Unfolding

Review of Unfolding, Reviewed May 2021 by Suzanne Sawyer, Preservation Specialist/MLIS Candidate, UNC Greensboro, [email protected]

Review: Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World

Review of Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World by Anna Arabindan-Kesson. Duke University Press, May 2021. 320 p. Ill. ISBN 97801478014065 (pbk.), $27.95. Reviewed September 2021 by Suzanne Sawyer, Preservation Specialist/MLIS Candidate, UNC Greensboro, [email protected]

Get on the Balcony: There Is Plenty of Room [slides]

Slides from a presentation given March 9, 2020 at the LAUNC-CH Conference in Chapel Hill, NC. A world that is changing requires leaders and professionals to adapt themselves and their organizations to meet new and different challenges and ideals. Gabrielle Ka Wai Wong and Diana L.H. Chan write about the complexity of changing organizational culture and how adaptive change techniques require leadership to take a more holistic view of problems as well as how problem solving should be a shared responsibility. This leadership technique is described as “getting on the balcony” which means leaders must take a more global view of issues and assume a role of mediator or facilitator while empowering their employees to become problem solvers. This presentation will present a case study from the University Libraries at UNC-Greensboro in which we are working to incorporate collective problem-solving skills and talents from across the entire organization

The Dark Side of Information and Communication Technologies: The View from the Industry-Level of Analysis

The Year 2000 problem spurred companies to rethink investments in information and communication technologies (ICT). Many used the Y2K problem as an opportunity to renew ICT infrastructures, to install integrated enterprise packages, and to pursue new opportunities for ICT-enabled value such as e-commerce, supply chain management, and customer relationship management. Some evidence suggests that these efforts have had substantial payoffs in terms of shareholder value. But can such firm-level benefits persist when competitors catch up or when the success of leaders drives inefficient producers out of business? This panel features NSF-funded researchers whose studies have examined the impacts of ICT at the industry-level of analysis. They show significant industry-level ICT-enabled impacts with potentially negative implications for the firms competing within industries. In the Information Systems field, the ability to gain competitive advantage with ICT has long been an important theme. Although some researchers warned that ICT might contribute to the destruction of competitive advantage, by far the majority of the discourse has centered on how individual firms should invest in ICT. When taking an industry-level view of ICT-enabled competitive advantage, however, we can see its potential dark side. Among the risks ICT poses to the firms in an industry are these: • Fundamentally reducing the cost structure of an industry such that some firms can no longer compete and that others experience squeezed margins • Destruction of in-house competencies (e.g., through radical process change or business process outsourcing) • Investments in ICT are required as a condition of doing business without providing any bottom-line benefits • Increased dependency on external ICT providers leading to business inflexibility and lack of ICT knowledg

Against Reduction

Provocative, hopeful essays imagine a future that is not reduced to algorithms. What is human flourishing in an age of machine intelligence, when many claim that the world's most complex problems can be reduced to narrow technical questions? Does more computing make us more intelligent, or simply more computationally powerful? We need not always resist reduction; our ability to simplify helps us interpret complicated situations. The trick is to know when and how to do so. Against Reduction offers a collection of provocative and illuminating essays that consider different ways of recognizing and addressing the reduction in our approach to artificial intelligence, and ultimately to ourselves. Inspired by a widely read manifesto by Joi Ito that called for embracing the diversity and irreducibility of the world, these essays offer persuasive and compelling variations on resisting reduction. Among other things, the writers draw on Indigenous epistemology to argue for an extended “circle of relationships” that includes the nonhuman and robotic; cast “Snow White” as a tale of AI featuring a smart mirror; point out the cisnormativity of security protocol algorithms; map the interconnecting networks of so-called noncommunicable disease; and consider the limits of moral mathematics. Taken together, they show that we should push back against some of the reduction around us and do whatever is in our power to work toward broader solutions

Unfolding, by M. Shlian [book review]

Matthew Shlian, an artist and paper engineer, has spent the last twenty years exploring and exploiting the characteristics of one material: paper. Unfolding provides a retrospective of Shlian’s work and process by means of his own writings and a wealth of stunning images, as well as essays and an interview by other authors

Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World, by A. Arabindan-Kesson [book review]

Black Bodies, White Gold is a compelling study of the inextricably entangled histories of cotton production and slavery, as well as how those histories can be either represented or obscured in visual art

Silenced and Siloed: Racism, Rankism and the Age of COVID [Slides]

Slides presented at the Critical Pedagogy Symposium held online May 17-19, 2021