Laura Carter
Seattle, USA
About Me
Where something is going wrong for people, I want to find out why and how we can fix it. I'm experienced in developing and leading research projects to find out what is going wrong for whom, why, and how to make changes that have an impact on people's lives. I've worked in the spaces where human rights, intersectional discrimination, new technologies and social justice interact. I write well-researched, rigorous and clear reports, for technical and non-technical audiences.
I will be a UC Berkeley Tech Policy Fellow in the 2024-25 cohort. As part of the Improving Diversity in AI working group, I'll be researching how family relationships are represented in data and AI systems used in the public sector, and how these representations might reinforce stereotypes about 'normal' families.
I recently relocated to the traditional land of the Duwamish people in Seattle, where I am writing a book proposal developing my PhD thesis research on data about people, and writing about other things as well.
I'm also doing a bit of consulting: please do get in touch if you're in need of short-term research support!
Work
As a freelance researcher and evaluator, I've contracted for organisations including the World Bank, Edge Effect, Frontline AIDS, and DataAnnotation.
From August 2022 to January 2024, I worked at the Ada Lovelace Institute as Senior Researcher, Public Sector Algorithm, where I led on Critical Analytics? a research project investigating the experience of local authority staff using a data analytics system in a London borough, which was published in June 2024.
I carried out my PhD research in the Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project at the University of Essex from 2018 to 2023. My supervisors were Professor Lorna McGregor and Professor Roisin Ryan-Flood. During my PhD, I spent January-September 2020 as an Enrichment Student at the Alan Turing Institute.
From 2011 to 2019, I worked at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, of which six years was spent in research and policy advice roles covering the rights of LGBTI people and of human rights defenders.
I have also worked as a caseworker for domestic violence and hate crime cases, a freelance maths tutor, a bartender, and an assistant language teacher for elementary and junior high school students in rural Wakayama, Japan.
I have an MA in Gender Studies from SOAS and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge.
Publications
Sobey A and Carter L, ‘The Harmful Fetishisation of Reductive Personal Tracking Metrics in Digital Systems,' The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (Association for Computing Machinery 2024)
Carter L, 'Machine-Readable Lives or ‘Troubled Families’? Classification, categorisation and stereotyping in data collection and sharing in children’s social care in England,' (PhD thesis, 2023)
Carter L, ‘Prescripted Living: Gender Stereotypes and Data-Based Surveillance in the UK Welfare State’ (2021) 10 Internet Policy Review
Carter L, ‘Imperfect Models of the World: Gender Stereotypes and Assumptions in Covid-19 Responses’ in Carla Ferstman and Andrew Fagan (eds), Covid-19, Law and Human Rights : Essex Dialogues. A Project of the School of Law and Human Rights Centre (University of Essex 2020)
Writing
August 2022: The Human Rights Case for Open Science: a blog post commissioned by Open Heroines as part of their writing grants series aiming to elevate the voices of women and non-binary people in open spaces. This pieces was republished in the LSE Impact Blog.
February 2022: Prescripted Living: Gender Stereotypes and Data-Based Surveillance in the UK Welfare State: a post for the Essex Law Research Blog summarising my Internet Policy Review paper. It was the most-viewed blog post by a doctoral student in the 2021-22 academic year.
November 2021: “There is always an element of judgement”: a blog post on an event on web scraping organised by DataKind UK.
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May 2021: “In the end, it is all about power”: a blog post reporting on DataKind UK's Watch Party event on the film 'Coded Bias.'
May 2020: Take a seat: the AI will be with you shortly: a blog post on DataKind UK's Ethics Book Club on AI and medicine.
November 2019: Book Review: The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias for LSE Review of Books.
April 2019: Google's pay audit and the meaning of 'equality', a blog post for the Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project.
Conference presentations
July 2024: ’To observe suspicious facts in child-life:’ the historical roots of AI enthusiasm in child protection services in the UK, Rethinking the Inevitability of AI: The Environmental and Social Impacts of Computing in Historical Context, online
June 2024: 'The Harmful Fetishisation of Reductive Personal Tracking Metrics in Digital Systems,' FAccT 2024, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (slides)
June 2023: 'Categorising the ‘Troubled Family’: Data Sharing, Binary Classifications and Family Role Stereotyping in Children’s Social Care in England', The Datafied Family: Algorithmic Encounters in Care, Intimacies, Routine and Play, online.
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June 2021: 'The Turing Way Guide to Ethical Research' with Malvika Sharan (Turing Way Community Manager), RightsCon2021, online (also available on YouTube)
October 2020: 'Cloudy With Silver Linings: Including people with diverse SOGIESC in Humanitarian AI', with Emily Dwyer, co-director of Edge Effect, Communicating with Disaster-Affected Communities (CDAC) Forum 2020, online. Our 10-minute presentation is here (from about 35:05).
May 2020: ‘Tech Winners and Losers: What’s in Your Backpack?’, with Isobel Talks (PhD candidate, University of Oxford), at Civic Participation in the Datafied Society, Cardiff, UK (cancelled due to COVID-19)
November 2019: ‘Prescripted living: gender stereotypes and surveillance technologies,’ Workshop on Feminist Data Protection, Forum Privetheit, Berlin, Germany
March 2019: ‘Gender stereotyping in machine learning: a technical necessity or a human rights violation?’ Cambridge International Law Journal Conference, Cambridge, UK
March 2019: ‘Gender stereotyping in international human rights law,’ Human Rights Triangle Conference, London UK
Panels and invited talks
July 2022: 'The impact, value, and challenges for women and open data sharing,' panellist, with Paz Bernaldo (Open Life Science), Esther Plomp (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands), and Irene Ramos (National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Mexico); facilitated by Emmy Tsang (Open Life Science); IFLC WLIC 2022, online
June 2022: 'Sex, gender, binaries and categories: frictions in data about humans,' The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK, (slides)
May 2022: ‘Surveillance and Subjecthood: Gender, Race, and Class in the Constitution of Data Subjects,’ panellist, with Jens T. Theilen (Helmut-Schmidt-University, Hamburg, Germany) and Aisha P.L. Kadiri (École normale supérieure, Paris, France); chaired by Felix Bieker (Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ULD) Schleswig-Holstein, Kiel, Germany); Surveillance & Society Conference 2022, Rotterdam/online
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April 2022: ‘Practical ethics in research software development,’ chair and convenor, with Garnett Achieng (Data & Digital Rights Researcher, Pollicy), Arielle Bennett (Research Project Manager, Tools, Practices, & Systems, The Alan Turing Institute), Stef Garasto (Ethics Committee Member, DataKind UK), and Andrew Strait (Associate Director of Research Partnerships, Ada Lovelace Institute); Collaborations Workshop 2022, online (available on YouTube)
June 2021: 'Technologies for gender diversity: the impact of gender diverse leadership on the design of human rights technologies,’ panellist, with Enrique Piraces (Carnegie Mellon University), Kat Lo (Meedan), Yvonne McDermott Rees (Swansea University), Eriol Fox (Newcastle University); chaired by Hae Ju Kang (Korea Future); RightsCon 2021, online
Open science
I have been a mentor in two cohorts of OLS's Open Seeds programme. I mentored the HausaNLP project leaders, who are building an open source community that promotes natural language processing work in the Hausa language, and a project developing data sharing frameworks in bioinformatics.
I was previously a Fellow in the second cohort of Open Seeds: together with Sophia Batchelor and Ismael Kherroubi Garcia, I built a community of practice for the Turing Way's Guide to Ethical Research. The Turing Way open-source book project aims to build open-source resources for reproducible, responsible and ethical data science, and a community to put these resources into practice. Guidance on how to join the community of contributors is in the project repository.
Board and advisory work
Since 2017, I have been a trustee of the Feminist Review Trust, which allocated around GBP 25,000 to feminist projects worldwide annually. The Trust is now in a winding-down phase and will close in 2024.
I was on the Steering Committee for the Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop 2022, for which the themes were Code Review, Ethics, Hybrid Working and of course Software Sustainability.
In 2020 and 2021, I was on the DataKind UK Ethics Committee: we ran ethics trainings for DataKind volunteers, supported DataCorps projects, and organised data ethics panel discussions and book clubs in London and online.
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I volunteered as a screener for the EuroCentralAsian Lesbian* Community's COVID-19 grants programme in September-October 2020, where we allocated EUR 28,000 to lesbian*-led groups in crisis across the region.
I was on the Steering Committee for the European Commission's Transgender people in the EU study, which ran from 2018 to 2020. The findings from the study, which covered the discrimination and harassment faced by trans people in the EU, and the impact of different legal gender recognition procedures on the lives of trans people, were published in the report Legal gender recognition in the EU: the journeys of trans people towards full equality in June 2020.
Other projects
I have a blog about living in Seattle.
I wrote a satirical twitter bot that gives individual self-care advice for coping with structural problems.
I contributed to the Design Justice Network's zine #5, How to make a local Design Justice node.
I ran Data/Feminism, a weekly(ish) newsletter that looked at algorithms, data and technology from a feminist perspective. The archives are online.
My tiny plot in a North London community garden had an Instagram.