When Critical Race Theory Enters the Law & Technology Frame

Jessica Eaglin intertwines the social construction of race, law and technology. This piece highlights how the approach to use technology as precise tools for criminal administration or objective solutions to societal issues often fails to consider how laws and technologies are created in our racialized society. If we do not consider how race and technology are co-productive, we will fail to reach substantive justice and instead reinforce existing racial hierarchies legitimated by laws

Transhumanism and/as Whiteness

Transhumanism is interrogated from critical race theoretical and decolonial perspectives with a view to establishing its ‘algorithmic’ relationship to historical processes of race formation (or racialization) within Euro-American historical experience. Although the Transhumanist project is overdetermined vis-à-vis its raison-d’être, it is argued that a useful way of thinking about this project is in terms of its relationship to the shifting phenomenon of ‘whiteness’. It is suggested that Transhumanism constitutes a techno-scientific response to the phenomenon of ‘White Crisis’ at least partly prompted by ‘critical’ posthumanist contestation of Eurocentrically-universal humanism

Race and Technology in Southern Literature, Civil War to Civil Rights

This dissertation considers the intersection of technology and race in the literature of the American South from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though narratives about technology in American literature often promise democracy, equality, improvement, and progress, the role of technology in southern literature is more complex and ambivalent. Literature from and about the South from the Civil War to the civil rights era, by Black and white southern authors like Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty reveals technology’s ability to uphold and naturalize southern white supremacy, but also to subvert it. Southern literature traces a pattern of technological white supremacy that predates contemporary scholarly debates about technology and race and reveals both strategic and unconscious uses of technology to support white supremacy in reaction to the threat of an egalitarian future. My dissertation will argue that though study of technological apparatuses themselves can be revealing, the study of the representations of these apparatuses in literature will emphasize a collision between the use of these objects and their shifting social meanings. The chapters, which focus on literary representations of mills, electricity, automobiles, and camera, reveal a pattern of prototypical whiteness that has existed since the advent of technology in the South and has shaped southern literature. The strategies exposed by southern literature begin by naturalizing the subjugation of enslaved Black people and end by attempting to hide white supremacy in plain sight through the implementation of apparently neutral technological systems. If literary and cultural studies are to continue examining the cultural narratives that led the nation to this technological moment, particular attention must be paid to a body of southern literature that explicates the contradictions, complexities, and latent white supremacy of narratives of technological progress

No Child Left Confined: Challenging the Digital Convict Lease

The following is a lightly edited transcript of comments provided at the Journal of Health Care Law & Policy’s Spring Symposium entitled “Uneasy Alignments: The Mental Health Turn in The American Legal System.” This event was hosted on March 16, 2023, by University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law in collaboration with the University of Maryland School of Social Work’s Daniel Thursz Social Justice Lecture Series. The Symposium examined how legal systems, like child welfare and juvenile law institutions, use coercion to force engagement or compliance with often unproven therapeutic interventions. The presentation took on the question of how the negative impacts of this turn manifest in the home. The lecture centers on the use of digital surveillance technologies, like electronic ankle monitors, by juvenile courts as presumed rehabilitative tools and alternatives to incarceration. It argues that not only is electronic monitoring ineffective as a therapeutic intervention toward adequate adolescent development, but also it leads to a marginalization that severs youth from the community ties necessary for growth. The lecture concludes that a critical race and technology approach is useful for understanding how this practice feeds an expanding data economy that exploits poor families of color under the premise of contributing to public health and public safety

Student Satisfaction and Performance in an Online Teacher Certification Program

The article presents a study which demonstrates the effectiveness of an online post baccalaureate teacher certification program developed by a Wisconsin university. The case method approach employing multiple methods and multiple data sources were used to investigate the degree to which pre-service teachers were prepared to teach. It was concluded that the study supports online delivery as an effective means of teacher preparation, but it was limited in the number of students followed into their first year of teaching

Digital Inequality

Unpicking and understanding if and how the web is linked to inequality means: Recognising that the access divide is not over, Thinking beyond hardware, Thinking beyond demographic variables, Developing a conceptual and theoretical toolkit, Beyond technological determinism, Co-constitution, Intersectionality, Technical capita

Engaging Antiracist Conversations: Foregrounding Twitter Feeds in Library Guides as a Way to Critically Promote Discussions of Racial Justice

Academic librarians have often been hesitant to foreground real-time engagement with social justice in our public facing library guides. The guides, more often than not, serve merely to provide access points to “academic” materials and traditional news sources. Perhaps there is a different path. This chapter suggests that engagement with Twitter can point patrons toward the real conversations happening outside (and sometimes inside) academia that are missed when we rely on traditional sources. The critical engagement with social justice issues such as race and technology, or migrant justice, is happening right in front of our eyes on Twitter. This chapter discusses how adding Twitter feeds to library guides can engage libraries (and our students) in critical conversations around racism and the foregrounding of traditionally marginalized voices. A problem with traditional library guides is that they center the voice and opinion of the librarian curating the guide. Adding in Twitter feeds can complicate this. Adding Twitter feeds from traditionally marginalized voices centers those voices in real time as opposed to centering the voice and authority of the, often white, librarian initially creating the guide. This centering occurs because while the librarian initially chooses which feeds to feature, the feeds are continuously updating in real time. This chapter reflects on why this centering of non-white voices is important, how it engages the counterpublic discourse on Twitter, and how doing so can push us all to be a little more critical, a little more subversive, in our work

The Daily Texan

Texas Student Medi

CURRICULUM II

The genesis of the series of works entitled Curriculum came from the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe’s ideas around archive and curriculum. Curriculum I began with exploring the rich archive of Bill T. Jones’s movement phrases which are mostly non-theatrical, non-psychological, non-narrative, all made with the intention of clarity and form. Running parallel to and in juxtaposition with this formal exploration is a ticker tape of topical concerns informed by the 24-hour news cycle: climate change, racial violence, identity politics, reparations, decolonization. Mbembe might categorize these concerns as “planetary curriculum.” Curriculum I was set to premiere at the Holland Festival in the summer of 2020 and was canceled due to COVID-19. At the height of the pandemic, PEAK Performances at Montclair State University commissioned Curriculum II as a film project. As with its predecessor, the work attempts to embrace formal directness and clarity while allowing it to be intruded upon by word fragments, imagery, and the stuff of Mbembe’s planetary curriculum. This time the focal point comes from Louis Chude-Sokei’s treatise The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics which explores the connection between race and technology from minstrelsy, music production, and cybernetics to artificial intelligence and posthumanism. Curriculum II came to an abrupt stop because of COVID-19. The work will be reimagined as a live performance for an in-person audience, and as with any curriculum, it is a dynamic entity made up of intersecting parts whose content will and must change in response to time, place, and purpose.https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-performances-2021-2022/1007/thumbnail.jp

Nothing But Net: American Workers and the Information Economy

Explores the implications of the information economy for American workers, including worker experience with computers, perceptions about their future in the information economy, and the role of government in how technology affects jobs and prosperity in the information age