Is everybody still with us . You guys awake . Its my pleasure to introduce our final panel before our keynote, justice inclusion, imagine and building alternative platforms. And so to introduce our guests, i would turn it right over to dr. Lori lopez and well start the panel with that. Thank you. All right. So, for our panel today, we have four wonderful speakers and im going to start by introducing them. So here we have margene christian, professor of Communication Studies at northwestern university, he recently earned tenure there so will very soon have the title of associate professor. Tanya sutherland is assistant professor of archival studies and Computer Sciences at the university of hawaii. New title. Well clap. Applause anyway. Sarah j. Jackson at Northeastern University and in july shell be starting a new position as president of communication at the university of pennsylvanias ananberg school of communication and matthew bui is the fellow at the university of southern californias ananberg school of communication. And im lori kilo lopez, at the university of wisconsin madison. Okay. In this panel, we want to explore the question of how we can use new Media Technologies for the specific purposes of Racial Justice and inclusion. It connects really well to the the themes of the Previous Panel but i think all of our research is going to take it in a different direction. These scholars look at antiracist interventions, including alternative media productions, archives, hash tag campaigns. Building on their wide array of experiences, they will discuss potential lessons, themes and strategies for a more radically and future distribution and consumption. Together we seek to engage with and produce scholarship activism aimed at the flattening discourses of diversity and multiculturalism. So im just going to open with kind of a broad question that i think will help you all to just tell us a little bit about the general work that youve been doing in this area. So what does Racial Justice look like in relation to your work, and how do you see your research as an intervention in the larger political social context around Racial Justice . And we can just go in order here. Hello. So i view Racial Justice as critical to my work and also as inextricably linked from gender justice, sexuality, Economic Justice and all the other forms of difference we contend with. In my specific work right now, ive been interested in what independent creators do online and how they make their own cultural products intervene in hollywood and industries more generally. So i after writing a book about independent web series creators called open tv in which i interview people like issa rae, who is probably the most famous person in the book at this point, i started a platform called open television to specifically assist chicago artists who are intersexually identified in making and releasing their own shows. When i was doing my work, trying to figure out why does the internet matter, i learned and sort of got deeper into how much money there is in hollywood, and how systematically excluded people of color have been in that system for so long. Netflix spends now i think 13 billion a year on original programming. Thats one channel. All the tech platforms spend over 1 billion a year. Hbo spends several billion dollars a year. A lot of money, but the number of people who actually are executive producers and creators of shows for all those networks, streaming or otherwise, i think is less than 5 to 7 . Thats all people of all colors. For television. And thats a lot of money that doesnt go to our communities and doesnt allow people to support younger creators and tell more stories and really help us all understand what its like to be racialized in america. So for me, Racial Justice is about getting people access to these systems but also Building Systems outside that could sustainably develop our communities when those systems inevitably lose interest, right, and the waves go. Right now were in a diversity wave. So i sort of knew that starting open television. That there would be an opportunity to maybe get some people in. And build an audience that might sustain these communities going forward. So my training is in arcable studies. And so im primarily interested in records and evidence and the specific context, also very much interested in digital memory and also as karen said on the Previous Panel, in the digital traces that we leave behind. So from that perspective, i look a lot at gaps in the arcable record. I look at how people are represented in records. I look pretty specifically at how records are contributing to our state. So the gathering of data and social media records. You know, the sort of push toward using those kinds of things. And i also have sort of deep investments in critical critically understanding decisions to move analog records into digital environments, which ill talk about more later. So, you know, in terms of a larger intervention in records and archives in digital memory, there are so many ways that records are used in our everyday are lives that were just not aware of. And someone on a Previous Panel said something about how we dont know how long we dont know how long Homeland Security records are going to be kept, for example. Well, for an archivist, thats actually not true. For archivist managers, there are laws that govern and mandate how long those records are kept. And those so looking at those kinds of concerns and being able to address the racialized aspects of them, the race overlay, you know, very typically when youre looking at gaps and vagaries in our historical record, its black people and other people of color and queer people that are falling into these gaps. And whether whether its just a lack of representation or if its work in our descriptive practices and how we name things, what we call people, you know, there is sort of a lack of empowerment right now in terms of people being able to name and call themselves, to record themselves, to create their own evidence and historical record. And the gap and the vaguery and the violences tend to happen to communities of color and also, again, to queer communities. So, you know, those are sort of my primary engagements and investments, how that plays out in the research, all kinds of ways. But it really always comes back to the record and the evidence in front of us. So my work, as some of you know, focuses on media activism and also the ways in which journalists and other media makers cover black activism, feminist activism, and et cetera. So the question of sort of like what does Racial Justice look like in relation to my work. Its basically what my work is about from a media studies framework and perspective. And i would say that that means that theres a lot of nuance and complication in that, because historically, there have been some sort of we can take technology as an example and folks on Previous Panels have noted this. There have been some myopic and very hopeful ideas spread that so, for example, technology will save us. That it will erase inequalities. That it will do et cetera, et cetera. That have lacked the interventions to sort of acknowledge that, for example, the internet is a tool of military technology, primarily, surveillance tool, primarily. And actually reinforces the hierarchical structures in our society. That many activists are using to try to upend. And so my work really considers and centers the question of the agency of activists and ordinary people. And thinking through the importance of the storytelling of those people. So we know hopefully we all know that there is sort of no media outlet or tool that is perfect or was created for the purpose of social justice. And yet we know that activists and ordinary folks use the tools available to them to tell really important and compelling stories that can change public narratives, that can change public politics, that can create Community Within groups that really helps to in some cases save lives, frankly. And so thinking through some of those issues in this terms of the question of Racial Justice means thinking through how are these media makers often at the margins really working on and helping to support projects of Racial Justice. But also how are those projects linked, and this is an important part, to the many projects and Many Organizations working on Racial Justice that we dont often see covered in the media or that we you know the things that are happening offline or the things that dont get covered because theyre not compelling enough or whatever. Which means thinking through the relationship of media activism and the framing of activism in media to the on the ground organizing, where folks are trying to make change. As one of the earlier scholars on this panel, i think i have multiple projects to answer this question. Im working out how my longterm Research Agenda thinking about how race racial inequality is shaped but also propagated through technology. So for one, my colleague and i just got this forthcoming article about how technology how communication policy structures are very white and center whiteness. And we actually didnt think it was an original idea to really say and argue that there is a need for centering and grounding, Diverse Communities of color. And actually, the interexchange within, communities of color are not monolithic. That was actually an original contribution we did not think to get through, but it is. And secondly, im working on a chapter thats talking about a. I. Ethics, and how as a dominant paradigm, why is it problematic that some boards dont even have representatives from marginalized communities that are the most vulnerable. Thinking about the lack of representation of black folks in the room, or even other endangered communities. And lastly, the dissertation that im currently working on in a year, hopefully it will be finished, thinking about urban data initiatives and urban data science as tools for datafied racism and how do we bring to light the racial politics of data, and well talk about that more later. Great. Thank you so much. So lets dig in a little bit more to get the specificities of your work and your research. Well start with amar. So lets talk more about open tv. You guys are creating tons of content. But i thought we could have a conversation about the idea of ownership and what you do with all of the content that youre producing. And what negotiations you make in thinking about where you post your media and then who owns it as a result of that. So can you talk a little bit about the decisions that youve made or the conversations that youve had with your media create first about posting on youtube or facebook versus tart are starting your own platform. Yeah, theres a lot there. So ownership is so critical, request and we dont normally think about it when we think about creative media. But hollywood is ravenous for intellectual property. Most of the shows you watch there used to be restrictions on how much an entity could own that they distributed. That got killed with regulation. And the results of that in the 90s was actually the black television, because corporations figured out a way to make money without having to cater to community and building new answers. And i think this is a real problem for inequality and sustainability. If you are a real creator, youre almost given this proposition, if you want this story made, you have to sell it to us and then you lose control over it, right . They can bring in other writers who may not sure your little perspective or culture to make it. So when i started open television, i very specifically started started theed with of that artists who own, we have a letter of agreement where it states that quite clearly. Part of this was like i didnt want people to get into conversation. And i didnt have money to defendedly glee its also an ethical thing. I wanted them to walk into the room, saying, this is my story, i own it, and should be able to profit from it. What ive tehraned since many of our artists have gone on in television, because theyre new and havent been in the system as decades as other people have, dont look like the producer, theyre still in the position where theyre made to sell their story. And sometimes they walk away. And i really cant blame them for that. When you put something on the internet, you have some platform intern terms of and it was have the rights to say you can put anything on youtube in an ad. They generally accept the proposition you are creator and i. P. Holder of that property. And yet at the same time, if you actually want to profit from that, most people, unless youve been on uindicated, are not might go bank off their loose, right . They need another system in order to property. Of their vid, right . They need to enter another system in order to profit. So we need infrastructures, right . We need infrastructures to figure out how to correct these systems, and for me thats really the research question, right . Can you actually create a structure that is equitable that brings people in from the ground up and allows them to soar, make their own money and build their own system so that they can support other people. Thats the work of sort of social transformation, and i dont have the answers yet. Theres possibilities of spinning off corporations and nonprofits and doing deals with investors and stuff, but its very complicated and very heady and thinking about liberation in any of these instances is very difficult. Youtube and vimio and their algorithms make it very difficult for any independent creator to build an audience, to get seen. Maybe ten years ago it was a little bit possible, more possible to spread, but now theres so much content and all of those companies are also spending their own money on their own intellectual property. Youtube has youtube premium. Facebook is now entering television. They want independent creators because they want that free ip, but they also dont because they dont want stuff to compete with their own things. Algorithms as wendy chun has been arguing are inherently discriminatory and might be disadvantaging creators of color. There really are tremendous barriers. As researchers its important for us to be in that space. Thats where you get that rich thick data where you understand this is whats going on on the ground and these are the really specific barriers to justice. Yeah, so in this conversation about alternative platforms and how we can get around that, where are you seeing some of the hopeful areas . That was kind of a bleak answer, but the limits and barriers . Hopeful things. I would say, you know, people are really hungry for stories that reflect them, right . So we released this show in 2017 called brown girls, and it ended up being our hit show. Premiered basically right around the time of trumps election. It was the story about a friendship between a black woman and queer muslim woman written by a queer muslim woman about her friendship with a black woman, ja mila woods. Ja mila is a beautiful singer, you should look up her music if you havent heard it. I do think sincere narratives artfully told can energize communities to support independent creators, and it it really was multiple intersectional community that propelled that show to an hbo sale and emmy nomination. Fatina wrote a book and has been touring. They have then supported creators that come after them, right . So i can see how youre actually building solidarity sort of project by project, but of the 40 something programs that otv has released its really that one and maybe a couple others that have had that big success story. Most of the ones are little seen. Even the ones that are little seen have been able to get writers gigs in hollywood. Its getting them some credits and some level of professionalization, so i do think theres a way in which im learning that even as we in academia f academia sometimes small data actually can have a much larger impact than we think, especially for the lives of those artists. Ive also seen a lot of artists, everything is chicago based right, a lot of artists supporting each other. Theyre starting to post about each others shows. Theyre collaborating with each other and this idea that younger people are hyper individualistic i think is maybe true in some contexts but not all contexts. Film and Television Production is highly collaborative and you have to support each other if you want to get anywhere. Its really only through cle collective effort that were going to remake these systems. Thank you. Tonia lets talk a little bit more about your work on digital memory. What kind of practices have you been seeing and how has race played a role in those practices . And how is it that people of color are fighting for both the right to be remembered and the right to be forgotten, and what roles do technology play in both of those . Ooh, okay. So in terms of digital memory practices, one of the things that ive been looking really closely at is digital after life practices, looking at what im calling digital remains. Im sure im not the first person to use that term, but its the one thats sort of singing to my heart right now. So i have several example for you. The first as i sort of gestured towards earlier, is this practice of moving records that were analog records into digitized or into digital environments, digitizing them and moving them into digital environments and so some of what that looks like is taking slavery records, for example, or colonial era records and mass digitizing them and putting them up online, which in theory is fantastic, right, because it means that people who didnt who priorly previously may not have had access to say ge geneoloical materials can help build an zest rial history. The Danish National archives just digitized Something Like a kilometer of colonial era records from the virgin islands, and they sort of did it without any real context or without putting it into any kind of context. They just, you know, dingtizgit all of this stuff and threw it up online. And now you have people looking at these records and being like whoa, wait a minute, thats my an zeses ter and the image of tm is whipped and bleeding or the image im seeing online is a violent image, and i didnt sort of consent and my ancestor certainly didnt consent and my family didnt consent to having this image up online where it will, you know, now live in perpetuity. Its different from it sitting in a box in a physical archive somewhere and enjoying sort of the digital after life. That again goes on in perpetuity. Another case that comes to mind in terms of digital memory and digital after lives is hen yeria lax. Theres been a lot of research and writing on the case of henrietta lax, the hela sales. For those of you who arent familiar, henrietta lax was a black woman who died of an aggressive form of Cervical Cancer in 1951. She was treated at Johns Hopkins hospital, and they took which was, you know certainly nothing untoward about it, they took cell samples from her cancerous cell samples from her, but this form of cancer was so aggressive that the cells were able to replicate so fast, and this was the first time that we had really sort of seen this play out in the medical in medical history, and so previously one could just take sort of a dead his logical stain or smear, if you remember back to biology class, the gels, right, you look through the microscope and you see the like dead stain there. With henrietta laxs cell, they were replicating so fast that you could do studies on the cells that sort of imitated what the human body could do so henrietta lax, the first two letters of her name, these excels became known as hela cells. They were mass produced and sold and so everybody kind of knows that part of the story. Her family didnt get a say in it. Lots of people made a lot of money on hela cells. In fact, i have a friend who does like bio sales and i remember asking her, you know, have you ever heard of hela cells, she was like oh, yeah, you know. We sell them. Thats one of our highest selling products and i was like have you ever heard of henrietta lax, and she was like no, never heard the name. This black woman becomes completely invisible yet her cells live on. The part that really interests me is that german researchers took it upon themselves to match the entire genome and throw that up online, which meant that for her family, for her descendants, their entire je gnomic history is now online. While its illegal in the United States anyway for Health Insurance companies to use dna evidence from ancestors against you, that is not the case for Life Insurance companies. So their family was like, her family was like hey, wait a minute. You know, our my grandmother died of this very aggressive form of Cervical Cancer. I could be denied Life Insurance because of this digital after life, right, that the german researchers created, and theres been work it kind of remediate that, but these are the kinds of things that come up. You know, those of you who are more familiar with my work, ill make this my last example before getting to the right to be remembered and forgotten, the tupac hologram. Its a burr in my side because, you know, somebody im not going to remember right now and so apologies to the journalist who brilliantly wrote this and said this about the tupac bio pick, you know, acting like tupac is not the same as being tupac, and that hologram, you know, which was created, you know, in cconjunction and in conversation with his mother, but really you have this instance of taking a whole bunch of data, images, you know, archivable material, and you know, bringing a dead man back to life. A dead black man back to life to entertain a white audience at coachella, and i take deep, deep issue with that. And you know, were starting to see that some celebrities are exercising agency in what can happen to whether or not there will ever be a hologram of them after they die. Theyre trying to put in the Carrie Fisher had a statement in her will that she was not to be digitally resurrected, you know. So those are the kinds of things that im seeing in terms of digital memory, and just the racialized aspects of it. In terms of the right to be remembered and forgotten, you know, the right to be remembered, i think, is really its a big one. Memorialization, you know, burial, the way that black people care for and remember and think about our dead is really its really important, and so we see memorial sites popping up that have also been come modified, right, for like 30 you can put up pictures but if you pay a little more you can also have video, and you know, so there are those kiends of services that speak to our desire to be remembered. That being said, there are also Companies Like eterni. Me that are looking to gather peoples data right now, like in the moment as they live so that when you die it can create a reasonable facsimile of you to continue conversing and texting and so on with your loved ones who remain, right, who you leave behind after you die, and so you know, some of the questions that come up around that are how is this algorithm, which has taken all of my data or ive handed over all of my data, how is this algorithm going to know to keep my secrets. How is it going to know what i do not tell my husband, who i dont tell my mom. Is it going to tell my mom something that wasnt meant for her eyes or wasnt meant for her eyes via text. The right to be remembered also becomes it becomes a very complex thing especially when sort of juxtaposed against the right to be forgotten. The right to be forgotten is not something we enjoy in the u. S. , primarily because it we have First Amendment rights and those two things tend to bump up against one another, but that being said, you know, i think about the images of the dead from katrina. I think about mike browns body lying in that hot august sun, and you know, there is no right to be forgotten in those cases. Again, theres sort of a digital after life that is created wherein, you know, in the e. U. The right to be forgotten basically says you can ask google, for example, to take down some stuff that you dont like. You were convicted of a crime and google has it up, you have the right in europe to be forgotten. To make a request and have that information taken down. We dont have that right here. So the right to be remembered really starts to come up against the right to be forgotten because, you know, there are ways in which black people in particular in this country dont enjoy that right to be forgotten, even when we are looking to be remembered, theres sort of a lack of agency and power there. When youre talking about power, youre talking about race. Thanks. Okay. Sarah, lets talk more about twitter. So how would you say that your work on activism counters some of the way that twitter has been traditionally understood . And maybe as part of your answer, you could give us a specific example of activism and teach us about how people of color are using Digital Media for activism. Sure. Yeah, so as i sorted of mentioned in my opening remarks, i think one of the interventions that my work does and i hope does and ive seen it used in different ways, and so im glad to be going on the record about the intervention i think it does is that, you know, there have historically been these two impulses around Digital Media and especially about social media. Theyre the digital optimists who were sort of screaming from the rooftops that Digital Media was going to save us, that it was a revolutionary tool, that it could do all these things. And you see that in a lot of the early coverage, for example, of the arab spring, right . That twitter the Facebook Revolution they called it, et cetera, right . And then there were the digital pessimists, and the digital pessimists said this isnt real activism. This isnt real organizing, you know, its just people clicking on something. Does that really make a difference . It lures people into a sort of sense of theyre making a difference but are they really, and they were sort of infamously, to use arab spring as an example again, Malcolm Gladwell published a piece called small change. I think it was literally like two months before jose mubarak was toppled as a dictator in egypt basically saying social media is not going to be a useful tool for revolutions. And so from my perspective and the perspective of my work, the answer is actually a middle ground and a very nuanced middle ground, right . So it is absolutely true that we shouldnt assume as i said before that any kind of technology is a technology of liberation. Thats just not the world we live in. Technologies are designed and created with very sort of purposeful ties to systems of capitalism, systems of imperialism, you know all of the sort of hire arkt cal systems. At the same time people, and i think the story should be about the people and not the technology is part of what i want my work to speak to, people have used tools that might otherwise be used against them for libertory projects. Dr. Clark talked about the beginnings of the africanamerican press in the United States, and the ways in which early black journalists and the early black press really evolved to respond to the White Supremacy of the press in america that excluded stories about black peoples lives or only used those spaces to denigrate them. And my work very much argues that just as newspapers were a tool in that period, right, just as, for example, ida b. Wells at the turn of the 20th century was telling really important and different stories about lynching h than what those in power were telling, and that her stories became really foundational and important in our collective memory about the role that lirc lynching has played in our nation, that contemporarily media makers, ordinary people, activists are using new technologies to similarly attempt to intervene in the record and tell news stories from the perspectives of those communities and create new narratives and encourage the public to think differently about some of the taken for granted questions. And as i mentioned and i always, like, dig in on this, that is part of larger projects, right . Thats part of larger organizing projects and projects that you sometimes see online but that often you dont, right . So theyre playing one role in sort of asking us as a nation to reimagine some of these stories. And so in answer to your, you know, example of this in the forthcoming book activism, which i coauthored with moya bailey and brook fucos wells, we look at different aspects of activism. Everyone has heard at this point of the hashtag metoo, right . Even the metoo there were some questions around its creation and ownership that had to do with race, particularly because taron da bird had an Organization Called me too. That was correct sked and very quickly corrected because black women on the internet said hey, you need to interrogate where credit is being given here. But that said, we argue in the book that me, too, was made possible by other hashtags that are sort of less wellknown and sometimes less visible, and yet they start to essentially are the Building Blocks towards visibility, and so we look at theres four hashtags in particular that we found were especially influential on twitter that didnt get the same type of mainstream attention offline as me, too, but that predated it, and these hashtags were youokaysis, why i stayed, survivor privilege an and sayhername. And these hashtags started by black women to talk about intervening in street harassment and strategies around intervening in street harassment and talking about the everyday sort of intersectional sexism of existing on the street in a femme body. Why i stayed was a hashtag also started by a black woman to talk about the ways in which victims of Domestic Violence are blamed in our society and to talk about interpersonal and Domestic Violence. Survivor privilege also started by a black woman, was started to reject narratives that were coming from the right suggesting that it somehow benefitted women to talk about being sexually assaulted, and then of course say her name was starletted by group of activists and scholars to really lift up the names of women and femme and trans victims of Police Brutality and other forms of state violence, and all of these networks existed and sort of evolved over a very close number of years, and what we found in our work is that the people who were leading these conversations and the people who were participating in these networks were sort of all in conversation with each other and all sort of were influencing one anothers discourse, and ultimately these same people became the people that helped metoo trend on twitter, right . And so the story of me, too, becoming a national or even global phenomenon that has allowed us to have a National Conversation about all kinds of gender violence is in part due to the fact that there is a sort of digital labor happening that was largely black womens Digital Creative labor that was setting the stage for and creating Online Networks of people who were using similar vocabulary and framing and bringing to light sort of new ways of talking about these issues. Of course i should say, you know, this isnt the first time this has happened. In the 1970s womens lib publications, for example, set the stage for the Mainstream Media paying attention to issues like abortion, right, and were writing about those things before, but so that sort of speaks to the ways then in which these networks really are a tool that can be harnessed and that should exist along side the fact that these says are also spaces where often the people doing the most creative labor and often the people creating some of the most liberatory frameworks and stories are also the people most surveillanced and harassed and patrolled on these platforms. Thats something important for me to think about in my own work and other people to think about when theyre using any media really but in this case using Digital Media as a liberatory tool in that it cant be a myopic framework in thinking thats the only thing it does. People are vulnerable. People are really vulnerable, and their lives are really vulnerable in these spaces and those things align along all kinds of things having to do with power and inequality and difference. Thank you. Actually, can i ask a followup question. Im really curious about this finding and im wondering if you can talk about the methods that you use. Sure, sure, yeah. So one of the things that was really great in collaborating with dr. Bailey and dr. Wells is that we all have different field backgrounds. We all have different training. My fields media studies. I you know, do discourse analysis, cultural studies. Dr. Fucowells is a network scienti scientist and so we use mixed method approaches, so what we did essentially is poll millions and millions of tweets which for me as somebody who does critical methods, i couldnt possibly analyze all those tweets but when you have a Network Scientist on your team, they can use Network Science methods to find out in, for example, ill give you another example of a hashtag we looked at, the hashtag girlslikeus, which is a hashtag trans women used to talk about everything from joy to survival to like media, you know, whatever, is and was it started by janet mock, who people now know her. When it started she wasnt as wellknown as she is now. And so oh, okay. So what we can do is we can take the millions of tweets of girls like us and the Network Analysis methods allow us to see who are the most influential nodes or the most influential users within that network, so we can see that janet mock, for example, and luverne cox from orange is the new black are two of the most influential in that network. What we were really excited to see in many of our networks is contrary to what some might expect or what some of the sort of other theorization in at least my field media studies would expect, you will say oh, it will be elites that have the most power. It will be celebrities, et cetera. What we found in fact is it was often ordinary everyday people who didnt have that many twitter followers, who didnt have, you know, that much visibility in what would be considered sort of the mainstream world but in these particular communities and networks, these were people that others came to rely on to sort of stoetell stories and share resources and sort of create a sense of community. And so then, right, once we know who these folks are, we can look at what are the stories theyre telling. How are the stories theyre telling different or more . How are those stories filling gaps that others might not be being told. You know, we looked at this as well with the ferguson. What we found was pretty amazing. We found ordinary people who were neighbors of Michael Brown who really were initially in the first days of what became to this day still one of the most used hashtags ever in the history of twitter, as being the people who really framed the narrative that then later got picked up by, you know, the activists and the advocacy organizations and the celebrities to talk about Police Brutality and what was happening in the streets of ferguson. And so we think thats really cool, right, that with the mixed methods we were able to see that and then one more thing on the methods tip. We also i mean, absolutely both many all three of us feel this way, but dr. Bailey really pressed us to think about the ethics of some of these methods, and this is a really important question. One thing we see particularly in academia and particularly in journalism is that people will go on to twitter, theyll say theres this girlslikeus, im going to take screen shots and tweets, what they dont know is theyre outing people. Theyre driving tropical trolls and sort of like far right squads to these peoples twitter accounts, they often are doing damage. There have been people who have flippantly said twitter is public. Thats not exactly the anterie l ethical thats not the stance we want to take. One of the important things was not just treat these folks who are doing a lot of creative labor as subjects or as objects to be consumed because our argument and what we find in the project is essentially that their agency takes a tool that wasnt made for them, takes a space that wasnt made for them, and fundamentally changes the conversations were having and what their Community Looks like and all these kinds of things. It was really important for us to include them in the process. So we actually applied for a small grant, got a small grant, and paid honorariums to the activists that we studied to write small contributions sort of reflecting on the creation of their hashtags and on what we are saying or arguing in our Academic Work about those hashta hashtags, so we have a contribution from janet mock which was exciting. We have contributions from who started the survivorprivilege. We have contributions from, you know, quite a few of these folks, someone from blm, et cetera, et cetera. And it was important to us that their voices appear alongside ours so that we didnt perpetuate these dynamics of power and data and access around them doing labor and us simply sort of like consuming and telling you all what the labor meant. They get to tell you what the labor means, too. In my opinion their version of what that labor means is just as valid of my version of what that labor means. That was something that was really important to us. And we also asked permission to use tweets, so this is something that i feel like even a couple years ago i would be on panels and people would argue about this, and i dont know if its something people still argue about or not, im not sure, but i have a position on it. So we removed identifying data when people wanted us to remove identifying data. I mean sometimes we would still say people made this argument, but we wouldnt include their handle. We wouldnt include an image if they didnt want identifying data. Thats like just a very humane and frankly ethical and humanistic way to understand our positionalty and their positionality in terms of power. I think that thats something that became also an important part of the methods we chose to use, which was thinking about were using methods that werent necessarily designed to respect or honor the labor that were studying, so how and what can we do to sort of subvert the fact that methods themselves might produce in us sort of an ethic of consumption and instead move towards an ethic of collaboration with those folks. Thats fascinating. Thank you. So matthew, how do you understand the relationship between technology and racial capitalism, and what role does that play in how you understand Racial Justice around Data Analytics . So very intimately in the sense that i think a will tlot Technology Studies remove the way logic capitalism are immeshed in technologies especially data driven technology. In the initial conception of my dissertation, the starting point that i was starting at was thinking about the smart city and how its like in this day and age of data driven technologies, algorithms, artificial intelligence, ubiquitous data centers are going to solve all our urban problems. Were going to be more efficient, what chuommunities a actually represented in the data and how are they represented. Thinking about the racial politics of data and how im thinking back to the moynahan report that urban observations and thinking about how black families were denigrated because of their lack of familiar their they were denigrated because of their disorderly Family Structures but think about how observing and objective observations are often used to make riesacial hierarch in the way that smart cities, Data Collection could reproduce these same inequalities. So building alongside the critiques of the smart city as ahistorical, acontextual and looking into the lit chuerature about the way i see the city as racially segregated. Especially thinking about racial capitalism in the lens of real estate technology. Thinking about how los angeles, theres a 1939 map from the Homeowners Loan Corporation that shows the original one of the original conceptions of red lining. These were the zones denigrated as zone 4, the least valuable, the least likely to get invested in with loans. Whereas so these are often also the most the low income working class communities of color, and theyre mixed race, so even just not getting loans for these communities whereas zones one, zones two are the middle and upper class White Communities and zone three is the lower income White Communities, so how is los angeles as its pushing this narrative of objective neutral data driven policy making actually obfuscating and really erasing the histories of racial inequality, and how are we actually going to foreground those questions in the analyses for equitable interventions, so just thinking about how racial capitalism has produced los angeles as a segregated, as a very multicultural yet segregated yet divided community and really digging deep. And then thinking about how do you platform such as yelp reproduce imaginaries of so to go back a little bit, my first chapter is about yelp and scraping yelp data and thinking about now in the moment i i have to give an l. A. History lesson. Im working through how to explain l. A. History. Its a polly centric city. After 1939, the inner city we have multiple inner cities because l. A. Has multiple centers. There was a lot of white suburban flight, l. A. , los angeles, before the current moment of urbanization, people wanted to be on the suburbs. It was a privilege to be in the suburbs. But now with the Global Restructuring and urbanization, people are moving back to the city. With the revitalization of downtown l. A. , people want to be in downtown l. A. So whereas the suburbanization was a mark of privilege, now people want to move back to the inner cities but yelp, all these popular hipster coffee shops are centering in these central inner cities and these communities of color. So the first chapter is thinking about and interrogating how gentrification actually is overlaid with a lot of these imaginaries of space, so the most highly and most popular coffee shops are actually in gentrifying areas and so im actually problemtizing if you dont trust me on my methods, a Harvard Business school study did this and they say gentrification actually is happening is hipster coffee shops are a signal of that, but they dont problemtize the word gentrificati gentrification. They view it as a positive term, Like Development up. Im actually thinking about hey all these communities were erased from loan investments, but now that its hip and popular to be in the cities, why are these people getting displaced, dispossessed. Thinking about that first chapter is about yelp and then now i have access to a commercial database that i cannot name. I think its a real estate site, imagine whatever you want, but thinking about the material displace of employment, right, so from the symbolic erase sure in the real estate data reflecting these communities are the hot and upcoming areas, flagged as hot and upcoming areas, but also who are the hot and upcoming four whose histories are erased in these like up and coming Neighborhood Real Estate advertisements. Now the last chapter is also thinking about this history of l. A. s revitalization, and thinking about data as some proxy to counter map these inequalities, the ways in which Downtown Los Angeles from 2011 to 2017 has exponential arrest records, so as a mandate sorry im giving another l. A. History lesson. The city l. A. Mayor Eric Garcetti mandated all civic and public agencies have to publicize their data. From 2011 to 2017 nonviolent, nondrug related crimes, aka, just being there or homelessness, being homeless in the specific area of Downtown Los Angeles, how im conceptualizing it has exponentially grown from around dont quote me on the numbers from 200 to 7,000, so im mapping kind of why is it that as Downtown Los Angeles has become increasingly prime real estate, why are we arresting . Why are we criminalizing homelessness now. Kind of putting the Historical Context back in these urban Data Analytics that kind of erase histories, erase contexts, erase inequalities, how we actually do new methods with these critical questions at the fore. Also racial capitalism as a key concern of these technologies and the ways in which they produce racial hierarchies in community skb community. If you are unfamiliar with the term racial capitalism, you should read cedric robin sson o black marxism. I was thinking about this how we study racial activism and technology and how theres many obstacles that we have to overcome, many challenges, limitations, also just dark days, sad days, so what are some of the strategies that you have for overcoming those challenges, and what are some of the things that give you hope and inspiration as you do this kind of research . So for me i think and its been great to see so many people on this panel who do Community Based work. That has given me hope. Going offline and actually convening people in cities and communities to meet with, discuss, partake in and support this kind of work. In chicago weve hosted over 40 screenings of intersectional tv, and its really critical for people to actually see each other, to be able to have an intention conversation. To be able to like sort of like engage with how youre dealing with the moment that were in right now, and have been in for our entire history, so i think its important for me as a method to refract the online environment with the offline environment because they really are two different environments that form each other but have different sort of stakes and Different Levels of possibility. So a lot of the work im doing requires looking at things like lynching photos, you know, interacting with google images, which will ask you whether you want to see Trayvon Martins deceased body on the ground or in a casket, right . So the sort of daytoday engagement is really heart hard. Its heavy work. Anybody that knows me well knows that i hate being told what to do. Question authority my dad said and i do. So i think the thing that gives me the most hope is seeing the ways that people subvert these systems, seeing surveillance turned on its head and become suveillance. Seeing the ways that people have taken, you know, facebook and tw twitter and other social media platforms and created smaller autonomous and also liberatory spaces within them. Dr. Brock who spoke on the first panel does a lot of work around this, i think a lot of us do a lot of work around the ways that people are subverting existing systems and using them for libber toir purposes, i think thats probably the thing that gives me hope on the days that it seems like its just depressive, right, its not, right . Theres a lot of joy to be found in subversion. Yeah, i mean, i would echo, i think, both of those points, you know, i mean, i think being connected to communities, you know, i think its interesting because theres an impulse in academia but also in journalism, a lot of professionalized fields towards this concept that does not exist called objectivity where youre not supposed to be attached to the things youre writing about it. And i mean when were talking about writing about peoples lives and liberation and bodies and joy and like all these things, the ideas of not being attached to that sounds actually kind of vicious, right . So i think for me absolutely being part of the communities that i study is really important, and finding joy in those communities, recognizing that resistance can be joyful and resistance can be a form of joy. I mean, i think particularly right now its very interesting because there were people warning and many of those people were black women on twitter a long time ago about trolls and fake accounts and fake news and all kinds of like attempts to like, you know, silence people on twitter many, many years ago but since the 2016 election there is like this renewed or not renewed but new public concern and sort of pessimism about digital spaces and how whose voices are being included and not included in information, et cetera. And those are valid concerns, and those are things we should be worried about and we should be thinking about, but i think for me in terms of the joyful part, i just think its so phenomenal to insist and in my work i insist on centering agen agency, right . And of centering the agency of people who are reclaiming power, right . And so that doesnt mean its not important to study the ways in which systems of power deprive them, but we cant keep focusing all of our work on that if we want to find the solutions were looking for. Like we have to see what actually works, what kinds of subversion works, what types of story telling and ownership models work. What types of recordkeeping works, right . What types of understanding like urban centers work if were going to develop the libertory frameworks that topple ones that concern us. So i find joy absolutely from that process. I would just echo the Community Like being embedded in the community, connected to Community Organizations that actually are like oh, we can use this map or have you heard about this . Have you heard about that . I think a lot of the l. A. History i kind of knew because i was a native but also was taught by these Community Members and these Community Organizations. Secondly, i think ive been sitting at the feet of a lot of women of color who have been very generous academic mentors and the ways in which theyve just been like yes. Right now im sitting here, but ive actually been told that my project is not important because no racism exists, al ggorithmic bias exists. But having people do the emotional labor, just be like matt, keep going, you have an interesting question. Nobodys doing it i mean, people could be doing it. I havent found them. If you know where they are, send them my way. But yeah, i think just having and sitting at the feet of a lot of kind and generous mentors and peers who keep me grounded. Keep reminding me that academia is not everything. That life is joyful outside, too. I also want to say because i forgot to mention that, you know, television is not by far the only platform, and there are so many other people doing the work of organizing other people in other cities nationally. You know, theres between women a network for black women in atlanta, theres signal 23 and like it just goes on and own. Issa rae has a counter platform, theres so many people doing the work. That also gives me hope. I also see alliship is possible, solidarity is possible. I have privilege, i have a little bit of something to give. I see them show up. Theyre lying yes, introduce me to someone. Ill shoot something for 100, you know, so solidarity is so key, and its happening. Thanks. Yeah, also attending amazing conferences where you get to network with scholars who are studying interesting things and hear things from the audience as well, so lets open it up to q a if anyone has any questions for our presenters. Thank you so much for all of your talks. I had a question about is this on . Okay. Thanks. Okay. Some of my work is about counter cultural communities. The thing that i have to balance is when were talking about resistant platforms, the way that we can learn so much from them but also expose, you know, the way that our work exposes those practices to a whiter audience, and sometimes this is overblown in terms of like some of us who are doing Academic Work and it just lives in a journal and so we can sort of have like ten people are going to read it, but other times we cant control the ways that our work sort of exposes people and brings attention and renews those surveillance or reopens surveillance to the people we study. I was just wondering if any of you could talk about the ways that you sort of balance those concerns . So specifically im thinking about my meeting with a yelp executive who was like hey, im interested in your research, tell me more, and we skenld skejd scheduled a meeting. Midway through the meeting he said something kind of questionable, and this was like a red herring for me. Like the blacks. Yeah, and then he was like i was presenting a map of digital divides. Why should we these poor communities get im putting him on blast on cspan. Midway through i realized why were you interested. Hes like i was going to sell this data, this project to real estate developers. So really thinking about gentrification and the veilance of this word. As i do these maps what areas am i showing, what data am i not. What data am i showing. How do i not make the homeless data project, how do i not make visible these areas that a lot more policing could happen. This is like the geographer training in me now, like how do i aggregate the data but also disaggregate the data at a level to which is compelling but doesnt make too visible these hyper surveilled, hyper criminalized or like the ways in which police, thats all ive got though. I think its a work in progress and its knowing how to give away and like kind of being more perspective to what is the ulterior motive. I think, you know, i nodded to this a little bit in terms of asking for permission, so like if the things and the people youre studying are concerned about being surveilled those are probably valid concerns that you should take into consideration in your work. I will say there were cases and have been cases in my work where i opted not to include data and not in a way that would change like my results, but as, you know, exemplars, we write these things up. We give examples and sometimes you can give examples, that can typify sometimes that example might put a teenager at risk or sometimes that example might put somebody at risk for police prosecution. This is something when i was really concerned about when people at the point of ferguson really started collecting all this data and collecting all the live videos and images, et cetera, from the protests, i knew what was going to happen, and it happened, which is that they decided to use that data and those images to prosecute young people who they who had, you know, thrown a molotov cocktail supposedly or who had, you know, resisted arrest supposedly or whatever, right . So those are things for people who are collecting data, for archivists, for researchers, for journalists to think about because you dont want to be complicit in the projects that, you know, youre trying to lift up the people who are working against. So i think that that is, you know, thats absolutely a thing, but i will say to my point on agency, one thing that i like to point out to people is that activists smart and ordinary people are smart, and there is this way in which sometimes, again, journalists and academics write about activists and write about like ordinary people, like they dont know whats happening, and i promise you like most people who like the average millennial who has a twitter account and has a snapchat account knows and understands surveillance a lot better than potentially many journalists who work at flagship organizations understand surveillance because their lives have been about having an alternative snapchat that, you know, their parents cant find or tweeting. This is very common when people are like oh, but the police are going to surveil activists when they tweet about actions. Activists are aware of that, right . Its literally a classic social media strategy to publicize or exaggerate the size of an action or whatever in order to get establishments to respond to demands or overreact so you look like the good guys. Thats like a strategy, right . And activists sometimes feed Incorrect Information into these spaces, right, and that also is a strategy to kind of avoid the folks who are surveilling them. Theres kind of all sorts of interesting, you know, questions happening in there. My work is very much about making my participants visible, and they come to me to be visible, and largely that allows me to assist them, and i sort of kind of like you were saying about being objective, i kind of unabashedly im in league with you. If a festival comes to me, we need intersectional content, right, ive been able to get my participants work program into festiva festivals. Hollywood executives have reached out know, and ive had several rounds of general meetings and theyll be like introduce me to a couple of people. I had do it because ive been able to get artists their first agent or a meeting with a really important show runner or whatever. It has in some limited cases made put me in an awkward position where sometimes i introduce them to someone and then like i introduced one artist to a broadcast Network Executive who set up a deal with a broadcast network but then like the deal was very fuzzy where it seemed like they were trying to buy her out of her own show. People are smart. She saw what it was and walked away. I kind of felt icky. I trusted this person and i trusted them with a really important person in my study. Its never like, we are definitely on the front lines of a lot of sort of systemic problems, right, and we have to be aware of that. I think these systemic problems are big enough that we kind of cant pretend to sit on the sidelines and be objective and say our work is not going to have any effect because its going to have an effect. I think we should try to do the change that we think needs to be done. You know, i think knowing you have a problem, right, is the first step, so matt and i were recently at a data and a data datafication and activism workshop and one of the things that the workshop participants did as a group is acknowledge that just by being in that space and doing the work we were doing and putting a Public Document up online that was the result of our two days worth of conversation that we were, in fact, making ourselves vulnerable, that pewe were puttg ourselves out there in a way that might indeed make us targets. And you know, it sort of required everyone there to maybe not explicitly but at least implicitly agree that we acknowledge this is a position in which we are put ourselves, and to be able to at least have that conversation. I mean, i i think what troubles me or concerns me is sort of the lack of awareness of the issue that youve raised, and so i really feel like its just important for us to even be having the conversation, giving people choices. Giving people options and you know, as dr. Christian has said to also, you know, keep an eye out as people who do have power in agency in particular situations and moments to take that power and agency to protect or to provide cover if thats whats appropriate. Hi, the question that i have specifically is for dr. Christian, but i do if anyone else wants to answer please specifically answer. In terms of the creative space, especially in the context of telling stories from a sort of Racial Justice or social justice perspective, many of the platforms have participated in sort of banning and shutting down voices of brown and black and indigenous folks but allowed others who had, lets say, questionable Conspiracy Theory frameworks who got, you know, millions of followers and made money off of that by the way, which is what you mentioned earlier today, but somehow that level of opportunity is not sort of afforded when you happen to be someone whos speaking up against racism, you know, or telling a narrative thats not sort of mainstream, what would you suggest to any creatives who are trying to do that . I mean, i know you mentioned issa rae and i remember when she first was complaining about the whole hbo thing in 2012. I was around. I watched that, and i watched her progression, but the truth is the challenge to come from a framework, especially with these platforms specifically where they they will, you know, allow their voices to be silenced because they are being sort of critical of the main street american frame, best way i can give it, and then how do they get past that to their own existence but also being able to get someplace like an hbo or Something Like that . Yeah, thats a really important question. Its difficult, and you know, in capitalism success is rare, right . Especially for folks who are historically marginalized. There have been creators i work with who do frequently on social media call out White Supremacy, call out police violence, and i know one creator specifically whos an activist and an artist and has had their facebook profile shut down like five times over the course of my study, you know, and theyre very popular, and theyre like an important person just in Movement Space in the city of chicago, and theyve taken it upon themselves to weather the storms and keep plugging along because they believe its important. And i think thats something that every artist has to reconcile with themselves. Do i want to get into fights on social media. Do i want to take the abuse. Is it important to me. Can i take it. And a lot of artists i know take a step back. Theyre not in it all the time. Theyll shut down their own accounts and take a couple of months for selfcare. I think its really important as an artist to decide where your boundaries are and recognize that its okay to unplug. Its okay to get off the hustle, right, not everyone can just hustle consistently. Im sure issa rae took breaks and we just didnt hear about it or see it, right. Theres another way in which you can support other people behind the scenes. You can take a step back from your own work, but i see creators if theyre not producing their own work, theyll produce work for other people. Issa rae was very smart about releasing other peoples shows when she wasnt able to work on her own shows. You dont always have to be a visible person to make a difference. You can make a difference behind the scenes as well. If i just can say one thing about the development of platforms themselves and shes not here, but dr. Sasha costanza has written about this extensively. Early on after the success, the visibility of the zapatista movement, this Indigenous Movement from mexico, there were developers who were inspired ask who came out of supporting and working on that movement in, you know, what we now call Silicon Valley who were developing technologies because they did think that they were going to be liberatory, and they were trying to do that, and of course what happened with the tech boom and, you know, et cetera, et cetera, really changed the shape and the politics of tech and of course also because so much money for the development of Digital Technologies came out of sort of military and surveillance projects, right, but there have always been people, some people who were trying to imagine these tools and these spaces differently, and so i mean, i personally, you know, cant say exactly what that means, but i think part of what that means is that the imagination exists and theres something that these platforms need to do, these organizations need to do that has to do a lot with their own structures, their own hierarchy, et cetera, and you know because of capitalism they may not ever do it but that couldnt early hope that a different type of design, even, right i mean, human beings are making decisions about how things trend, about what you can all the lesbian bars have closed and something happened on one of the platforms and her account got shut down. A party she had been running for six years went from oversubscribed sold out every month to no one knew what was happening. Why doesnt that platform have an office in chicago where she can go hey im an important person in chicago i should not be banned from this platform. Its remarkable were not holding platforms accountable. All right. I think were out of time. So lets give our panelists a round of applause. [ applause ] we continue our coverage of this race and Technology Conference with strerch of two professors