Docenti proponenti
Dr. Sapignoli is a socio-cultural anthropologist (BA and MA from the University of Bologna, and PhD from the University of Essex). Before joining the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan in April 2021, she spent eight years at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, first as research fellow in its ‘Law & Anthropology’ Department and most recently heading the Max Planck Independent Research Group AIming Toward the Future: Policing, Governance, and Artificial Intelligence. She is continuing to cooperate with the MPI as a Cooperation Partner and as an Accompanying Scientific Committee member of the research cluster she contributed to setting up, titled Anthropology of AI in Policing and Justice.
She has spent the past decade conducting ethnographic fieldwork in southern Africa as well as in several international organizations, including the United Nations. She has explored topics of institutional reform, indigenous and minority rights, social movements and advocacy and, ultimately, justice. She is working in three interconnected projects a) AIming Toward the Future: Policing, Governance, and Artificial Intelligence b) Algorithmic Technologies and Human Rights: An Anthropological Approach, c) The Social and environmental life of Al systems in policing and policy. These projects are connected by her broader research interest that investigates how Artificial Intelligence and related technologies are being conceptualized, developed, transferred, and applied in governance and in the context of the intensification of state and non-state policing. These projects engage critically and collaboratively with the legal and social challenges and opportunities presented by the use of digital technologies and big data in society and in environmental governance. They also shed light on the human creators of such technologies, including the values and aspirations that become codified in the programs they develop.