Join us for the next Doctoral Seminar from visiting scholar Gwendolin Barnard (PhD researcher at the Department of Sociology at the University of Graz) who will present their work-in-progress, entitled “The interrelationship of worker participation and the EU AI Act”, followed by discussion.
This presentation will introduce Gwendolin Barnard’s PhD project on participation and the EU AI Act. It critically interrogates the ways in which principles such as fairness and transparency are invoked and mobilized in relation to participation with the EU AI Act. This work specifically addresses the participation of workers in mechanisms of assessing the potential and experienced impacts of AI used at work to the possible benefit or detriment of workers.
To approach this question, this project undertakes a practice-based document analysis (Asdal & Reinertsen, 2021) researching key documents for the establishment of the EU AI Act. In doing so, it assesses the overall objectives and logic of the legislation to provide the context to understanding participation. It then reviews empirical contributions that have assessed different stages of the establishment phase of the legislation looking at the frictions and tensions that come to surface including some preliminary observations from studying key documents that informed the constitution of the final text. Lastly, this contribution will outline the author’s methodological and empirical approach chosen to study this phenomenon and the primary objectives of this study, aiming to produce a typology of participation, before introducing early theorizations of the empirical finding.
This event will be in a hybrid format (both on-campus and online). Interested participants wishing to take part can register by sending an email to Pablo.Rodrigo.Trigo.Kramcsak@vub.be.