Organizers: Evan Buswell, UC Davis (ecbuswell@ucdavis.edu), Clarissa Ai Ling Lee, UCSI University in Kuala Lumpur (leeal@ucsiuniversity.edu.my)

Call for Submission:
In the mathematical and scientific community, computers appear not as a collection of applications but as tools for running computations to produce knowledge. In certain respects, then, code has taken the place of mathematics as the epistemic basis and the medium of expression of knowledge. While code can be reasoned about mathematically, such that the correctness of a given program can be mathematically established, this is rarely done in practice. This has led to a miscognition and misapplication of concepts such as “stochastic,” “analytics,” “probabilistic,” “modeling,” “optimization,” and others.

It is this panel’s goal to disrupt, dismantle, and dislocate these hyper-­positvistic concepts, and to critically engage with the epistemological questions to which this computational shift gives rise. How do code and the results of computations figure into descriptions of knowledge? What role do code and computation play in the justification of knowledge? How are different practices of programming led to different epistemic commitments? What becomes hidden and what becomes visible with the emerging use of code in knowledge production? These questions have been approached by the disciplines of software studies, critical code studies, platform studies, game studies, information studies, and other areas. While this fragmentary disciplinization was historically useful, this panel feels it is crucial to break out of the constraints of these micro-disciplines to critically engage with the cross-­cutting concerns raised by the arrival of epistemological computation itself.