With Professor of Political Geography Louise Amoore at the helm, the centre will explore new ways to understand how humans interact with algorithmic technologies.
The Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life is one of three winners of the 2025 Leverhulme Research Centre competition, which awards research centres grants up to £10 million over ten years for cross-disciplinary work.
The latest round focuses on the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
With members spanning many fields of study, the centre will be a truly interdisciplinary project. It will be based at Durham University with four collaborating institutions in York, Edinburgh, Amsterdam and North Carolina.
From ChatGPT, to social media, to public health and more, algorithmic technologies have come to infiltrate our lives in profound ways.
The Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life will explore new ways of understanding how humans engage with these technologies — including machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) — and how they impact our lives.
It will investigate the ways algorithms can influence how we behave, how we think, and even what it means to be human.
The centre's work will model a new approach that uses humanities and social sciences to address the important question of how we want to live with algorithms.
Professor Louise Amoore has written extensively on the politics of algorithmic systems and AI, the ethics of machine learning, and the geopolitics of security, borders and biometrics.
Louise currently holds an ERC Advanced Grant for the project Algorithmic Societies: Ethical Life in the Machine Learning Age.
Her most recent book, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others examines the ethico-political questions surrounding machine learning and deep neural network algorithms.
The book was awarded the 2023 Royal Geographical Society Political Geography book prize.
Louise is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and is Mercator Fellow at the Goethe University Frankfurt.
/prod01/prodbucket01/media/durham-university/central-news-and-events-images/83431-1920X290.jpg)