What Can We Learn from Digital #Fail(ures)?
Keynote scheduled at 8:30-9:20 in Memorial Hall
The idea that we will become free through technology is not new. However, we do not live in a world that is a blank slate. Hierarchies of power are reproduced and enacted through digital technologies. The ways in which our everyday lives are digitized into easily stored and repurposed bits of information actually heightens control and surveillance: as we are tracked and categorized, power-laden boundaries across race, gender, and class become digital enclosures.
Technology is not neutral. In this talk, Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble from the UCLA Department of Information Studies will discuss the importance of new models of intervention and resistance. By illuminating linkages to power struggles over values, particularly in the context of the digital, we can re-examine information contexts and realize we have great responsibility and the imperative to act.
Presented By
Safiya Noble
Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, and holds appointments in the Departments of African American Studies, Gender Studies, and Education. Her research on the design and use of applications on the Internet is at the intersection of race, gender, culture, and technology. Her monograph, Algorithms of Oppression: Data Discrimination in the Digital Age explores racist and sexist algorithmic bias in search engines like Google (NYU Press, 2017). She serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and is the co-editor of two edited books: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online with Brendesha Tynes, and Emotions, Technology & Design with Sharon Tettegah. She is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award.
Follow @safiyanoble on Twitter