Description:

Speaker

Clare Kim - History and Global Asian Studies, University of Illinois Chicago

Title

"Datafied Subjects: Race, Computation, and Japanese American Incarceration"

Abstract

Following the events of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, a series of U.S. presidential proclamations and executive orders designated the US West Coast a “theater of operations” and a war zone. They also enabled the removal and subsequent incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps. This talk considers how the Asia-Pacific conflicts of World War II contoured the entanglements between computational work and Asians and Asian Americans residing in the U.S. Recounting the setup of statistical laboratories established to track and manage Japanese American incarceration, it examines how the problem of surveilling these populations necessitated the treatment of militarized carceral spaces as information environments, where the classification of Japanese and Japanese American residents as enemy alien, citizen, or an alternative legal status could be adjudicated. Evolving datafication practices were collapsed and equated with bodies that were racialized as the yellow peril, which paradoxically effaced other subject positions to which Japanese Americans came to occupy at the time: in particular, the invisible labor to which they furnished to statistical work as technical experts themselves.

Biography

Clare S. Kim is an assistant professor of History and Global Asian Studies who specializes in the history of science and technology, STS, modern US and Asian American history, and critical race and media studies. Her scholarship examines the history of twentieth and twenty-first century mathematical and computational sciences, with a particular focus on their entanglements in US intellectual and political life. She is especially interested in the place of Asians and Asian Americans as targets and agents of information and computation.