Nigerian-American artist and researcher whose work highlights the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection, Mimi Onuha joins the WBI show. We spend a lot of time in the beginning of this episode exploring Mimi’s undergraduate thesis Death on Facebook, how different cultural practices around death and birth are allowed in western society and mediated in the digital. We think together about how these rituals-fundamental to being human-are happening on commercial platforms we know we don’t own or govern yet connect on this *public* forum anyway because we year to be seen. Out the ashes of this loss, we dream about building alternative sociotechnical systems to further liberation, think about the racial tension between Black Americans and African immigrants in STEM academia, ending with a cypher round on hope and possibilities.

Multimedia artist and scholar whose work enacts Blackness as the imaginative capacity to desire and enact something else and otherwise, Treva Ellison joins the WBI show in conversation with Romi Morrison. Romi is an interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher working across new media, Black feminist praxis, and cultural geography.Together we think out loud about the epistemic assumptions embedded in sociotechnical systems that aim to calculate Black life, how Blackness is so much more than being a subject of violence.For further show notes and information please navigate to https://americanassembly.org

Dorothy Roberts, acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare joins the WBI show with co-founder of Movement for Family Power, Lisa Sangoi to discuss the history of the American child welfare system. Better understood as a family regulation system, the state began systematically targeting Black families for punishment and surveillance as a matter of *child welfare* policy in the 1960s coinciding with mainly Black mothers demanding inclusion into public assistance programs. Why do so few people know about the multibillion dollar surveillance apparatus able to knock on the door and remove your child on the basis of racist stereotypes with not even as much as miranda rights being read? How can we begin to dismantle a system that articulates its violence in the language of care and benevolence? For complete show notes, navigate to: https://americanassembly.org/wbi-podcast

Assistant Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work at MCLA, Mohamad Junaid and Lafayette College Assistant Professor, Hafsa Kanjwal join the WBI show to discuss the the acceleration of the settler colonial project in Kashmir and the continued fight for Azadi or self-determination. The Indian BJP government’s recent passage of the domicile law in Jammu and Kashmir is a move towards ethnically cleansing the occupied territory. Last November, Indian Consul General in New York, Sandeep Chakravorty advocated for this law in order to introduce “Israeli model” settlements into Kashmir.“I don’t keep calm, I’m continuously in outrage, I don’t have any spiritual solace, I don’t have any calm, everyday is like a new mourning.” Junaid shares- yet finds hope in Kashmiri writers, activists and artists a generation removed from state sanctioned illiteracy now documenting the desire and struggle for national liberation to the rest of the world.“Bollywood is India’s kind of wet dream...Initially kind of creating this desire for the beautiful landscape without any regard for the local ‘ignorant people they needed to modernize’”- Kanjwal provocatively comments, drawing out the sophisticated ways in which Hindu nationalist culture legitimizes the state sanctioned erasure and potentially the extermination of the Kashmiri people.For full show notes and cited works, please navigate to The American Assembly

Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois and author of Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age, Brian Jefferson joins the WBI show to discuss the history of digital computing and criminal justice, revealing how big tech, computer scientists, university researchers, and state actors have digitized carceral governance over the past forty years. How did the War on Terror provide the impetus and funding for the NYPD’s to set up a separate proprietary fiber optic cable network for their surveillance infrastructure in the backdrop of historically low crime rates? How are IT companies-that are the equivalent of industrial manufacturing companies in the late 18th century- actively driving urban policies and the physical infrastructure of 21st century smart cities?

Rashida Richardson, Director of Policy at the AI Now Institute joins the WBI show to discuss the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act she wrote while at NYCLU, the limitations of the law as a tool in addressing or mitigating the harm of automated decision making systems (ADSs) and the amount of time she has for institutions waking up from their 450 year slumber to the realities of racial capitalism. How can we distinguish the types of action big tech companies including Microsoft, Amazon and IBM are taking to respond to public demands for them to end contracts with law enforcement?  How can we distinguish the types of action big tech companies including Microsoft, Amazon and IBM are taking to respond to public demands to end contracts with law enforcement? She puts us on the spot asking, will the title of this podcast will get to most of America? Will we have a little more imagination on what makes an actually racially equitable and just society because the efforts of most of these institutions is still drawing on logic based on assimilation, “here let’s throw a few things at you and let’s go back to business as usual”?

Andrea Miller, soon to be a faculty member of Florida Atlantic University this fall, joins the WBI show to discuss her research interests including critical military and police studies, racialization, drone warfare and preemption, cybersecurity and algorithmic governance, ecosystem ecology, and the politics of extraction and infrastructure.  How do some digital technologies that are operationalized in the war on terror really emerge through circuits and histories of racialized policing? How can we understand drones as complex infrastructures and trace them back through the use of air power by military and local police departments? Is the police response to protests representative of a strategy and tactics or is the state being reactionary-responding in full force to threats to its consolidation of power?

Katherine McKittrick, Professor of Gender Studies at Queens University and author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and The Cartographies of Struggle, joins the WBI show to discuss her interdisciplinary research attending to the links between theories of liberation, Black studies, and cultural production. How do we nurture patience, sitting with ideas for a long time when the need to understand or react to what’s happening in the street feels so immediate and visceral? How do we sustain the struggle against white supremacy and deal with the unknowability of the moment? For complete show notes, visit americanassembly.org/wbi-podcast

Resident Artist at Culture Hub and host of Word Hack, the language +technology talk series at Babycastles, Todd Anderson joins the WBI show alongside virtual/augmented reality practitioner Bryan Yee to discuss the ways in which experimental digital storytelling can provide opportunities to intervene in the political moment where protesters are in the streets demanding justice for George Floyd. What if by using the Hitchhiker Chrome plug-in developed by Todd, participants vandalized the websites of government agencies that are killing us in the streets? Is hashtag activism a way to assuage White guilt without having to take any meaningful risk and how can we use these technologies to create public space for the resistance? For complete show notes, visit americanassembly.org/wbi-podcast.

Assistant Professor of Digital Media Theory at New School’s School of Media Studies and author of This is Not a Minority Report: Predictive policing and population racism, Joshua Scannell joins the WBI show. How do calls for police transparency miss the ways predictive policing claims to have ownership of the future through surveilling the present? How does speculative fiction embody and intervene in our anxieties of American racial capitalism? Drawing on his essay in Ruha Benjamin’s collection, Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, Josh invokes the words of Black studies scholars including Christina Sharpe in challenging us to see the world otherwise.