ABSTRACT
Algorithms have risen to become one of the—if not the—central technology for creating, circulating, and evaluating knowledge in multiple societal arenas. In this volume, we argue that this shift has, and will continue to have, profound implications for how knowledge is produced and what and whose knowledge is valued and deemed valid. Ultimately, it will transform the epistemological, methodological, and political foundations of knowledge production, sense-making, and decision-making in contemporary societies. To attend to this fundamental change, we propose the concept of algorithmic regimes. It draws our attention to the transformation in today’s “regime[s] of truth” (Foucault, 1977, p. 13), in particular to the socio-material “apparatuses” (Barad, 2007), cultures, and practices that configure and regulate how (valid) knowledge is produced and by which means truth claims can be made. Knowledge production in algorithmic regimes refers to the ways in which people as well as algorithms gain access to the world, how “reality” is made intelligible and subsequently constructed, and how power and agency are redistributed across human and non-human actors. In algorithmic regimes, the role of human subjects for knowledge production and circulation is decentred, because algorithmic systems are co-shaping ways of knowing and being in the world.
