These are some of our speakers and featured workshops. More to be announced!

André L. Brock

Keynote: Black Technoculture

André Brock is an associate professor at the School of Literature, Media, and CommunicationHe is an interdisciplinary scholar with an M.A. in English and Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His scholarship includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as groundbreaking research on Black Twitter. His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter, in particular, continues to evolve.

 

Stand With Tigray

Workshop: Digital Activism against the Tigray Genocide

Stand With Tigray (SWT) was founded on November 6, 2020, in reaction to the unjust war and genocide waged on the people of Ethiopia’s northernmost region, Tigray, by central government forces, Eritrean forces, and armed Amhara militias. Stand with Tigray has become a global campaign whose aim is to raise awareness about the war crimes and human rights violations committed against the Tigrayan people in Ethiopia. SWT engages in social media campaigns to raise awareness, develop and maintain educational platforms to support our humanitarian causes.

 

Timnit Gebru

Keynote: Natural Language Processing and Ethiopia

Timnit Gebru is a computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and data mining. She is an advocate for diversity in technology and co-founder of Black in AI, a community of black researchers working in artificial intelligence.

Ayantu Tibeso and Awol Allo

Conversation: Oromo Knowledge Production

Ayantu Tibeso is a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow and doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA with a concentration in archival studies. Her primary research interests explore the intersections of archives, historical knowledge production, and indigenous knowledge and recordkeeping systems. Her work is rooted in African contexts with Ethiopia at the center of much of her analysis. She is passionate about decolonizing knowledge and revaluing and harnessing indigenous knowledge for the well-being of communities globally.

 

The Southern Movement Assembly

Workshop: Movement communication in the Black US South.

The Southern Movement Assembly is a coalition 110+ local organizations from all over the US South. They are a multiracial, multi-issue, multigenerational movement alliance of grassroots organizations across the South that practices democratic governance, coordinates shared actions, and convenes peoples movement assemblies of frontline communities to grow bottom-up power and build infrastructure for long-term liberation.

 

Lilly Irani

Talk: Hindutva and Managerialism

Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019). Chasing Innovation has been awarded the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. Her research examines the cultural politics of high-tech work and the counter-practices they generate, as both an ethnographer, a designer, and a former technology worker. She is a co-founder and maintainer of digital labor activism tool Turkopticon. Her work has appeared at ACM SIGCHI, New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values, South Atlantic Quarterly, and other venues. She sits on the Editorial Committee of Public Culture and on the Editorial Advisory Boards of New Technology, Work, and Employment and Design and Culture. She has a Ph.D. in Informatics from University of California, Irvine. 

 

Nate Raymond

Talk: Humanitarian tech/satellites for evidence generation for genocide

Nathaniel A. Raymond is a Lecturer at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. His research interests have focused on the human rights and human security implications of information communication technologies (ICTs) for vulnerable populations, particularly in the context of armed conflict. Previously, he was the founding Director of the Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health from 2012 – 2018. From 2010 to 2012, he was Director of Operations for the George Clooney-founded Satellite Sentinel Project at HHI, which utilized high resolution satellite imagery to detect and document attacks on civilians in Sudan and South Sudan. Raymond was Director of the Campaign Against Torture at Physicians for Human Rights from 2008 – 2010, leading investigations into the role of US health professionals in the Bush Administration’s “enhanced” interrogation program. He previously was a humanitarian aid worker with Oxfam America, serving in the field in Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and the US Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Raymond has conducted joint research with multiple United Nations agencies into the role of ICTs and digital data, including remote sensing, in improving the protection of civilian populations and the delivery of humanitarian assistance. He served as a consultant in early warning of mass atrocities to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in South Sudan in 2015. Raymond was a 2013 Poptech Social Innovation Fellow, a 2010 Rockwood Leadership Human Rights and National Security Reform Fellow, and a co-recipient of the 2012 US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation Industry Intelligence Achievement Award.

 

Carrie Freshour

Talk: Poultry and Prisons

Carrie Freshour is a Southerner, abolitionist, and assistant professor of geography at the University of Washington. Her work focuses on low-wage food and agricultural labor in the U.S. South, racial capitalism, carceral geographies, and the Black radical tradition. Freshour is currently finalizing her book project, Making Life Work, which centers the experiences of Black women, their families, and broader communities in Northeast Georgia who remain the basis for the global production of cheap chicken. She teaches courses on qualitative methods, food and agriculture, racial capitalism, and the radical geographies of the PNW. She is a part of several research and organizing collectives including The People’s Geography of Seattle, the Antipod Sound Collective, Study and Struggle, and abolitionist organizing in WA state.

 

Robyn Caplan

Workshop: Platform Governance—Content vs Context Moderation 

Robyn Caplan is a Researcher at Data & Society, and a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University (ABD, advisor Philip M. Napoli) in the School of Communication and Information Studies. She conducts research on issues related to platform governance and content standards. Her most recent work investigates the extent to which organizational dynamics at major platform companies impacts the development and enforcement of policy geared towards limiting disinformation and hate speech, and the impact of regulation, industry coordination, and advocacy can play in changing platform policies. Her work has been published in journals such as First Monday, Big Data & Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She has had editorials featured in The New York Times, and her work has been featured by NBC News THINK and Al Jazeera. She has conducted research on a variety of issues regarding data-centric technological development on society, including government data policies, media manipulation, and the use of data in policing.