Furman Center Spring Speaker Series: Barbara Kiviat

Please join the NYU Furman Center for a lunchtime presentation:

Going Against the Record: How Algorithms Shape the Way Landlords Make Exceptions for Bad Background Checks

with

Barbara Kiviat

Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University
 

Date: Monday, April 1, 2024
Time: 12:00-1:00 PM ET
Location: Vanderbilt Hall, Seminar Room 202
40 Washington Sq S, New York, NY 10012

Lunch will be served at 11:45 AM. There will be an option to join remotely.

RSVP to attend in-person here.

RSVP to join remotely here.

Abstract: Organizations have long used records of individuals’ pasts to assess risk, and increasingly they do so with algorithms. This may seem to eliminate the possibility of leniency for people with problematic pasts, yet scholars note that algorithms do not erase discretion, only relocate it. Kiviat and co-authors ask what differences in exception-making follow. The authors turn to the case of tenant screening, where gatekeepers consult credit reports, criminal records, and eviction histories, but some do so with rules-based algorithms, while others employ traditional methods of judgment. Interviews with landlords, property managers, and executives at real estate and tenant screening companies reveal surprising similarity and meaningful difference. To move from documents to decisions, gatekeepers of all sorts mobilize cultural understanding—via situational and temporal re-embedding—but with algorithms, exception-worthy situations must be codified into counter rules before tenants come along, in ways interoperable with records’ classification systems. The result: only applicants with the most culturally salient and institutionally legible circumstances benefit. The authors discuss implications for theories of algorithms and for scholars studying the influence of personal records on life chances. Read the paper here.

About the Presenter:

Barbara Kiviat is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. She is an economic sociologist who studies how moral beliefs and other cultural understandings shape markets and justify the inequalities they produce. She is particularly interested in how normative ideas influence the pricing and allocation of socially important resources, such as insurance, credit, and jobs. Her current project considers how these dynamics play out when corporations use massive amounts of personal data to decide what to offer to individual consumers. She mostly uses qualitative data and methods, including in-depth interviews, archives, and ethnographic observation. She also at times works with survey data and vignette experiments.

Kiviat’s research has received awards or funding from the American Sociological Association, the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and other groups. Her work has been published in American Sociological Review, Socio-Economic Review, Sociological Science, Socius, and other journals.

Kiviat holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University. She holds an M.P.A. from New York University, an M.A. in Journalism from Columbia University, and a B.A. in the Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Previously, she was a staff writer at Time magazine. Her website provides more information.