Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

Computers and the Dream of "Race-blind" Decisions

Thu, October 19, 2023
Lunch Program
Moon Duchin

For many years, members of the Supreme Court have sought racial fairness in race-blindness, as in the famous quote from John Roberts: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." In today's court, that view is ascendant, as we saw in the affirmative action decision last term. Moon Duchin is a mathematician whose work has been at the middle of a parallel debate in voting rights: can an algorithm that works without race data deliver on the dream of race-blind redistricting?
 

Moon Duchin is a professor of mathematics and Senior Fellow in the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. She runs the MGGG Redistricting Lab, an interdisciplinary group of researchers working on the basic science of democracy. They helped commissions and state governments collect public feedback and find better redistricting maps around the country in the last cycle, and Duchin served (or is still serving) as an expert in state and federal court cases in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Texas.

At Tufts, she was the founding director of the interdisciplinary program in Science, Technology, and Society, and she has also been affiliated with Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and with the department of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies. Duchin's work has been honored with a Radcliffe Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In Fall 2023, she is co-organizing a semester program in Algorithms, Fairness, and Equity at the SLMath institute in Berkeley, where she is in residence as the Sloan Professor.

Dr. Duchin's visit is co-sponsored by the Kravis Lab for Social Impact at CMC.

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
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Claremont, CA 91711

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