The Public Humanities Hub (PHH) hosts (or co-hosts) a number of speakers each year who are actively engaged in public-facing research and community-engaged scholarship. PHH is particularly interested and open to co-sponsoring events with departments and units on campus with advanced humanities research.

2024/25 Public Humanities Noted Scholar Lecture Series

March 6th, 2025: PHH Noted Scholar Lecture: Dr. Alex Hanna and Dr. Beth Coleman, “The Politics of Freedom: Generative AI, Race as Technology, and Postcolonial Computing”.

Please join us for a PHH Noted Scholar Lecture by Dr. Alex Hanna and Dr. Beth Coleman, where they will be in conversation to discuss “The Politics of Freedom: Generative AI, Race as Technology, and Postcolonial Computing”.

Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)* and has published widely in top-tier venues including the journals Mobilization, American Behavioral Scientist, and Big Data & Society, and top-tier computer science conferences such as CSCW, FAccT, and NeurIPS. Dr. Hanna is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies, and sits on the advisory board for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the Scholars Council for the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. *The Distributed AI Research Institute is a space for independent, community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech’s pervasive influence.

Headshot of Dr. Beth Coleman (200x150)
Dr. Beth Coleman is Associate Professor “Data & Cities”, Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, University of Toronto (U of T). Working in Science and Technology Studies, generative aesthetics, and Black poesis, her research focuses on smart technology & machine learning, urban data and civic engagement, and generative arts. Dr. Coleman is inaugural director of U of T’s Black Research Network. She was a 2021 Google Artists and Machines Intelligence awardee and is a Senior visiting researcher with Google Brain and Responsible AI.

Event offered by: Public Humanities Hub and Centre for Computational Social Science.

Upcoming Events

March 27th, 2025: Responsible Innovation within the Social Contract for Science

The 20th century social contract for science removed societal responsibility for scientists pursuing basic research. It was not their job to be concerned with the societal impact of their work. The 21st century found such removal untenable (in part because of concerns about dual-use research) and now scientists are widely regarded as having some responsibilities for the impact of their work, even if pursuing science solely for curiosity reasons. However, it has not been clear what the nature of these responsibilities are, what norms should shape that responsibility, whether such responsibility should limit scientific freedom, and what accountability structures should accompany such responsibility. In this talk, I will discuss this terrain, and provide some answers to these questions, answers that will be central to any new social contract for science.

A Science and Technology Studies Colloquium, funded by the Public Humanities Hub-supported Research Cluster, Reasonable Trust: Fostering Humanities Methods in Public Engagement with Science and Technology.

March 28th, 2025: Fostering Trustworthy Science

Although many have argued that science as an institution should be generally trusted by the public, others have noted that there are lots of reasons for distrust between the public and science. This focuses our attention on what should be considered trustworthy science, how to generate that kind of science, and how to signal its presence. I will argue that there are three interrelated bases for grounding the trustworthiness of any particular piece of science, and that these bases can be utilized by the non-expert to assess the trustworthiness of scientific expertise. These bases are 1) a method for detecting the presence of expertise, 2) an assessment of the expert community with which the expert is engaged, and 3) shared relevant social and ethical values. With this view, scientific expertise is capable of being assessed for trustworthiness by the non-expert. These bases provide reasons for trustworthiness in both cases of expert consensus and dissensus. I will conclude with implications for the practices and institutions of science for fostering trustworthy science.

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