Lara Choksey welcomes Ben Woodard and Camille Crichlow for a conversation on scientific racism, drawing together the work of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. Focusing on two key works, Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (1981) that debunks the statistical methods and cultural beliefs of biological determinism, and Wynter's open letter to her colleagues on the 1992 Los Angeles Race Riots, 'No Humans Involved' (1994), the discussion ranges across fudged data, AI facial surveillance, the pseudo-science of white supremacy, and why a concept of the human beyond the purely biological matters.

Ben Woodard is an affiliated fellow at the ICI in Berlin. He received his PhD in Theory and Criticism from Western University in 2016. He regularly lectures at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, the School of Materialist Research, and the New Centre for Research and Practice. He has two forthcoming books: Uninhabited: Science Fiction and the Decolonial (Zero Books) and F.H. Bradley and the History of Philosophy: Animating a Lost Idealism (Edinburgh University Press).

Camille Crichlow is a PhD candidate at the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. Her research interrogates how the historical and socio-cultural narrative of race manifests in contemporary algorithmic surveillance technologies. Her PhD project traces the historical expansion of biometric facial surveillance, considering both its present and historical iterations within evolving regimes of racial thinking.

Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures in UCL English, and Faculty Associate in the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre.

This conversation was recorded on 2 July 2024.

Speakers: Dr Lara Choksey, Ben Woodard and Camille Crichlow

Producer: Dr Lara Choksey and Kaissa Karhu

Editors: Kaissa Karhu

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