2025 Morris Lecture: Reimagining Resistance in the “Black Box Society” Alondra Nelson

Scholars have examined the relationship between knowledge and power, including how access to knowledge, or its unavailability, have animated practices of resistance. Theorized as the “politics of knowledge,” “contested knowledge,” and “experiential knowledge,” and more, these struggles over meaning have been central to efforts for social change. The algorithmic turn poses a challenge to longstanding strategies of resistance and of our understanding of them, for algorithms deepen the “black box” of knowledge, perhaps to the point of inscrutability. Drawing on cases from the history of medicine and medical sociology, as well as contemporary uses of advanced artificial intelligence, this lecture explores the relationship between the possibilities of knowing and possibilities for social change.