STAY IN TOUCH
Address:
20 Cooper Square, Office 238New York, NY 10003
Phone:
212-992-6341Leadership
Director Mara Mills, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, Steinhardt
Big Blue: Computing Depression from the DSM to AI Psychodiagnostics with Jeff Nagy and Whit Pow
May 1 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Friday, May 1, 4-5:30PM ET @ Zoom
Please join The Center for Disability Studies and The Association for Computing Machinery History Committee for our event with Jeff Nagy in conversation with Whit Pow, who will examine the remaking of psychiatric disability in an AI era through the case of algorithmic depression diagnostics. Depression diagnosis and treatment have long been targets for computation, from early patient tracking systems to cognitive behavioral therapy software. But what happens to the political economy of diagnosis in the scalar shift from clinic to platform, and in the concomitant translation from diagnostic criteria to machine learning features? What can we learn about an emergent technopolitics of depression by examining these systems and the datasets they depend on? This talk takes up these questions, leveraging a database of three decades of attempts to bring AI to bear on depression diagnosis.
Moderated by Mara Mills.
Event is free and open to the public but requires registration.
ASL and live captions will be provided.
Please email accessibility needs as they relate to this event to kgotkin@nyu.edu.
Register Here
Bios:
Jeff Nagy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University. He holds a PhD in Communication from Stanford University. With the DISCO Network, he is a co-author of Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal (Stanford University Press, 2025). His research and writing have appeared in Parapraxis, n+1, New Media and Society, Technology and Culture, and elsewhere.
Whit Pow is an assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Their research lies at the intersection of transgender media studies, trans of color critique, software studies, electronic art, video game studies, and computer history. Pow’s work has been published in Flow Journal, Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Histories, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories, among others. Pow is a recipient of the NYU Center for the Humanities Fellowship, the Career Enhancement Fellowship funded by the Mellon Foundation, and the ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant for the Trans Games Digital Zine Project, directed by Ari Gass and Teddy Pozo. Their book manuscript, “Unmediating: A Trans Media History,” is forthcoming from the ASTERISK book series at Duke University Press.
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