Faculty Fellows Lecture Series: Clare S. Kim, History and Global Asian Studies, “The Modern Subject: Transpacific Exchanges and the Racial Politics of Mathematics in America”
February 22, 2024
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities, 153 Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileFrom statistical modeling to optimization algorithms, the proliferation of computational techniques in politics and everyday life have attracted increased scrutiny from scholars and politicians as well as the broader public. In this lecture, Kim examines the relations between two regulatory control mechanisms that have structured the management and use of computational knowledge, knowledge regulation and immigration, looking at both through the figure of the Asian American technical expert in Cold War America. During this period, policy reforms selecting for mathematically skilled students and workers from East Asia accompanied security concerns over the circulation of computational knowledge and know-how. An analysis of these entangled relations makes visible the increasingly ambivalent status of Asian American technical experts as agents and users of computation. Moreover, it reveals how racialized logics of enmity have become embedded in policies and knowledge infrastructures that shape modern governance.
Clare S. Kim is Assistant Professor of History and Global Asian Studies at UIC. Her research examines the relationship of twentieth- and twenty-first-century mathematical and computational sciences to the formation and representation of national, professional, and racialized identities in the United States, as well as how these identities, in turn, shape the dynamics of knowledge exchange. Prior to joining UIC, Kim was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD from the Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Date posted
Jul 5, 2023
Date updated
Jan 29, 2024