Algo-rhythms: How data-driven systems perpetuate unnecessary suffering 

  • Workshop
  • Cinema
  • Friday 22.05 — 08:45 - 10:00

This workshop introduces “algo-rhythms” by Anastasia Karagianni to explore how data-driven systems used in maternity healthcare transform embodied experience into measurable forms that regulate (health)care. Contractions become time intervals, pain becomes a score, and risk becomes probability, data that are compared, modelled, and used to trigger decisions. 

  

Through feminist epistemologies and using dance as both metaphor and method, participants will examine how continuous monitoring turns pregnant bodies into sites of surveillance, discipline, and normative control. Combining theoretical input with movement-based exploration, and featuring guest speaker Sean Mulcahy, the workshop investigates how law and AI organise the tempo of suffering. It invites participants to collectively imagine alternative rhythms of care grounded in lived experience, relational knowledge, and embodied resistance. 

Anastasia Karagianni

LSTS, VUB - Belgium

Anastasia Karagianni is 3rd-year Doctoral Researcher at the LSTS research group of the Law and Criminology Faculty of VUB and former FARI Scholar. She is the main coordinator of the Feminist Book Club at CPDP and the LSTS Gender, Law, and Technology Sessions. 

She has been a visiting researcher at several Universities, including iCourts University of Copenhagen, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Seville, ITACA Institute-Universitat Politècnica de València, University of Alicante (upcoming) and McGill University in Montreal (upcoming). 

Her academic research focuses on the "Divergencies of Gender Discrimination in the EU AI Act Through Feminist Epistemologies and Epistemic Controversies”. She is currently a RHEA member (VUB Research Centre on Gender, Diversity and Intersectionality) and former member of the Feminist Gender Equality Network.

Besides her academic interests, Anastasia is a digital rights activist, since she is a co-founder of DATAWO, a civil society organisation based in Greece advocating about gender inequalities in the digital era. Anastasia Karagianni was a MozFest Ambassador 2023, and Mozilla Awardee for the project “A Feminist Dictionary in AI”– of the Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence working group. 

Sean Mulcahy (Remote Speaker)

Sean Mulcahy is a Research Fellow at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society with a research focus on human rights law and experiences of stigma and discrimination against marginalised populations, including people with blood-borne viruses, people who use drugs, and LGBTIQA+ people.  Sean completed a joint PhD in the School of Law at the University of Warwick and the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University, which examined the performance of law through a study of courts and law from the perspective of contemporary theatre and performance research and practice. In addition to his academic work, Sean has also worked as a freelance actor, director and theatre producer and has performed in the Midsumma, Melbourne Fringe and Adelaide Fringe Festivals, and at the Malthouse Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne and La Mama Theatre.