HOW TO PARTICIPATE

Zoom Meeting ID: 930 5981 3180 (LINK)

Passcode: 704289

(Note: For this event, the number of Zoom participants outside of the University of Michigan is limited on a first-come, first-served basis. If you do not have a umich.edu Zoom login the event may be full.)

TITLE

Solidarities Across Platforms: Racial Politics and Information Practices

SPEAKER

Rachel Kuo, NYU

ABSTRACT

Information practices are integral to grassroots organizing, including how collectives collect data for contact lists; manage money and distribute resources; and design graphics. This presentation uses examples from racial justice movements that critique state-sanctioned violence in order to address how race and power is embedded in technologies and how creative information practices interact with structures of power. Different practices of information sharing, access, and production function as collective sites for people to negotiate racial politics across differences.

For example, during moments of heightened racial violence, Asian American organizers make use of different data narratives to shift racial alignments to be in political relation with Black liberation movements. Using archival materials, ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and examples from community-based research, this talk also draws our attention to the administrative and technical labor and care work in movement building to account for the ways that power operates relationally within movement spaces and the differential relationships that people have with technologies.

SPEAKER BIO

Rachel Kuo writes, teaches, and researches race, social movements, and digital technology. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Visiting Scholar at Duke University’s Asian American and Diasporic Studies program. She is a founding member of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and a current Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology. She is also a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective. Her writing on race, technology, and politics has been published in New Media and Society, Social Media + Society, Big Data & Society, ACM Interactions, Journal of Communication, as well as Teen Vogue and TruthOut. She has a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University.

This event is sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Information.