Jenny L. Davis - Böcker

The Injustice of Fairness shifts the foundation of algorithmic ethics, displacing “fairness” with repair and redress. A substantial and growing field, algorithmic ethics aims to mitigate harms and realize social good. The fairness paradigm dominates this field across AI, machine learning, and other data-driven domains. So far, efforts toward fairness have been unsuccessful, with algorithmic harms that propagate and persist. Jenny L. Davis and Apryl A. Williams explain why algorithmic fairness perpetually fails and present “algorithmic reparation” in its place. The stakes are high because algorithms are everywhere—from law to love, healthcare to housing, education to media, and beyond. More than lines of code or mathematical operations, algorithms carry history, configure the present, and are actively shaping the future. Set against a backdrop of societal instability and technological transformation, The Injustice of Fairness offers a careful critique, original framework, and blueprint for social change with algorithms as entry points and levers.

The Injustice of Fairness shifts the foundation of algorithmic ethics, displacing “fairness” with repair and redress. A substantial and growing field, algorithmic ethics aims to mitigate harms and realize social good. The fairness paradigm dominates this field across AI, machine learning, and other data-driven domains. So far, efforts toward fairness have been unsuccessful, with algorithmic harms that propagate and persist. Jenny L. Davis and Apryl A. Williams explain why algorithmic fairness perpetually fails and present “algorithmic reparation” in its place. The stakes are high because algorithms are everywhere—from law to love, healthcare to housing, education to media, and beyond. More than lines of code or mathematical operations, algorithms carry history, configure the present, and are actively shaping the future. Set against a backdrop of societal instability and technological transformation, The Injustice of Fairness offers a careful critique, original framework, and blueprint for social change with algorithms as entry points and levers.

In south-central Oklahoma and much of “Indian Country,” using an Indigenous language is colloquially referred to as “talking Indian.” Among older Chickasaw community members, the phrase is used more often than the name of the specific language, Chikashshanompa’ or Chickasaw. As author Jenny L. Davis explains, this colloquialism reflects the strong connections between languages and both individual and communal identities when talking as an Indian is intimately tied up with the heritage language(s) of the community, even as the number of speakers declines.Today a tribe of more than sixty thousand members, the Chickasaw Nation was one of the Native nations removed from their homelands to Oklahoma between 1837 and 1838. According to Davis, the Chickasaw’s dispersion from their lands contributed to their disconnection from their language over time: by 2010 the number of Chickasaw speakers had radically declined to fewer than seventy-five speakers.In Talking Indian, Davis—a member of the Chickasaw Nation—offers the first book-length ethnography of language revitalization in a U.S. tribe removed from its homelands. She shows how in the case of the Chickasaw Nation, language programmes are intertwined with economic growth that dramatically reshape the social realities within the tribe. She explains how this economic expansion allows the tribe to fund various language-­learning forums, with the additional benefit of creating well-paid and socially significant roles for Chickasaw speakers. Davis also illustrates how language revitalization efforts are impacted by the growing trend of tribal citizens relocating back to the Nation.

Trickster Academy is a collection of poems that explore being Native in Academia—from land acknowledgement statements, to mascots, to the histories of using Native American remains in anthropology. Jenny L. Davis’ collection brings humor and uncomfortable realities together in order to challenge the academy and discuss the experience of being Indigenous in university classrooms and campuses. Organized around the premise of the Trickster Academy— a university space run by, and meant for training, Tricksters— this collection moves between the personal dynamics of a Two-Spirit/queer Indigenous woman in spaces where there are few, if any, others and a Trickster’s critique of those same spaces.Trickster Academy is playful at times, yet more complicated and salient issues are at the heart of these poems. Davis’ Trickster Academy deeply challenges the institutions that still hold Indigenous remains in their archives and storage rooms, and the insincerities of the academy when it comes to acknowledging Indigenous peoples. The realities that the poems in Trickster Academy address are not only relevant to people in academic positions. From leaving home, to being the only Indian in the room, to having to deal with the constant pressures to being a ‘real Indian’, these poems illuminate the shared experiences of Indians across many regions, and all of us who live amongst Tricksters.