https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TGFsOUH9-MZdQtq9OaMouPG3axuqjYiG9WgAVscxSzo/edit?usp=sharing
Link to reading guide/thoughts/reflections for week 0 :
For this session, please try to make some time to look over the two green check marked materials below. Don’t worry about cramming it all in — if you only get the chance to read one paragraph from one reading carefully, that’s great too!:
✅1. Learning spaces are about building community, and in this community space you are all coming in as teachers! If you can, listen or read bell hooks’s Chapter 1 on engaged pedagogy and think about ways you want to show up as a teacher — for yourself and others — in this space.
bell hooks - “Chapter 1: Engaged Pedagogy” from Teaching to Transgress
PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Hbw-727JAkon35iyysLAHZxtT8JOkFwr/view?usp=sharing
Audio: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V_RyKilaJaAnyL9Yi8tK4X0D0GPCVblN/view?usp=sharing
✅ 2. Grace Lee Boggs - “These are the times to grow our souls” from The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-first century
PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13TpwglbKM9UhxPI5PAzv_l0tiLU6K01X/view?usp=sharing
Audio: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_dUZWnCbACXJUMye9-OzrXtCUUHh_wiA/view?usp=sharing
Very optional further material:
🌼Rachel Herzing, Political Education in the Time of Rebellion
💭Herzing emphasizes, study is not the enemy of action. Tech doesn’t just stand alone as an industry, but is part of a broader set of long standing social systems. How do we contextualize these systems?
https://politicaleducation.org/political-education-in-a-time-of-rebellion/
🌼Annemarie Mol, The Logic of Care, selections:
💭 “If you don’t like it, you can choose to not work here” How often have you heard that line? In this piece, Mol is talking about healthcare, but also two logics: the logic of choice vs the logic of care. What does the logic of care instead ask of us, as a collective?
PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yFe-u4pmIfGz01ZGG4yXJNH3BeTC3Aqy/view?usp=sharing
🌼Deva Woodly, The Politics of Care
💭What is a politics of care? Woodly remarks that a politics of care is about understanding what the needs of a community are, not demanding something from the community. Listen carefully for her thoughts as well on strategy, governance and and creating new systems.
PDF transcript: https://mindofstate.com/the-politics-of-care-transcript/
Audio: https://mindofstate.com/the-politics-of-care/
Activity: Algorithmic Ecologies workshop with Free Radicals www.freerads.org and Stop LAPD Spying https://stoplapdspying.org/.
Keywords: mapping power, tech and community, strategies
For this session:
✅ 1. Make sure to read about the Stop LAPD Spying coalition’s work:
✅ 2. Read the Points of Unity of Free Radicals (and think about how it might translate to tech) https://freerads.org/points-of-unity/
✅ 3. Check out Zach Blas’s work, Facial Weaponization Suite: https://zachblas.info/works/facial-weaponization-suite/, think about ways “hypervisibility” can or cannot work in public protest, and the idea of refusal rather than representation.
4. Optional further materials:
📚How to Build a Mass Movement by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/womens-march-dc-trump-protests-inauguration/
Or! Listen to audio (longer than the article ^^, fyi)
🎥Inspiring Change in Trump’s America with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor https://aas.princeton.edu/news/aas21-podcast-episode-14-inspiring-change-trumps-america
🌼CASE STUDY: Consentful Tech protocols zine
https://www.andalsotoo.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Building-Consentful-Tech-Zine-SPREADS.pdf
💭We usually think of protocols as technical infrastructure, but what are the ways it’s a social AND technical infrastructure? How does framing a concept encourage new adoption? This zine provides some guidelines and recommendations around consentful tech. This framework is powerful because it frames ethics not just as an abstract thing to debate, but recenters the conversation around justice, power and the imperative to cultivate consent… what would it look like if enacted at your organization? Who would you need to speak to, to make that happen?
Activity: Brian J Jefferson https://ggis.illinois.edu/directory/profile/bjjeffer will join us for an hour for the first part of class. We’ll spend the rest of class working on our project ideas in breakout rooms, discussion material.
What is racial capitalism, and how does it explain the status quo ?
You may have heard the term “surveillance capitalism” and the phrase “means of production”. What is racial capitalism, how does it maintain the status quo, how does it show that surveillance capitalism is just one part of a broader, more complex system, in which race/class/gender intersect to intentionally create inequity, especially in a tech driven economy?
Keywords: racial capitalism, rural-urban uneven development, labor and dispossession
For this session:
🏵 Link to Reading Guide for Week 2
Listen/watch Robin DG Kelley’s lecture on racial capitalism from SURJ (1hr 27 minutes)
From SURJ’s Connect the Dots series (highly recommended series!) https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/connecting-the-dots-series.html downloaded video here (includes audio only m4a file): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15xAscU2EvyqcJ3Wz1FiVqpxo532XYzmR?usp=sharing
Optional further materials:
📚 Tressie McMillan Cottom - Where Platform Capitalism and Racial Capitalism Meet: The Sociology of Race and Racism in The Digital Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332649220949473
💭Why is it easier to maintain status quo than to fight against it? What does Dr. Cottom say about the nature of work flexibility?
🎥 Silvia Lindtner discussing her book, Prototype Nation
💭The ways racial capitalism works with “techno-orientalism” to create areas of the world for rare earth mines, cheap labor outside of the US assembling hardware, and how capitalism may or may not be proliferated through intellectual property laws. We’ll center this theme in MEETING 5 with Lilly Irani’s visit. https://www.si.umich.edu/about-umsi/news/new-book-silvia-lindtner-examines-promise-entrepreneurial-life-and-chinas-contested
🎥 Mary Gray on Ghost Work
💭One level of conversation about “free speech online” has revolved around the role of private platforms. Underneath these private platforms is a network of content moderators, data-labellers for generating AI and machine learning training data. In this talk, racial capitalism meets the digital economy to create a new class of people doing “ghost work”. Is it surprising that private, corporate platforms are moderated at the lowest cost possible? Why or why not? We’ll center this theme in MEETING 5 with Lilly Irani’s visit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj2DEQCOTh0&ab_channel=Data%26SocietyResearchInstitute
Activity: Activist and researcher Erin McElroy will be joining us for the entire class. They’ll be talking about their work for the first part, and then we’ll switch into break out rooms where you can talk about your project ideas!
Why read theory? What happens to theory on the ground?
This week, we’ll use some of our theory muscles from last week and look specifically at gentrification and tech as a case study. While we’ve heard about the changing landscape of San Francisco under the influx of tech workers, that’s just one small part of the story. Tools like private home security cameras and landlord tech are connected to longer histories of market speculation, real-estate development and gentrification, with recent tech accelerating these forces.
Keywords: landlord tech, real estate, gentrification, visualization, on the ground activism
For this session:
🏵 Link to Reading Guide for Week 3 <= updated 3/23, please add to it :)
https://uchri.org/foundry/landlord-tech-and-racial-technocapitalism-in-the-times-of-covid-19/
CHOOSE 1 from below:
~~~~Think/work on your project proposal~~~
🍜 💭Food for thought, in class:
🍜 💭 Questions about DOING: What are the ways “offline” action can spur and fuel movements? How do tech companies that design for ease, access and frictionless experiences actually create friction and exclusion? How does public visibility (offline) amplify a movement?
🍜 💭 Questions about THEORY: How do different forms of tech work intersect with creating gentrification? Is each “class” of tech workers shaping space in different ways? How does this manifest? For example, think about the “tech worker salary” in the SF Bay Area vs another city, and how housing prices are related to notions of median income?
Optional further materials:
🌼Erin McElroy, Disruption at the Doorstep https://urbanomnibus.net/2019/11/disruption-at-the-doorstep/
🌼Desiree Fields, “Uploading Housing Inequality, Digitizing Housing Justice?”
Understand how online platforms contribute to ongoing housing inequality: https://www.publicbooks.org/uploading-housing-inequality-digitizing-housing-justice/
🌼The Architecture of Utopia Laura Raskin, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/the-architecture-of-utopia/539109/ PDF here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LEESVG92BPSqXT8QWsBjIgG8OzMo7RMX/view?usp=sharing
🌼 Look over the case study from Week 1, consentful tech zine if you didn’t get a chance previously.
Activity: J. Khadijah Abdurahman will be joining us for the entire class. She’ll be talking about her work for the first part, and then we’ll switch into break out rooms where you can talk about your project ideas.
What is neoliberalism and imperialism? How do we use storytelling to flip the script in culture and ideology?
What is neoliberalism? It’s a term we hear often, but what does it really mean? This week we’ll understand neoliberalism as a continuation of imperialism, to understand the forces behind VC funding and global “debt imperialism”. While capitalism is seen as a “practice” or “mode of production”, neoliberalism also has cultural and ideological goals. One way to change culture? Storytelling. We’ll hear from Khadijah Abdurahman on digital storytelling and offline activism.
🏵 Link to wildly condensed political economic history that might be of interest on neoliberalism and imperialism
^^ A recording of this is located: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17o67TBzZpZaKkWEwy9V2LtG6tExbTg5u/view
For this session:
Option 1: Read this short interview with activist/storyteller Thenmozhi Soundararajan about using technology for storytelling and “the story as the basic unit of social change” https://www.eyebeam.org/five-questions-around-technology-and-stories-for-social-change/
Option 2: Read this piece by political scientist Wendy Brown on neoliberalism and how it erodes “the social”. Note, might be helpful to listen/read the wildly condensed political economic history above. https://www.publicbooks.org/the-big-picture-defending-society/
Optional further materials:
Related piece to Khadijah’s moral collapse of AI Ethics, Julia Powles on “The Seductive diversion of solving bias in AI”: https://onezero.medium.com/the-seductive-diversion-of-solving-bias-in-artificial-intelligence-890df5e5ef53 pdf: The Seductive Diversion of ‘Solving’ Bias in Artificial Intelligence _ by Julia Powles _ OneZero.pdf
Ruth Gilmore, In the Shadow of the Shadow State, from the book “The Revolution Will Not be Funded”, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/ruth-wilson-gilmore-in-the-shadow-of-the-shadow-state/
💭Think about the funding and organizing models Gilmore mentions towards the end of the article. How does funding work hand in hand with organizing and equity?
Richard Walker, The boom and the bombshell: The New Economy bubble and the
San Francisco Bay Area
💭For those who are SF Bay Area history buffs or interested in the rise of financial power in the Bay Area, this is an accounting written by an old school Californian historian.
Walker - 2006 - The Boom and the Bombshell The New Economy Bubble (2).pdf
“The Long Downturn” from Nick Srnicek’s “Platform Capitalism” to understand in broad strokes how it wasn’t “natural” that we went from manufacturing to digitally based economy, but rather worked in tandem with a desire to increase profits. This reading relates back to Brian J Jefferson’s visit, where he talks about the history of deindustrialization and subsequent War on Poverty/War on Drugs. PDF here: Srnicek - Platform Capitalism.pdf
David Graeber, last chapter, “The Beginning of Something Yet to Be Determined (1971-Present).” DEBT: the First 5,000 Years, Melville House, 2021.
💭Whether you agree with Graeber or not, this chapter provides an overview onto the role of debt, “debt imperialism”, and financialization of debt since the 1970s, when Nixon untethered the US dollar from the gold standard.
Activity: Lilly Irani will join us and talk about her experience organizing Amazon’s Mechanical Turkers over the past 10 years as part of the Turkopticon project (https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/ https://blog.turkopticon.info/?page_id=758 )
We will be focusing more on final project feedback
Why does lived experience matter in organizing on the ground? This week, we’ll look at and understand the concept of intersectionality, and how solidarity can be found in listening and building new relations WITH difference, not “despite” it. We’ll also think about ideas of coalition building as well as “inside-outside” organizing strategy — specifically in the case of Turkopticon and organizing virtually across many different geographies.
For this session:
💭Global movements, solidarity, non-Western feminisms, the rendering of the Egyptian revolution as the result of Twitter vs the work of revolution as the result of people like Nawal el Saadawi. ;)
Very Optional further reading/listening:
!!! Highly recommended if you are interested in autonomy/direct action approaches, thinking about how mutual aid fits into a broader political organizing strategy — Look over introduction from Care Notes, think about the ways care and public health activism can operate strategically and intersectionally, and notice the ways this one issue starts from the “common”, the everyday, the detailed and dovetails with other isms...the everyday is a place where of intervention... (note: this is written by Silvia Federici, an Italian feminist activist who helped pioneer the idea that reproductive labor is also key to capitalism) PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VprN3FXjC-0LB6y-RGuQreStZ2PnxJu_/view?usp=sharing
Dean Spade, “No Masters, No Flakes”, from Mutual Aid
💭This is a recent book (?) but the chapter “No Masters, No Flakes” has some really nice checklists and charts about internal group dynamics, as well as group facilitation. A lot of it works hand in hand with coalition building and inside-outside organizing (mainly, avoid perfectionism!)
Combahee River Collective Statement: https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf
If you are curious about coalition building, watch a talk from Kyle Whyte (below). Kyle is an Indigenous activist and academic working on climate change and environmental governance issues. 💭Of interest is the ways he’s engaging multiple coalitions in climate activism.
“Introduction to the inside/outside strategy” https://befreedom.co/introduction-to-the-insideoutside-strategy/
💭Ok, ok, it’s a wordpress site but this is a helpful overview of what strategies groups have. Inside/outside is a “both/and” approach (both outside agitation and insider advocacy). It introduces a framing that might be helpful — ”prefigurative”, as some movements like to enact the politics they are seeking within their group. Other movements do not do “prefigurative” politics with a more traditional structure.
Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, ed. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Fourth edition.
CASE STUDY: Survived and Punished https://survivedandpunished.org/, specifically page 7 of their “Why Do We use a grassroots funding model” https://www.survivedandpunishedny.org/mutual-aid/mutual-aid-toolkit/
Recommended podcast from Lexi, includes a snippet on Indigenous organizing about the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1qKens9INN42Z3xZqFI2iy?si=Hq7beCJaRUqSHYHRdzq9xQ&nd=1
Special guests: Dorothy Santos (executive director at Processing.org), Ari Melenciano (Founder, Afrotectopia), Shazeda Ahmed (Tech policy, visiting scholar at AI Now)
Union organizing / 1on1s with guest from LABOR NOTES/CWA, Erin Mahoney
A.E.I.O.U. Organizing Conversation.pdf
4 stages of organizing (6).pdf
How to: 1on1, power map, etc
OPEN TO LOGIC SCHOOL FRIENDS AND FAMILY!
Activity: Meredith Whittaker will join us and talk about her experience organizing Google walkouts and her current work.
How to do research pointers: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1k2WLas_GpsTWpdLctcoEb-UhV3i2gpwdYBleiuM0nYQ/edit?usp=sharing
How does a sustained movement come about?
For this session:
Activity: Special guest Meredith Palmer on Indigenous data sovereignty
Breakout rooms on research, final projects and readings
Tech is powerful not just because it shapes our daily lives, but it also shapes our expectations of each other, of what it means to be human (what is considered “normal” human behavior, who is the “default” human). Ideologies and narratives continue to proliferate, especially in tech, that narrowly define what being human, being in relation and community mean. This has profound consequences on the way we think about things like “community” trust and safety, or the model of community data sovereignty versus an individual user’s privacy. This week we’ll hear from Meredith Palmer on indigenous data sovereignty, as well as the ways race is constructed by science and technology.
1. Fullwiley, Duana. "The Biologistical Construction of Race: Admixture' Technology and the New Genetic Medicine." Social studies of science 38, no. 5 (2008): 695-735.
PDF: Fullwiley 2008 - bio construction of race admixture (1).pdf
2. Reardon, Jenny, and Kim TallBear. "“Your DNA is our history” genomics, anthropology, and the construction of whiteness as property." Current Anthropology 53, no. S5 (2012): S233-S245.
Audio: Thank you Yindi!! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B0T0o1pziCBvO0c8_V9gurr6VEi0ZRtK/view?usp=sharing
PDF:Reardon TallBear - DNA is our history.pdf
Optional, bonus tracks related to last week’s themes brought up by Meredith Whittaker, specifically emotional work, as well as themes from the Transformative Justice workshop:
Look at the work of activists like:
Stacey Milbern https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/05/19/loving-stacey-milbern-a-rememberance/
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha on Healing Justice, Grief in movementment work and the disability justice movement https://micemagazine.ca/issue-two/not-so-brief-personal-history-healing-justice-movement-2010%E2%80%932016
Learn/think more about racialization/critical race theory in US and non-US contexts, an extremely abbreviated list (brought up in the articles we have been reading):
Patrick Wolfe's Traces of History (global histories of racialization)
Omi + Winant’s Racial Formation in the US
Troy Duster’s work, Alondra Nelson’s “Social Life of DNA”, as well as James Doucet-Battle’s “Sweetness in the Blood” (for overlaps with genetic tech)
Katherine McKittrick's Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis
Alexander Wehilye's Habeas Viscus
[Add your rec to this list!]
Any other things? Should we talk about algorithmic bias/fairness vs power?
~Options~:
Pratyusha Kalluri, “Don’t ask if artificial intelligence is good or fair, ask how it shifts power” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02003-2
Keolu Fox, “The Illusion of Inclusion” https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1915987
Revisit old readings for discussion!?
Abolitionist science, community science with Jeff Yoo Warren
Listen:
https://www.abolitionscience.org/home/instrumentsformultipleworlds
What’s the difference between CITIZEN science and COMMUNITY science?
Parallels: What’s the difference between PUBLIC tech and COMMUNITY tech?
Optional, bonus tracks:
ACT UP: https://www.thebody.com/article/sarah-schulman-let-record-show-political-history-act-up-ny
Science for the People https://www.michiganradio.org/post/science-people-revived-movement-radical-scientists-meet-week-ann-arbor
Pick one or more:
Rebecca Roanhorse, Postcards from the Apocalypse: https://uncannymagazine.com/article/postcards-from-the-apocalypse/
Interview with Ling Ma, author of Severance (novel)
https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/conversation-with-ling-ma/
Summary of Severance: https://blogs.qub.ac.uk/americanists/2020/11/17/severance-a-millenial-apocalypse/
Pair:
Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from the Omelas
N.K Jemisin, The Ones Who Stay and Fight
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-ones-who-stay-and-fight/
Final presentations with special guests!
Note: you have the option of pre-recording your presentation (video or audio), and then during the session you can get get real time feedback/questions.