This Faculty-Graduate Seminar will feature Mariame Kaba, Social Justice Institute, Barnard Center for Research on Women.

This seminar explores the intersections of technology, surveillance, and inequality. While the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the rise of facial recognition databases have sparked calls for privacy protections and algorithmic transparency, mainstream protest generally ignores the racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities that fundamentally structure the normalization of surveillance. Blackness is a key site through which surveillance technologies are innovated, concentrated, and justified, but, as Simone Browne has noted, surveillance studies leave race in general and Blackness in particular under-theorized. Over the course of this yearlong seminar, we will situate newer algorithmic, biometric, and information technologies within the longer history of surveillance practices rooted in anti-Black domination, colonialism, and counterinsurgency. This series also explores the freedom practices of anti-surveillance and counter-surveillance, as well as technology’s role in the struggle for liberation. Invited presenters include scholars, activists, and activist-scholars working in the fields of African American studies, law, philosophy, information studies, history, sociology, and statistics.

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