beth semel
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bethmsemel.bsky.social
beth semel
@bethmsemel.bsky.social
2.7K followers 550 following 160 posts
AI killjoy, prednisone hater, writing a book about voice analysis AI and the limits of technosolutionist listening in American mental healthcare
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bethmsemel.bsky.social
Miyako Inoue's "The Listening Subject of Japanese Modernity and His Auditory Double" is one of those articles that gets better with each and every reread and reminds me how much (and why) i love linguistic anthropology. i mean, look at her definition of language ideology - perfect, no notes
"These auditory practices are embedded in a 'language ideology,' or a linguistic regime of the social, that underlies and produces social knowledge of the 'structure' of language, retroactively regiments it, and delimits certain (pragmatic) effects of its use (Silverstein 1979). This metapragmatic awareness, which is, in this case, the recognition of certain linear sequences of sounds as segmentable and as socially meaningful, is historically specific and contingent on a determinate language ideology that it, in turn, informs. Language ideology sets the boundary for what counts as language and what does not and the terms, techniques, and modalities of hearing and citing."
October 22, 2025 at 2:06 PM
bethmsemel.bsky.social
excited to get my hands on a copy of @nassimparvin.bsky.social and Neda Atanasoski's new (and very good looking) @dukepress.bsky.social book, Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen. i've got a chapter in there offering some preliminary thoughts on transductive labor in vocal biomarker AI
the front cover of Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, edited by Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin. The title is in white sans Serif font highlighted in bright pink. The features an image of Darya Fard's "Ineffable Freedom." I'm holding the book Technocreep open to Chapter 10, by me! The chapter is entitlted Resistant Resonances: Vocal Biomarkers, Transductive Labor, and the Politics of Things Not Heard. My left hand is partially covering the chapter's text to help hold the book open.
May 31, 2025 at 9:58 PM
bethmsemel.bsky.social
CFP from Josh Babcock and me for AAA 2025. we're looking for participants who take a grounded, ethnographic approach to explore computational technologies (broadly construed) and questions of agency. please share / send your abstract to either of us by April 14
(1/2) Ghosts in the Machines: (Un-)black-boxing AI Agencies AAA 2025 New Orleans, Organizers: Beth Semel and Josh Babcock Abstract: The collection of technologies routinely thrown into the “AI” kitchen sink has become as ubiquitous as the value-laden narratives about them. While contemporary computational systems present genuinely new techno-scientific, machinic affordances, many of their supposed novelties are anything but—nor are the narratives, values, or interpretations assigned to them by individuals, groups, and institutionalized personae across both expert-technical and nonexpert domains. This panel explores how regimes of value, narratives, and implicit-to-explicit understandings of personhood and/or agency, reflexively framed as belonging to prior social spacetimes, continue to haunt AI in the present, not despite, but because of diverse narratives asserting its radical novelty (Choi and Babcock 2024). We ask: what enfleshed, immaterialized, or absented agencies trail behind or snake through AI? How do epistemic and systemic violences—racism, sexism, anti-Blackness, white supremacy, ableism, and other intersectionally compounding oppressive structures (Wilf 2023; Seaver 2022; Semel 2021; Benjamin 2019; Noble 2018)—linger, become ghosted from, and interpenetrate with the functioning and uses of, as well as narratives about, AI? And how does the functioning of AI get rendered inscrutable in some contexts—made “invisible by its own success” (Latour and Woolgar 1979)—while in others, it is opened wide to explanations with varying degrees of “truth,” “facticity,” or legitimization? (2/2) This panel contributes to ethnographic explorations of AI by synergistically bringing together grounded-theoretical approaches to technological (un-)black-boxing from scholars across fields and (sub)subfields of anthropology (with a particular focus on linguistic and semiotic anthropology; Wortham and Reyes 2015), along with diverse (inter)disciplinary approaches to techno-scientific and material agencies, from STS and HCI to interactional sociology, sociolinguistics, the history of technology, and beyond."
April 7, 2025 at 6:28 PM
bethmsemel.bsky.social
gradually deleting my tw**ts means bidding farewell to some real sleeper hits
"you're in her DMs i'm in track changes of her book proposal telling her it's ok to refer to a bunch of seemingly disparate subfields as all falling under "the interdisciplinary rubric of STS""
December 7, 2024 at 10:15 PM
bethmsemel.bsky.social
see you all at AAA i guess
A screenshot of Caroline Polecheck's recent live performance on the Late Show. Caroline wears an all-burgondey latex skirt suit and gestures toward the projector behind her, which displays a slide that reads, in white text "YESSSS oh my god this is so much FUN HAHAHAHA"
November 15, 2023 at 4:48 PM
bethmsemel.bsky.social
yesterday, my favorite cloud anthropologist, the endlessly talented and imaginative @boriscrito.bsky.social defended his dissertation, "Cloud Ecologies: An Environmental Ethnography of Data Centers," and i couldn't be more proud 💚
a screen shot of a zoom call. my video and the video of several other people is visible at the top of the screen, as well as a sliver of the chat on the right. on the main screen, Steven Gonzalez stands smiling, clinking his glass with someone off camera, and he is surrounded by other, smiling people raising their own glasses in celebration.
August 29, 2023 at 8:58 PM