Publications













Algorithm

Under review
2024

The question “What is an algorithm?” quietly presupposes another, one rarely asked outright but nonetheless presumed in anticipation of a particular answer: “What is its essence, its logic, its real object?” This essay considers various historical accounts of the algorithm circulated among computer programmers in the 1960s and 1970s as they sought to locate its “mathematical essence” across time and place—from ancient algorithms to snippets of modern code—just in order to dislocate the concept from its social and historical specificity. It argues that many efforts to historicize the algorithm simultaneously involves thinking them ahistorically. As such, definitional work surrounding the “algorithm” can be neither descriptively neutral nor scientifically autonomous. In its timeless and ideal form, the algorithm is made to do exactly the work of politics: to sanitize its material connection to industrial and feminized labor, to supply an origin for modern logics of economization and optimization and, above all, to lend discursive support for the legibility of a capitalist social formation. To think the algorithm as a political concept is to acknowledge that it has become a cyborg concept. It invokes, at once, a technical artifact, a drive towards ever-more efficient production, an aspiration for a world reducible to math, a metaphor for the neoclassical economic subject. To answer the question “What is an algorithm?” indeed surfaces an essence—but rather than one that unifies origins and objects in the actually existing past, this is an essence that crystallizes capital’s practically-existing metaphysics in the historical present.























Goodtech, Voice-tech, and Economies of Racial Affect

Under review
2024

The recent emergence of accent-matching voice technology has been understood as a means to mask accents in real time and bridge sonic markers of national, ethnic, and racial difference within call-center work. The marketing of this ‘technology of empathy’ as a key to ending accent-discrimination and empowering workers, speaks to what we call a peculiar alliance between cultures of innovation and diversity-washing, where entrepreneurs, venture capital, and modes of labor-discipline conspire towards ending racism and saving the world. To begin theorizing this historical moment, we draw on affect theory to shore up the techno-fantasies that accompany rhetorics of global empathy, connectivity, and empowerment. Through an analysis of a contemporary accent-matching platform, Sanas, we trace the means by which this historical moment finds its genre. We forward an affective reading of how Sanas positions itself as ally to the interests of brown workers and as a salve to an originary trauma of discrimination, to address how the rhetoric of affect enters the global politics and affective economy of racial capitalism. Through this discussion, we build on the notion of contaminated diversity to grapple with the cruel optimism of DEI-innovation, where ‘empathy’ turns difference into whiteness and care-work into customer service, where the desire for connection melts into cruel dreamscapes of meritocracy, and where this project of making globalization ‘feel good’ is constantly haunted by the specter of revolt.
























Designing for Agonism: 12 Workers’ Perspectives on Contesting Technology Futures


ACM Conference on Computer Supported Work and Social Computing
Peer Reviewed Proceedings
2024

Open Access PDF

In this paper, we gather 12 workers from a large technology company, as recent participants of a research initiative on the social impact of emerging technologies, to present a collaborative analysis of the opportunities and limitations of dissensus-based approaches to technology research and design. We introduce a series of speculative and deconstructive probes and present findings from their use in four collaborative design sessions. We then draw on the theoretical tradition of Agonism to identify moments of friction, refusal, and disagreement over the course of these sessions. We contend that this approach offers a politically important alternative to consensus-based collaborative design methods and can even surface new rhetorics of contestation within discourses on technology futures. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of worker-authored research and an initial set opportunities, challenges, and paradoxes as a resource for future efforts to "Design for Agonism."


























Towards Labor Transparency in Situated Computational Systems Impact Research


ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
Peer Reviewed Proceedings
2023

Open Access PDF
Researchers seeking to examine and prevent technology-mediated harms have emphasized the importance of directly engaging with community stakeholders through participatory approaches to computational systems research. However, recent transformations in strategies of corporate capture within the tech industry pose significant challenges to established participatory practices. In this paper we extend existing critical participatory design scholarship to highlight the exploitative potential of labor relationships in community collaborations between researchers and participants. Drawing on a reflexive approach to our own experiences conducting agonistic participatory research on emerging technologies at a large technology company, we highlight the limitations of doing participatory work within such contexts by empirically illustrating how and when these relationships threaten to appropriate and alienate participant labor. We argue that a labor-conscious approach to computational systems impact research is critical for countering the commodification of inclusion and invite fellow researchers to more actively investigate such dynamics. To this end, we provide (1) a framework for documenting divisions of labor within participatory research, design, and data practices, and (2) a series of short provocations that help locate and inventory sites of extraction within participatory engagements.

















Politics without Privacy


Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology
2022

Open Access PDF

Digital platforms stand to open new spaces for political assembly and enable social movements to materialize at unprecedented speed and scale. Yet, this promise has largely fallen short of its goal, as networked movements have thus far failed to produce the sustainable modes of collective action that early and mid-twentieth century labor and civil rights movements had delivered. Why can we not muster digital communities with the same power and contestational force?

Answers to this question arrive one after the other and, often before the ink can dry, new political ruptures emerge, demanding our ever-renewed analysis. Amidst this flurry, one particular answer demands pause, if only at first for its unexpectedness: Indeed, collective action has been disarmed in the digital agora but it is our fixation on privacy that is to blame. This provocation, delivered quietly in the closing chapters of Firmin DeBrabander’s Life After Privacy, follows a broader meditation on the historical emergence of our modern entitlement to privacy. It is written against common liberal democratic narratives that tell us that privacy is an essential condition to political autonomy and self-determination—that it forms the basic foundation of our democracy. On this story, it is no wonder that in our age of mounting digital surveillance, we lack the protected spaces necessary to nurture the independent spirit which previously drove democratic engagement and political organization before the emergence of digital media. DeBrabander’s position on the matter, however, flies in the face of our apparently deep historical relationship to privacy.


















   About Me


EDUCATION


Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD                                                                                                    
PhD Candidate, Political Theory

Reed College, Portland OR
B.A. Philosophy


EXPERIENCE


IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights NY                                                      
Research Staff Member (Research Scientist)
2023-present                                                                                                                                                        

FELLOWSHIPS


Cornell University, School of Criticism and Theory                                                                                  
Fellowship, Summer 2021                                                                                                                                

Johns Hopkins University, SNF Agora Institute
Student Fellow, 2020-22

GRANTS


IBM-Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab, ‘The Ethics of Large Scale Models,’                                          
2024-2025 (co-PI w/ Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal)
 
National Endowment for the Humanities, ‘Machine Listening in the Age of AI’
2024-2025 (contributor)                

























                                                                                               
Socials

       


Research Sites

   Google Scholar

   ACM


Contact

    fjing1 [at] jhu.edu

    felicia.jing [at] ibm.com


































Felicia JingNew York, NY   |   IBM Research  |   Johns Hopkins University



A political theorist by training, my research approaches algorithms and computing from contemporary critical theory, feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Marxian traditions of critique. My dissertation project, titled “Untimely Algorithms: the Politics of Historical Thinking about Technical Objects,” is a methodological contribution to the critical history of algorithms. 

Currently, I am completing my PhD in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and, before that, I recieved my BA in Philosophy from Reed College. Since 2022, I have also concurrently worked in the tech industry and am now a full-time researcher at IBM. There, I interact daily with algorithmic systems, observe their design and development, and contribute to an emerging scholarship on AI auditing.

My work in political theory has been published in Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology and my empirical work can be found at venues in computer science and human-computer interaction (HCI) such as FAccT, CSCW, and the Journal of Responsible Innovation (forthcoming). From 2024-2026, my research will be supported by grants from the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab and the National Endowment for the Humanities.


SELECTED Publications


2024 “Algorithm” in Political Concepts
Article

2024 “Good Tech, Voicetech, and Racial Affects”  
Article

2024 “Designing for Agonism” in ACM CSCW
Proceeding
 2023 “Toward Labor Transparency” in  ACM FAccT
Proceeding
 2022 “Politics without Privacy” in Techné
Book Review


legend:   = theoretical work
  =   empirical work
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