Digital Society public lecture by Dr. Margarita Boenig-Liptsin
Assistant Professor for Ethics, Technology and Society, ETH Zurich

There is much talk of "transformation" today and it is true that things appear to be rapidly changing at the intersection of digital technologies and society. Meanwhile, important human questions and realities persist. What's transforming and what's staying the same? How are new digital capacities layered on older histories of the digital in their broader societal contexts? In this talk, I will explore these questions by identifying a sociotechnical imaginary of data and justice alive today whose origins can be traced back to the 1970s United States, when risk discourses, practices and institutions converge with John Rawls' theory of distributive justice and visions of the information society. If transformations are also inflection points where societies can take a radically different course, then how, given the understanding of the co-production of data and justice, can interpretive social scientists aim to intervene in this moment in pursuit of a more just digital human future?

Dr. Margarita Boenig-Liptsin is a tenure-track Assistant Professor for Ethics, Technology and Society at ETH Zürich. She holds a PhD in History of Science (Harvard University) and in Philosophy (Université Paris-Sorbonne). From 2018 - 2021 she was the Director of the Human Contexts and Ethics Program in the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society at UC Berkeley and Lecturer in the History Department. In 2021-2022 Boenig-Liptsin held the Sorbonne Université - Paris IAS Chair on "Major Changes" research fellowship at the Institut d'Études Avancées in Paris. Her research examines transformations to human identity and citizenship in relation to information technologies across time and cultures. She also studies the meaning, practices, and institutions of ethics and democratic governance in contemporary technological societies.