Race & Technology, A Research Lecture Series
May 1, 2021 – June 30, 2022

Race and Technology: A Research Lecture Series

10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

Location: Virtual

Beyond the Technology: The Need for Identity-Inclusive Computing Education

Nicki Washington headshot

Dr. A. Nicki Washington

Professor of the practice of computer science at Duke University

Date: June 29, 2022 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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“Freedom Dreams”: Imagining Inclusive Technology Futures through Co-Design with Black Americans

portrait of Dr. Christina N. Harrington

Dr. Christina N. Harrington

Assistant Professor in the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and Director of the Equity and Health Innovations Design Research Lab

Date: June 8, 2022 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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Designing an AI-driven Neighborhood Navigator with Black and Latinx NYC Residents

Dr. Desmond Upton Patton wearing glasses and looking at the camera

Dr. Desmond Upton Patton

Associate Dean for Innovation and Academic Affairs, founding director of the SAFE Lab and co-director of the Justice, Equity and Technology lab at Columbia School of Social Work

Date: April 20, 2022 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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Building with, not for: Case Studies of Community-Driven Employment Innovations

portrait of Tawanna Dillahunt

Dr. Tawanna Dillahunt

Associate Professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information (UMSI)

Date: March 30, 2022 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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Intersectional Tech: Black Praxis in Digital Gaming

portrait of Kishonna Gray

Dr. Kishonna L. Gray

Associate Professor in Writing, Rhetoric, & Digital Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky

Date: February 23, 2022 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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Towards a New Biology Nexus: Race, Society and Story in the Science of Life

Portrait of C. Brandon Ogbunu

Dr. C. Brandon Ogbunu

Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University

Date: January 26, 2022 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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  • Genetics and its many subfields have made strides in their attempt to define the flow of information that underlies how living things operate. This has created a landscape full of intrigue, complexity, and controversy, as we deal squarely with who we are as a species, and most importantly, what underlies the differences in phenotypes and fates. In this seminar, I introduce the idea of a “Biology nexus,” a new understanding of biology that can rigorously and responsibly incorporate multiple understandings about life—including the molecular, technological, social, and contextual—into a more complete picture of who we are and why we are different. In doing so, we create a more rigorous dogma that embodies, rather than regresses, the statistical noise and capriciousness that underlies modern genetics.

  • C. Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. He is a computational biologist whose research investigates complex problems in epidemiology, population genetics, and evolution. His work utilizes a range of methods, from experimental evolution, to biochemistry, applied mathematics, and evolutionary computation.

    In addition, he runs a parallel research program at the intersection of science, society, and culture. In this capacity, he writes, gives public lectures, and curates media of various kinds. He is currently an Ideas contributor at Wired, and has written for a range of publications including Scientific American, The Undefeated, Undark, and the Boston Review all on topics at the intersection of science and society.

    He has also performed for Story Collider, and was featured on an episode of WNYC’s Radiolab (where he is currently a contributing editor). He was also featured in the Emmy Award winning PBS web series Finding Your Roots: The Seedlings.

Our Genomes, Our Selves?

Portrait of Sohini Ramachandran

Dr. Sohini Ramachandran

Director of Brown University’s Data Science Initiative and Center for Computational Molecular Biology

Date: December 1, 2021 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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On Race and Technoculture

Portrait of André Brock

Dr. André Brock

Associate Professor of Media Studies at Georgia Institute of Technology

Date: November 17, 2021 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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  • Where does Blackness manifest in Western technoculture? Technoculture is our modern ideology; our world structured through our relationships with technology and culture. Once enslaved, historically disenfranchised, and never deemed literate, Blackness is understood as the object of Western technical and civilizational practices. This presentation is a critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS), reorienting Western technoculture’s practices of “race-as-technology” to visualize Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things”. Hence, Black technoculture. Utilizing critical technocultural discourse analysis, Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, this presentation employs Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic.

  • André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, and Black cybercultures; his scholarship examines race in social media, videogames, weblogs, and other digital media. His book, *Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures*, (NYU Press 2020), the 2021 winner of the Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, theorizes Black everyday lives mediated by networked technologies.

Acrylic, metal, blue and a means of preparation: Imagining and living Black life beyond the surveillance state

Portrait of Simone Browne

Dr. Simone Browne

Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Research Director of Critical Surveillance Inquiry with Good Systems, at the University of Texas at Austin

Date: October 27, 2021 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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  • This talk is a series of “small comments in no particular order” on the interventions and innovations made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of Black life, from policing to encryption, electronic waste, and artificial intelligence. The interventions under study trouble surveillance and its various methodologies, and are “a means of preparation” for imagining and living Black life beyond the surveillance state. (The quoted text is borrowed from Avery F. Gordon’s Hawthorn Archive).

  • Simone Browne is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Research Director of Critical Surveillance Inquiry with Good Systems, at the University of Texas at Austin.

    She is currently writing her second book manuscript, Like the Mixture of Charcoal and Darkness, which examines the interventions made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of Black life, from policing, privacy, smart dust and the FBI’s COINTELPRO to encryption, electronic waste and artificial intelligence. Together, these essays explore the productive possibilities of creative innovation when it comes to troubling surveillance and its various tactics, and imagining Black life beyond the surveillance state. Simone is the author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.

    A longer version can be found here: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/aads/faculty/sb28889 (opens in new tab)

Women of Color and the Digital Labor of Repair

Portrait of Lisa Nakamura

Dr. Lisa Nakamura

Director of the Digital Studies Institute and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan

Date: September 22, 2021 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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  • Women of color make our digital products. They assemble them in Asian factories and their cheap labor has made the tech industry’s innovation possible. This presentation focuses on their immaterial and knowledge work that contributes directly to the Internet’s usability. Women of color on social media and gaming platforms contribute unpaid labor to call out misogyny, violations of user agreements, and hateful behavior. They lead our most effective and important campaigns against racism from their keyboards. This is piecework in the classical sense, squeezed in between paid work and leisure, it is unpaid, but it is productive. It is unpaid not because it is not valuable, but because of the type of person who is doing it, a type of person who is not treated as a person. This labor of digital repair is exactly the kind of labor that can’t be automated or outsourced.

    This presentation will analyze three examples of young women of color’s work as digital documentarians of public racism on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram using a comparative critical race studies approach. Join Lisa Nakamura, founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and P.I. of the DISCO: Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism Network, a 3-year Mellon-funded 4.8 million dollar collaborative higher education grant, to discuss anti-racist platform building, maintenance, and repair.

    Together, you’ll explore:

    • The history of women’s, children’s, and transgender people’s labor as community leaders (CL’s) from America Online to Instagram how they model a high-touch mutual aid-informed digital culture of care.
    • Theoretical and speculative approaches to anti-racist platform alternatives
    • Racial and gendered solidarities and intimacies on visual digital social platforms

  • Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Digital Studies Institute and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books on race, gender, and the Internet, most recently Racist Zoombombing (Routledge, 2021, co-authored with Hanah Stiverson and Kyle Lindsey) and Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT, 2020, as Precarity Lab).

The New Jim Code: Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology & Society

Portrait of Ruha Benjamin

Dr. Ruha Benjamin

Professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab

Date: August 18, 2021 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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  • From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin presents the concept of the “New Jim Code” to explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. This presentation takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with historical and sociological insight. Ruha will also consider how race itself is a tool designed to naturalize social hierarchies and, in doing so, she challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves.

  • Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab and author of two books, People’s Science and Race After Technology, which was awarded Brooklyn Public Library’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize. She’s also the editor of Captivating Technology. She’s currently working on her fourth book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want. She speaks widely about the relationship between innovation, inequity, knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice. For more info, visit www.ruhabenjamin.com (opens in new tab)

Computing Technology as Racial Infrastructure: A History of the Present & Blueprint for Black Future(s)

Portrait of Charlton McIlwain

Dr. Charlton McIlwain

Vice Provost, and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU

Date: July 28, 2021 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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  • In recent years computing technology stakeholders have increasingly begun to ask questions about how to make our technology less biased, more fair, increasingly equitable, and even explicitly anti-racist. When it comes to how to make this happen, however, we have fewer answers than we do questions — particularly when it comes to thinking about these challenges through the lens of race and ethnicity. If we are to imagine, conceptualize, design and build new technological systems that are anti-racist, the technology community must understand, engage and grapple with the historical paths that lead us to our current point. Our history contains many of the starting points for realizing a significantly different technological future.

    For the past decade I have investigated a variety of questions at the juncture of race and technology— from how does racial inequality manifest on the Internet, to how do activists, advocates, and lay citizens mobilize technology affordances to produce racial justice movements, to what is the historical relationship between Black people and technology? This final question serves as the basis for my presentation, which provides a historical narrative that demonstrates how computing technology as an enterprise “became racist” and how it has served to promote racist outcomes.

    Audiences will come away from my talk with more insight into how computing technology and race first fused to one another; how that fusion manifests in terms of a key technology problem-design-solution scenario that positioned BIPOC communities as the central problems that new technologies were meant to solve; how this race-as-problem-tech-as-solution scenario laid the foundation for our present-day technology infrastructure that has produced arguably the most racially disparate and destructive outcomes through the institution of law enforcement and policing; and finally, what we must do in order to begin to imagine what systemic, structural technological change might look like— one that provides the infrastructure for more racially just outcomes.

  • Charlton McIlwain is the Author of Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter. He is Vice Provost, and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. His work investigates the intersections of race and computing technology. He has served as an expert witness in landmark U.S. Federal Court cases on reverse redlining/racial targeting in mortgage lending, and recently testified before Congress about the impacts of automation and artificial intelligence on the financial services industry. McIlwain founded the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies and heads NYU’s Alliance for Public Interest Technology.

The Vanishing Indian Speaks Back: Race, Genomics, and Indigenous Rights

portrait of Kim TallBear

Dr. Kim TallBear

Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Environment, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta

Date: June 30, 2021 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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  • Central to US history is the idea that Indigenous peoples were destined to vanish. It is a cherished national myth that the “red” race simply faded away, leaving empty land for inevitable occupation and development by white civilization. The classic image of “the Vanishing American” illustrates this myth; it graced early twentieth-century novels and movie posters, including a film by the same name. In that image, a stereotypical, nineteenth-century plains “Indian” sits on horseback, facing west into the sun that sets on his epoch. The Indian’s otherwise copper-colored body fades to white or disappears; these are the same outcome. After the Indian wars, white society assumed the Indian would finally die out and politicians tried to hurry things along. The US government mandated assimilation through education, child adoption, employment, and urban relocation programs designed to “kill the Indian and save the man.” US policy also defined the Indian out of existence by implementing the racial idea of diminishing “Indian blood quantum.” Such ideas continue to shape American thought, including the genome sciences.

    Join University of Alberta Indigenous Science and Technology Studies scholar, Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), as she examines: 1) how older notions of race continue to influence genome scientists who study Indigenous populations today; and 2) the cultural politics involved in the marketing since the early 2000s of “Native American DNA” tests to an American public searching to appropriate Indigenous “identity.”

    Together, you’ll explore:

    • How human population genetics (re)defines “Indigenous” for sampling and study
    • The risks to Indigenous rights posed by racial, including genomic, definitions of Indigeneity
    • Indigenous frameworks that challenge dominant scientific populational/race ideas

  • Kim TallBear is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Environment., Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science.” In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexualities. She is a regular panelist on the weekly podcast, Media Indigena, and a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate.

Racist Tropes and Labor Discipline: How Tech Inherits and Reproduces Global Imaginaries of Race and Work

Portrait of Sareeta Amrute

Dr. Sareeta Amrute

Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington and Director of Research at the Data & Society Research Institute

Date: May 26, 2021 | 10:00 AM–11:00 AM PT

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  • How do histories of race and labor make their way into the tech industry? What is the relationship between these histories and the way new ideas and profits are generated in the tech industry more broadly? This talk will approach the question of the relationship between labor and tech through a history of the racialization of Indian IT workers and the temporary workforce they often represent. I will trace antecedents to the current regime of temporary circulating labor in the tech industry by means of plantation economies in the 19th century colonial period and the way that period crystalized a particular relationship between Asianness and labor. Using evidence from dialogues within tech companies, I show how the tropes associated with racializing Asianness continue to circulate, even as Asian tech workers are racialized more broadly as model, automaton-like, engineers. In the latter part of the talk, I will turn to caste discrimination in the global tech industry as a cognate phenomenon to this racialization, which operates within and alongside Asianess.

  • Sareeta is a cultural anthropologist exploring data, race, caste, and capitalism in global South Asia, Europe, and the United States. Her book, Encoding Race Encoding Class, was the winner of the Diana Forsythe Prize in Anthropology and the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize. She is at work on a new project, supported by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, on the material and perceptual infrastructures that undergird protest movements, tentatively titled Sensing Dissent. Sareeta received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and is currently Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington and Director of Research at the Data & Society Research Institute.