No room for business as usual: An ethnographic analysis in the tracks of predictive algorithms within the humanitarian sector

This work-in-progress seminar presents three ethnographic chapters from Annika Isfeldt’s anthropological PhD dissertation, which follows the development of predictive technologies within the humanitarian sector. Each chapter sits at a different point along a chain of translation, from data to action: one traces how conflict data is produced, asking what it means to know something well enough to act on it; another turns to the limits of prediction itself, and what happens when the event that matters most is the one a model could not have foreseen; a third asks what is owed, ethically, to those on the receiving end of anticipatory action, once a prediction has been made and someone must decide what to do with it. Across all three, Isfeldt examines the different kinds of knowledge humanitarian prediction relies upon, and what is gained, and lost, in translating one kind into another.