Teaching

Race, Technology, and Digital Media

Can artificial intelligence be racist? How is inequality coded into technology? Centering the work of digital studies, media studies, and communication studies scholars of color, this course will provide an overview of foundational and emerging discussions surrounding race, big data, technology studies, and digital media. Topics will include the role of people of color in histories of technology; algorithmic bias and technochauvinism; digital and hashtag activism; social media and Black Twitter; digital platforms as alternatives to legacy media; and queer, trans, and feminist approaches to race and digital media studies. Students will produce a 10-15 page paper exploring a topic in race, technology, and digital media studies.

Weekly Schedule

Week 1: Course introduction

Week 2: Foundations of critical race theory, intersectionality, and queer of color critique

  • Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 2015. Racial Formation in the United States. (Selections)

  • Combahee River Collective. 1977. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.”

  • Cohen, Cathy. 1997. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics.” GLQ.

  • Green, Kai M. 2016. “Troubling the Waters: Mobilizing a Trans* Analytic.” In No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies.

Week 3: Race and/as technology

  • Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2009. “Introduction: Race and/as Technology: or, How to Do Things to Race.” Camera Obscura.

  • Keeling, Kara. 2014. “Queer OS.” Cinema Journal.

  • McGlotten, Shaka. 2016. “Black Data.” In No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies.

Week 4: Histories of race and technology

  • McIlwain, Charlton. 2019. Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. (Selections)

  • McPherson, Tara. 2013. “U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX.” In Race after the Internet.

Week 5: Ethics of race, technology, and data collection

  • Cifor, Marika, Patricia Garcia, TL Cowan, Jasmine Rault, Tonia Sutherland, Anita Say Chan, Jennifer Rode, Anna Lauren Hoffman, Niloufar Salehi, and Lisa Nakamura. 2019. “The Feminist Data Manifest-No.”

  • Kim, Dorothy, and Eunsong Kim. 2014. “The #TwitterEthics Manifesto.” Model View Culture.

  • Bailey, Moya. 2015. “#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics.” Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Week 6: Indigeneity and sovereignty online

  • Duarte, Marisa Elena. 2017. Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country. (Selections)

  • Fair, Rhonda S. 2017. “Becoming the White Man’s Indian: An Examination of Native American Tribal Web Sites.” Plains Anthropologist.

Week 7: Algorithmic bias and racist artificial intelligence

  • Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. (Selections)

  • Broussard, Meredith. 2018. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misinterpret the World. (Selections)

  • Screening: Coded Bias (2020)

Week 8: Hashtag activism

  • Jackson, Sarah J., Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles. 2020. #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice. (Selections)

  • Kuo, Rachel. 2017. “Reflections on #Solidarity: Intersectional Movements in AAPI Communities.” In The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media.

Week 9: Blogs and racial discourse

  • Pham, Minh-ha T. 2015. Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging. (Selections)

  • Steele, Catherine Knight. 2016. “The Digital Barbershop: Blogs and Online Oral Culture within the African American Community.” Social Media + Society.

Week 10: Black Twitter and the digital politics of respectability

  • Brock, André. 2020. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. (Selections)

  • Williams, Apryl, and Vanessa Gonlin. 2017. “I Got All My Sisters with Me (on Black Twitter): Second Screening of How to Get Away With Murder as a Discourse on Black Womanhood.” Information, Communication & Society.

Week 11: Platforming race and intersectionality

  • Christian, Aymar Jean. 2018. Open TV: Innovations beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television. (Selections)

  • Christian, Aymar Jean, Mark Díaz, Faithe Day, and Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin. 2020. “Platforming Intersectionality: Networked Solidarity and the Limits of Corporate Social Media.” Social Media + Society.

Week 12: Technological labor and precarity

  • Precarity Lab. 2020. Technoprecarious. (Selections)

  • Poster, Winnifred R. 2019. “Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Service Economy.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life.

Week 13: Sur- and sousveillance

  • Fisher, Mia. 2019. Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State. (Selections)

  • Richardson, Allissa V. 2020. Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism. (Selections)

Week 14: Imagining new technofutures

  • Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. (Selections)

  • Keeling, Kara. 2019. Queer Times, Black Futures. (Selections)

  • Screening: Dirty Computer (2018)

Week 15: Final presentations