures are open to all and are given in English.
About the Honorary doctors and the Honorary doctoral degrees
Sally Haslanger
Sally Haslanger is Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Haslanger has contributed greatly to expanding our knowledge about how identity is constructed, and about what makes us perceive the world as consisting of, for example, men and women, or of different races.
She encourages us to think about how we use terms and concepts, whether they are correct and useful, or just expressions of ideology. She has helped found a new and influential direction in philosophy – conceptual engineering – which looks at how we can improve our concepts.
Haslanger is internationally recognized through her extensive philosophical work, and is a member of the editorial board of a number of professional journals. She has given a large number of guest lectures, and has been designated as next year's Tanner Lecturer at the University of Michigan.
She holds a Guggenheim Fellowship, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she delivered the Annual Examen Philosophicum Lecture in 2019. One of her texts is on the Exphil syllabus.
José van Dijck
José van Dijck is Professor of Media and Digital Society the University of Utrecht.
Van Dijck is an internationally renowned researcher into how digital media and platforms affect society and individuals. She combines humanistic and social science approaches and emphasizes critical theory development.
She addresses the question of what a digital society is, what power global platforms have, and how they should be regulated. She explores and challenges our understanding of the digital society's consequences for key values such as privacy, security, tolerance, justice, equality and autonomy.
Van Dijck is an editorial board member of some of the most important international journals in her field, and her many visiting professorships include universities such as MIT, Cambridge, Georgia Tech, Concordia Montreal, the University of Technology in Sydney, and Stockholm University.
She has been awarded the NWO's (Dutch Research Council) Spinoza Prize, and was appointed honorary doctor at the University of Lund in 2019.
Honorary doctoral degrees of UiO (Doctor Honoris Causa) are given to prominent, often foreign, academics. UiO has been entitled to appoint honorary doctorates since1824. The degrees are awarded without a thesis defence/disputation. They are usually appointed every three years at UiO's Annual Celebration in September.
About the lectures
Sally Haslanger: Addressing Structural Injustice, Changing Social Systems: What Can We Do?
“An important feature of theoretical projects that aim to promote social justice is their commitment to empowering those in oppressive circumstances so that they can solve their own problems.
There are two reasons to take this approach. First, the oppressed have situated knowledge of the circumstances that others lack. But situated knowledge may not be enough to prompt critique.
The second is that because both knowledge and values are shaped by social practices, a collective engagement with historically and materially grounded practices can provide a new frame for agency that enables a creative and potentially emancipatory restructuring of social relations.
I argue that such path dependency of values is compatible with social justice being objective, but not to be discovered by theory alone.”
José van Dijck: Governing Platform Societies: A geopolitical perspective on digital infrastructures and democracy
“The growing pains of digitization involve intense struggles between two platform ecosystems fighting for information control: a Chinese-based and an American-based ecosystem. A handful of American Big Tech platforms have disrupted markets and labour relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democracies.
At the heart of the online media’s industry’s surge is the battle over information control: who owns the data generated by online social activities? While two large ecosystems fight for information control in the global online world, the European perspective on digital infrastructures is focused on regulation rather than building its own alternatives. With emerging technologies such as generative AI (ChatGPT, Bard), this infrastructural perspective becomes more poignant.
This lecture takes up two questions. First, how can we identify public values in platform societies across the globe? Values such as privacy, security, transparency, equality, public trust, and institutional sovereignty are important principles upon which the design of platform architectures should be based. Democratic principles and the common good are the very stakes in the struggle over platformisation of societies around the globe. Second, the lecture focuses on what responsibilities companies, governments and citizens have in building such a sustainable platform ecosystem. Who is responsible for anchoring public values in an online world? Governments and civil society organizations try to negotiate public values on behalf of citizens and consumers.”