This paper uses the concept of epistemic injustice to shed light on the discriminatory treatment of experts in and by development aid. While the literature on epistemic justice is largely based on...

Over the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has become omnipresent in migration control and mobility surveillance, with AI systems now deployed across all aspects of migration management. Critics of such trends typically examine questions of ethics and rights from the vantage point of regulatory mechanisms and the limited venues for the redress of grievances. But if legal frameworks are as of yet forthcoming and do not necessarily apply to migrants, are there alternative mechanisms to critique algorithmic decision making? To explore (...) this and related questions, this paper engages one such alternative by taking a ‘visual turn.’ In asking ‘what can AI see’ the paper interrogates the role of images in constructing AI's capacity to both understand migration and make appropriate decisions about migrants. In addition, a visual turn allows for exploration of an emergent age of post-visualization: a phenomenon whereby the values and meanings of what we see will be increasingly imparted to us by AI systems. The paper examines what AI sees with the help of an experiment, prompting an AI generative platform to draw distinctions between migrants, refugees, and people. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of Balibar’s strategic decision to add Freud to the series of the thinkers of the transindividual. This move, I argue, both illuminates the other philosophers’ contribution to our understanding of transindividuality, but also creates some tensions within the triad Spinoza, Marx, Freud. After exploring both aspects, the reciprocal tensions and the reciprocal illumination, I will move on to analysing the relationship between the transindividual and the imaginal, as both concepts signal a questioning of the dichotomy (...) ‘individual versus society’ and thus can be seen as the result of the same movement of thought. (shrink)

Our contemporary politics faces the paradoxical problem that while we are inundated with images on our screens, we nevertheless seem to lack creative political imagination to conceive of solutions to our global problems. One account for this paradox is Chiara Bottici’s suggestion that the constant stream of virtual images produced qualitatively alters them to such an extent that they become ends in themselves: thus, spectacularizing our politics. My claim, against Bottici’s, is that it is not the case that the increase (...) in images created causes a qualitative change; rather, the increase in images created results from an already occurred qualitative change that images are created for their own sake instead of as a response to the particular situation’s determining conditions. The concept of the imaginal, insofar as it is unhinged from these local conditions, is itself the precondition for the very problem of political spectacularization that we face. To support my claim, I utilize Aristotle’s concepts of imagination, desire, and practical truth to show that without truth conditions determined by the particular, the political imaginal ends up operating under the motive of image for its own sake—which is, at bottom, desire for its own sake—thus feeding into the creation of more images devoid of concrete solutions. (shrink)