We Be Imagining

How does caste get articulated on the internet? Or where does caste creep in to our studies of media and technology? Can you dismantle Hindutva without dismantling caste? Black women organizers like Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie have emphasized police abolition in their work with survivors of sexual atrocities in the US, what are the overlaps and distinctions in how Dalit women activists are engaging with these political projects in the Indian context. This inaugural episode of season 4 for the We Be Imagining podcast interweaves commentary from Riya Singh, the founder of Dalit Women Fight, Murali Shanmugavelan, resarcher at Data and Society alongside some provocations from Thenmozhi Soundararajan of Equality Labs and the concluding plenary of the Dismantling Hindutva conference. Please write us at WeBeImagining@gmail.com with feedback on this episode or to share your perspective on caste and the digital :)**Please note, there are some descriptions of sexual violence and killings within the episode due to the realities of caste violence and brahminism. Riya Singh is a doctoral researcher in Women & Gender Studies at Centre for Women's Development Studies, Delhi - Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University, Delhi. She is a part of Core Leadership Group in India's single and largest Dalit women-led collective, Dalit Women Fight. She works on ground with the survivors of caste based atrocities of Dalit community in six states of Northern India.Murali Shanmugavelan isa Faculty Fellow, Race and Technology at Data and Society. He researches caste in media and communication studies and digital cultures. Murali is currently working on the re-manifestation of caste and social hierarchies in digital cultures such as hate speech and platform economies. At Data & Society, Murali's work will scrutinise communication and technology studies from (anti)caste perspectives. His work will analyse everyday casteism on the Internet and develop actionable policy recommendations and build pedagogic content about caste in communications and technology studies.Lightly Edited Transcript Available here and you can find out more about We Be Imagining on our website or @WeBeImagining on Twitter and IG. IG + Twitter: @WeBeImaginingSupport Us: On PatreonHost: J. Khadijah Abdurahman Music: Drew LewisLinks for Episode:Dalit Women FightEQUALITY LABSCaste-hate speech Report by Murali ShanmugavelanDismantling Global HindutvaDGH: Multidisciplinary Perspectives Closing StatementHow to write anti-caste solidarity textsCast(e)ing Indian Media: Unsettling Secular MythologiesPractice of Caste in USA - Series#1- Q&A with Dr. Balmurli Natrajan & Dr. Murali ShanmugavelanAdvocacy Group Fights India Caste System Discrimination in Silicon ValleyTrapped in Silicon Valley's Hidden Caste System | WIREDOpinion | California's lawsuit against Cisco shines a light on caste discrimination in the US and around the world - The Washington PostScheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImaginingSupport Us: On PatreonHost: J. Khadijah Abdurahman and Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisWho is responsible for safeguarding the biometric data of refugees collected in a humanitarian and mass atrocities context? The canonical justification for collecting biometric data in a humanitarian context is to mitigate the risk of fraud by recipients. However, this claim has been thoroughly debunked including because it assumes fraud is most prevalent among recipients rather than the organizations that operate as intermediaries between donors and aid recipients. What is driving this competition between the UNHCR and the World Food Program (WFP) to create and own the largest multinational biometric database? Zara Rahman joins the WBI show to discuss these questions with a focus on how the Rohingya have resisted digital identification schemes that violate their collective autonomy.Zara Rahman is a researcher, writer and linguist based in Berlin, Germany, and working internationally. She's currently the Deputy Director at The Engine Room, an international non-profit organisation strengthening the fight for social justice by supporting civil society to use technology and data in strategic, effective and responsible ways. **This episode was recorded April 1, 2021, prior to this report being released, but please note Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented that the UN shared Rohingya Data Without Informed ConsentLinks for the Episode:Myanmar coup: What is happening and why?Black Lives Matter protesters aren't being tracked with Covid-19 surveillance tech. Not yetRohingya refugees protest, strike against smart ID cards issued in Bangladesh campsBangladesh cuts access to mobile phone services for the RohingyaWhen technology improves the lives of refugeesBiometrics in the Humanitarian SectorAutomating Inequality | Virginia Eubanks | MacmillanDenied visibility in official data, millions of transgender Indians can't access benefits4 Cultural, Social, and Legal Considerations | Biometric Recognition: Challenges and OpportunitiesLiveCast Episode 13 Infant Identity Management – ID4AfricaHow Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual, BoukRohingya Refugees Protest, Strike Against Smart ID Cards Issued in Bangladesh CampsBurma: Amend Biased Citizenship LawAP Exclusive 'Leave no Tigrayan': In Ethiopia, an ethnicity is erased By CARA ANNAa fewA fiduciary approach to child data governanceDHS/USCIS/PIA-081 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Information Data ShareTested on millions Non-volunteers (Jordan EyeHood Technology)Use of Biometric Data to Identify Terrorists: Best Practice or Risky Business?Palantir and WFP partner to help transform global humanitarian delivery | World Food ProgrammePalantir's partnership with the UN World Food Programme has humanitarians worried.ID 2020 AgendaIrresponsible Data Risks Registering RohingyaThe Biometric Assemblage: Surveillance, Experimentation, Profit, and the Measuring of Refugee Bodies - Mirca Madianou, 2019Digital payments to refugees A pathway towards financial inclusionBangladesh Will Demand Biometric Data From All SIM Card UsersSharifa SultanaZara Recommends Native American DNA — University of Minnesota PressShe Would Be King

Prior to COVID-19, a significant percentage of academic revenue –particularly in terms of New York University (NYU) and Columbia University– came from real estate. COVID-19 has jeopardized the security of those assets and underlined the importance of teaching staff in order to establish value for classes that are online for the same full tuition as in person learning. So why is Columbia University refusing to agree to the demands of the Graduate Student Workers Union? Why are graduate students who typically make below the Federal Poverty Line having their pay withheld by Columbia in lieu of redistributing money from the university’s endowment?Yasemin Akçagüner (representing the Columbia Graduate Student Workers Strike) and Dylan Iannitelli (representing the Graduate Student Union at NYU) join We Be Imagining to share an inside view of being a scholar during the austerity politics of COVID-19, the scope of their demands which include the right to neutral arbitration for workers experiencing sexual harassment and the stakes of their labor organizing given graduate students are the life blood of a university.Yasemin Akcaguner Graduate Student Worker, 3rd year PhD and TA in History Department a member of Graduate Workers of Columbia University: GWC-UAW Local 2110 , UAW Local 2110 and Academic Workers For a Demcratic Union (AWDU)Dylan Iannitelli 6th year PhD student in Biology studying neurodegeneration, a member of the Grad Student Union at NYU and a member of the Academic Workers For a Demcratic Union (AWDU).**PLEASE CONTRIBUTE TO THE COLUMBIA ACADEMIC STUDENT WORKERS HARDSHIP FUND Solidarity with Columbia Academic Student WorkersIG + Twitter: @WeBeImaginingSupport Us: On PatreonHost: J. Khadijah AbdurahmanMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:The graduate workers union strike: explainedColumbia reports $310 million increase in endowment during pandemic while smaller schools flounderNYU strike authorization vote begins as graduate workers continue strike at Columbia UniversityIvy League Presidents Take Pay Cuts Up to 25% in CrisisColumbia TAs who say they can't pay their rent due to COVID-19 launch work stoppageColumbia University graduate students demand rent freezeColumbia People's COVID ResponseColumbia still refuses to give the GWC-UAW neutral, third-party arbitration. Is this indicative of a deeper institutional issue?FY 2020 Financial Statements for The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New YorkGSOC Petitions for NYU to Stop Stonewalling Contract NegotiationsColumbia Grad Students On Strike Over Wages And Harassment Policies, NYU Counterparts Voting On Similar ActionsColumbia canceled housing contracts, so 14,000 students moved into the city. What does this mean for the local housing market?

How do we think about “Nah” vs the “I would rather not to” of Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville- in other words, how does Blackness re-situate refusal? Samaria Rice and Lisa Simpson, mothers of Tamir Rice and Richard Risher who were murdered by the police, released forceful statements calling out the opportunist infiltration of BLM LA and Shaun King into the movement. This inadvertently catalyzed a conversation on Twitter around “Abolish Black Men” This episode unpacks what that phrase means, What is gender abolition? How does class mediate this discussion around gender and is leaving the hood a precondition for Black studies? Marquis Bey joins the WBI show to vibe on Lil Wayne’s A Milli, Katrina, digital infrastructure for mutual aid, and the utility in being unrecognizable to the state. Marquis Bey is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, and core faculty member of critical theory, at Northwestern University. Their work concerns black feminist theorizing, transgender studies, abolition, and critical theory. The author of several books, including Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism, most recently they are in the midst of revising a monograph entitled Black Trans Feminism to be published in 2022 with Duke University Press. Bey is committed to thinking rigorously and radically about subjectivity, blackness, nonnormative gender, and thoroughgoing abolition.**You can send personal donations to the CashApps of $SamariaRice and $LisaLee693 and/or make contributions to the Tamir Rice FoundationIG + Twitter: @WeBeImaginingSupport Us: On PatreonHost: J. Khadijah AbdurahmanMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black AnarchismTina Campt: Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity - ClassroomMelville, Herman. 1853Spike Lee turns cameras on New OrleansSpike Lee Paid $200,000 By NYPD For Consulting On Ad CampaignFred Moten Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next) – Dean SpadeDistributed Blackness: African American CyberculturesSamaria Rice Calls Out Prominent Black Activists In Scathing StatementSamaria Rice Has Demands for Shaun King, BLM Activists2Pac Speaks On Malcolm X Grassroots Movement 1992Otherwise Movements – The New InquiryNikki Giovanni Speaks on her "Thug Life" TattooDenise Ferreira da Silva – Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism, Refusal, and the Limits of CritiqueMama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book Author(s): Hortense J. SpillersAlondra NelsonThe Race for Theory by Barbara ChristianRecommendations:Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of BeingMAGIC: THE GATHERING

How do layers of content moderation infrastructure shape sociality and anti-sociality? What are the incentives motivating algorithms used by Facebook, Google and Amazon? How do algorithms shape our sense of time, how we register social information and what content is produced by users? What are the implications for digital consent? Unsettling the myth of “organic content” we discuss Spam and who gets to decide which media is categorized as deviant.Elinor Carmi joins the WBI show to discuss the history of Bell Telephone regulating sound as a form of urban planning in New York City-where Black Americans were deemed noisy (and certain decibels were criminalized), the way digital infrastructure mediates discourse around Israel/Palestine, and the connections between digital literacy and grassroots digital activism. Elinor Carmi is a Postdoc Research Associate in digital culture and society, at the Communication and Media Department, Liverpool University, UK. She’s the author of: Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise and Other Deviant MediaIG + Twitter: @WeBeImaginingSupport Us: On PatreonHost: J. Khadijah AbdurahmanMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:The Organic Myth — Real LifeMe and my big data: developing citizens' data literacyBeing Alone Together: Developing Fake News Immunity Being Alone Together: Developing Fake News Immunity- Faculty of Humanities & SocialTHE playlist – Media DistortionsDear Science and Other Stories - playlist by demonicground | SpotifySocial media's erasure of Palestinians is a grim warning for our futureBlack Siren Radio — The American AssemblyHe got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can't fix its misinformation addictionArchitectures of Sound : Acoustic Concepts and Parameters for Architectural Design / Michael Fowler.Over*Flow: Digital Humanity: Social Media Content Moderation and the Global Tech Workforce in the COVID-19 EraSarah T. Roberts / University of California, Los Angeles – FlowNetanyahu presides over a social media empire. Here's how he runs it'Go home,' chant anti-Netanyahu protesters ahead of Israel's snap pollsOperation Restart (May 14 Social Media Walk Out)

What’s concealed by the American narrative around Wuhan’s response to COVID-19? Can we attribute the speed at which the virus was contained to the repressive top down measures of an authoritarian government or were there decentralized human infrastructures built up to provide mutual aid and fact check news reports at the height of the pandemic. Digital ethnographer, Tricia Wang (pronounced Wong which we discuss) joins the WBI show to discuss the role of hyperlocal networks on WeChat, how SARS-COV-1 racialized mask wearing and the importance of regulatory frameworks for indoor ventilation to mitigate the occupational dynamics of transmission. Tricia raises that the issue with the privatized infrastructure hyperlocal networks rely on, is not fundamentally about violations of data privacy but violations of personhood. PLEASE GIVE TO STRIKING COLUMBIA GRADUATE STUDENT UNION IF YOU CAN: Solidarity With Columbia Academic Student Workers (GoFundME)IG + Twitter: @WeBeImaginingSupport Us: On PatreonWrite Us: WeBeImagining@gmail.comHost: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:what disturbs me is how quickly the world can forget centuries of anti-Asian violence, each time the cycle of forgetting is the only certain thingCoronavirus: We Can Lean Something From The People Of WuhanUnmasking the racial politics of the coronavirus pandemicTricia Wang thinks hyperlocal collaboration thrives after Covid — QuartzChinese Americans fear loss of WeChat conduit to friends, familyChina's new vaccine passport could expand the state's already vast surveillance programCOVID Straight Talk /Hablando Claro del COVIDUnderstanding the real impact of the novel H1N1 influenza pandemic: Why your colleagues need to knowI'm A Survivor: The Rhythm of Public Health Systems East Harlem Neighborhood Health Action CenterNew EPA Rules Will Increase Air Pollution As The World Suffers A Respiratory PandemicOur Data BodiesLogic SchoolYou are not your data but your data is still youListen to 'The Daily': Wrongfully Accused by an AlgorithmOn Owed (with Joshua Bennett)Joshua Bennett on the Use of Animals in the Work of Black WritersMachine Bias — ProPublicaApple and Facebook's Fight Isn’t Actually About Privacy or Tracking. This Is the Real Reason Facebook Is So WorriedHe got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can't fix its misinformation addiction1 - A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari ...https://www.youtube.com › watchGilles Deleuze - Philosopher of DifferenceRecommendations:barbara smith | Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement BuildingSmith Caring Circle is creating The People's Pension

How can the Left respond to the declining hegemony of finance and the rising hegemony of Big Data? We have more socialization of economic life and collaboration at a scale that was never possible in the past so in this sense you have more socialization. The problem is this socialization is governed by private entities that orient this socialization process not only in service of their quest for profit but to reinforce their own power. What are the limitations of the anti-trust in confronting Big Tech’s monopolization of quasi-public infrastructure? For example Amazon replicates the United States Postal Services (USPS) in some sense, so how do we see part of the reconciliation of political contradictions produced by financialized tech companies as needing to plan and re-organize the economy towards the public good rather than towards the desires of capital? We discuss the possibilities and constraints of implementing a Green New Deal, the role of fictitious capital in proffering a solution to social contradictions in the immediate but producing financial crises that require increasingly greater amounts of state intervention in the mid-long term. Cédric Durand teaches Economics and Development Theories at the University of Paris 13 and the EHESS. Working within the tradition of Marxist and French Regulationist political economy, he is the author of several articles on the euro–crisis, the financialization-globalization nexus and the post-Soviet transformation. He is a member of the editorial board of the radical online journal ContreTemps. IG + Twitter: @WeBeImaginingSupport Us: On PatreonHost: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:TECHNOFÉODALISME Critique de l'économie numérique Cédric DURANDFictitious Capital How Finance Is Appropriating Our FutureThe Financial Instability Hypothesis. Working Paper No. 74. Levy Economics Institute Capital, Vol.3, Chapter 25 (Credit and Fictitious Capital)Jackie Wang's Carceral CapitalismFinancialization Is Marketization! A Study of the Respective Impacts of Various Dimensions of Financialization on the Increase in Global InequalityDebt Relief Is Not Enough — Cancel the Debt of the Global SouthThe Global South Must Be Freed of Its Debt ServitudeDEBT THE FIRST 5,000 YEARS - DAVID GRAEBERWhat Is the Green New Deal? A Climate Proposal, Explained (Published 2019)https://academic.oup.com/cpe/article-abstract/30/1/31/329999?redirectedFrom=fulltextBlackRock, the World’s Biggest Money Manager, Expands Again (Published 2017)Shadow banking is now a $52 trillion industry, posing a big risk to the financial systemColor of Change Calls on Larry Fink to Stop Supporting NYC Police FoundationFinance-Led Capitalism - Shadow Banking, Re-Regulation, and the Future of Global Markets | Robert GuttmannMARGUERITE CASEY FOUNDATION 990 (2018)What the Luddites Really Fought Against | HistoryWe read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says.Big Tech’s Next Big Problem Could Come From People Like ‘Mr. Sweepy’Europe's Android 'choice' screen keeps burying better optionsGoogle COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports

The Algorithmic Ecology is an abolitionist framework and organizing tool that can be critically applied to any algorithm. Developed by Stop LAPD Spying and Free Radicals, it unsettles central assumptions about how predictive policing actually functions and makes visible key areas of intervention for those fighting for a world without police. Academics tend to present algorithmic harm in the narrow language of privacy – failing to address the ways policing shows up in people’s lives. Grassroots organizations often see predictive policing as a false reform or a useful entrypoint to discuss what we already know about policing or incarceration in general. But do predictive analytics produce new modes of surveillance and social control? How can not just go beyond “dirty data” but make the infrastructures algorithms build up visual and concrete?An investigation of PredPol heat maps of Skid Row (a community on the east side of downtown Los Angeles and home to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition) pursued these questions, resulting in surprising insights: “Given the prevailing notion that algorithmic policing would create ‘feedback loops,”’ our expectation was to find Skid Row — the area around the star marked on the map — to be laden with PredPol hotspots. But the hotspots were instead clustered at the periphery of the community. Rather than visualizing the hyper-policing that we know occurs in Skid Row, the PredPol hot spot maps appear to be drawing a digital border to contain, control, and criminalize Skid Row.”Guests: Sophie is a co-founder, organizer, and zine gremlin at Free Radicals, an activist collective dedicated to creating a more socially just, equitable, and accountable science.Shakeer Rahman is a community organizer and lawyer working with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.IG + Twitter: @WeBeImaginingSupport Us: On PatreonHost: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Music: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:LAPD ends another data-driven crime program touted to target violent offenders'Secret' body cam video finally shows what happened in 2015 LAPD shootingLos Angeles Community Action Network: LACANBefore the Bullet Hits the Body – Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los AngelesDid Garcetti achieve his $250 million LA pledge?Monitoring and Analysis Profiles: 2015-2019 New York State (MAPS Race Rubric)Desperate to slow spike in killings, LAPD redeploys controversial units in South L.A.A pioneer in predictive policing is starting a troubling new projectThe Complicity of Academia in Policing of Families Opinion Victoria CopelandNo Tech for ICEUS police employ mass surveillance systemsThe Microsoft Police State: Mass Surveillance, Facial Recognition, and the Azure CloudTech Companies’ Complicity in State Violence Runs DeepPolicing Is an Information BusinessMisdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows PolicingChronic Offender Purpose and Check List (StopLAPD Report)Defund Surveillance Campaign

Suddenly everyone is an expert on platform governance but how do we situate the current widespread public concern around how privatized commons are ruled? Where is the moral brightline for the researchers and critics of big tech when the financial incentives to join the very same companies are high? How do we understand platform governance in a longer history where big tech corporations refused access to researchers and many felt the harm was something that would happen much further down the road? Should we resurrect the analogy to media (TV, Radio, Print) to better understand what regulatory approaches are useful? We discuss these questions and more with Robyn Caplan.Robyn Caplan is a Researcher at Data & Society, and a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University (ABD, advisor Philip M. Napoli) in the School of Communication and Information Studies. She conducts research on issues related to platform governance and content standards. Her most recent work investigates the extent to which organizational dynamics at major platform companies impacts the development and enforcement of policy geared towards limiting disinformation and hate speech, and the impact of regulation, industry coordination, and advocacy can play in changing platform policies.IG + Twitter: @WeBeImaginingSupport Us: On PatreonHost: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:Who Controls the Public Sphere in an Era of AlgorithmsWhen Media Companies Insist They're Not Media Companies and Why It Matters for Communications Policy by Philip M. Napoli, Robyn CaplanContent or Context Moderation?: Artisanal, Community Reliant and Industrial ApproachesListening to Black Women: The Innovation Tech Can't Crack

Tech companies are divesting from California claiming bad governance and high taxes are the cause. The gentrifiers leaving seems like a victory in the immediate but echo a history of colonization– invaders extracting what they want and leaving when everything is ruined–in the long term. How do people in the hood feel about big tech corporations and what does tech got to do with abolition? How do we frame our organizing around gentrification in the wake of these seismic economic shifts and environmental disaster? Abolitionist and scholar Alejandro Villalpando comes through to discuss these questions from the perspective of living in the same community he grew up in. Alejandro Villalpando received his Ph.D. from the Department of Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Riverside. He is a born-and-raised South Central Los Angeles and son of a Guatemalan immigrant mother and Mexican immigrant father. Dr. Villalpando is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pan African Studies and the Latin American Studies Program at Cal State LA. His work can be understood generally as lying within the intersection of Black, Ethnic, and Central American Studies.IG + Twitter: @WeBeImaginingSupport Us: On PatreonHost: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:Chicanx/Latinx CaucusThe Rams’ Stan Kroenke Represents the Worst of the NFLBusinesses Are Fleeing California. Blame Bad Government.The Abolition Open School: How We Spread the Message (an ASA 2020 Freedom Course)Living next door to Elon Musk's SpaceX is hellish. Musk's fans disagreeNumber of Latinos dying daily from Covid soars 1,000% in Los AngelesThe University of California has fully divested from fossil fuels. It's the largest school in the US to do it.If CalPERS Divested from Coal, Why Does It Still Have $6.5B Invested?On Dray: a remix + zineHuawei's surveillance tech in Africa worries activists — Quartz AfricaFacebook’s Role in the Genocide in Myanmar: New Reporting Complicates the NarrativeThe Gig Economy Is White People Discovering ServantsMargari Hill Muslim Anti-Racist Coalition (MARC)"East of La Brea" Is Changing How Writers Rooms are FormedCentral American Studies Twitter HandleCSU Cops Off Campus IG“Why Did You Kill that Boy?” Los Angeles Sheriff’s Officers Fatally Shoot Salvadoran-American TeenStop LAPD Spying CoalitionRecommendationsJoy Oladokun

When discussing machine learning models “Black Box” is typically deployed as a helpful metaphor but from a hardware perspective the term is meant literally. How can we open the inside processors of a phone to verify that what’s inside is actually what we thought was inside? How does the minimalist aesthetic of consumer electronics create the illusion of technology as magic? Andrew "bunnie" Huang is a hacker, maker, and open hardware activist joining us on the WBI show to discuss these questions as well as share updates on Precursor. Alongside Edward Snowden, he worked on the Introspection Engine, a device allowing journalists to identify if and when their phones are transmitting or receiving information when it shouldn't be. Precursor is the development platform working to push out a new iteration of this device.Bunnie holds a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from MIT and is the author of Hacking the Xbox. IG + Twitter: @WeBeImaginingSupport Us: On PatreonHost: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:Talking with Andrew "bunnie" Huang (AdaFruit)How ‘Hoverboards’ Epitomize Our Broken Patent SystemHalf A Million 'Hoverboards' Recalled Over Risk Of Fire, ExplosionsMoore's lawThe inverted Pendulum: A fundamental Benchmark in Control Theory and Robotics`GUNG HO` SOFTLY SATIRIZES AMERICAN FEATHERBEDDINGTechnology is Not Magic - bunnie Huang, Bitmark Ambassador #2An Alternative to the American way of Innovation TEDxPickeringStreetSynchronized violin players reveal uniqueness of human networksEdward Snowden designed an iPhone attachment that detects unwanted radio transmissions(@RealSexyCyborg) Thread on IMEs/Signal/Untrustability 'We found a wiretap' Lyubov Sobol's campaign team head released from custody with bugged cell phone nytlabs : Listening Table AKA MEDIA SYSTEMTrackMeNotAdNauseam - Clicking Ads So You Don't Have ToIntroducing Precursor « bunnie's blogPrecursor.dev

When Nekayba McNeal arrived at the hospital to give birth to her second child, she had no idea that she would never bring her baby home. She never anticipated that she would be incarcerated at Rikers Island until her preschool son was separated from her as well. The clinical team at Cohen Medical Center stated the newborn baby required a blood transfusion due to anemia. When she requested to consult with her partner (and the baby’s father) Eddie Bellas, before giving consent for the transfusion, the hospital made an allegation of child abuse and neglect to the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS).Joyce McMillan, family regulation system abolitionist and impacted parent, joins the conversation as well, explaining how regularly Black and Brown families find themselves under investigation and separation when attending routine medical appointments. For white and middle class parents, questions posed to physician’s about their child’s care is typically interpreted as evidence that the family is informed and invested in their child’s medical care. For Black, Latinx and recipients of Medicaid, these same questions are interpreted as hostility, aggression and grounds to remove the children from their care. This episode does surface traumatic violence at the hands of multiple systems but it also ends with a surprise musical performance by the couple. Their message is one of hope, resistance and refusing to back down from the fight to have their children returned to them on their terms.IG + Twitter: @WeBeImaginingSupport Us: On Patreon**Note to our listeners, this is one of a series of episodes we have produced on the family regulation system featuring impacted parents and academics. We’re making additional efforts this season to provide a platform as well for former foster youth, adoptees or people who have been in the position of the child when encountering any aspect of the system including international adoption. Please contact us at WeBeImagining@gmail.com if you’re interested in coming on the show to share your perspective. We acknowledge that violence does occur within the family. Our position is abolition must provide restorative justice models and infrastructures of care as we dismantle this system of poverty management and policing. This is not just a theoretical argument and resources for restorative justice approaches are linked in the show notes.Guests: Nekayba McNeal, Eddie Bellas and Joyce McMillan Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:Abolishing Policing Also Means Abolishing Family RegulationDo We Need to Abolish Child Protective Services?In New York, Calls Grow to Address Racism in Child WelfareRacial Differences in the Evaluation of Pediatric Fractures for Physical AbuseRacial and Ethnic Disparities and Bias in the Evaluation and Reporting of Abusive Head TraumaResourcesA Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence (Creative Interventions)Child Sexual Abuse: A Transformative Justice Handbook (Generation Five)Reimagine Support (Movement for Family Power)

How can we bring the air of being a local and hospitality to technical design? What does it look like to design a wearable that’s not about surveilling or calculating your life? How would you manifest code in calm computing for a tactical-unplanned assemblage following a mycological (fungal) metaphor? Noah Feehan, joins the WBI show to discuss the NYT Labs Listening Table, agathonic design, the most salt shaker salt shakers and more.Noah Feehan, is an artist/maker/tinkerer whose creative work is designed to function in other experimental or speculative capacities, augmenting spaces with useful behaviors or holding a weird-mirror to your online personae. Professionaly, his role has taken many shapes and titles over the years, from heading up product strategy at Temboo, leading the critical and hardware research efforts at the New York Times R&D Lab, or building a Fab Lab at a NASA facility.You can now support the WBI Podcast by becoming a Patreon member!Please share your feedback and questions! You can reach us at WeBeImagining@gmail.com or via Twitter and Instagram at @WeBeImaginingHost: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:The Coming of Age of Calm TechnologySuper NormalPhd: Exaptation – Jb Labrune (Agathonic Design)The Repair AssociationSia's movie sidelines the disabled communityCommunication page I used to handle that invasive woman I met.Ekverstania Twitter Thread of blogs/art/scholarship/advocacy by #NonSpeaking #Autistic peopleWhat's the deal with the "Shake to send feedback" on Google Maps for Android?Kanye Got Kim K a Hologram of Her Late DadHow Holograms Work | HowStuffWorksNudgeablesSublime.cloudA Burglar's Guide to the CityDIY IMac Fish Tank : 10 Steps (with Pictures)Mycodo Environmental Monitoring and Regulation SystemCycling your JarrariumRecommendations:Review: George Saunders' 'Sea Oak' makes a dead-funny TV comedyThe Cooking Gene | A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

How do we practice the case for reparations? How do we do this land justice movement without being co-opted by the NPIC when people still gotta eat? When you bring Black young adults in to working on the land, how do you resolve conflict when you don’t call the cops? Abiodun Henderson, founder of Gangstas to Growers chops it up on the WBI show on how G2G is grappling with these themes in real time.Gangstas to Growers (G2G) is a social enterprise focused on building worker-owned cooperatives that provide opportunities for employment, empowerment, and entrepreneurship in agriculture for criminal injustice involved youth. You can now support the WBI Podcast by becoming a Patreon member!Please share your feedback and questions! You can reach us at WeBeImagining@gmail.com or via Twitter and Instagram at @WeBeImaginingHost: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:Tupac at Malcolm X Grassroots MovementOccupy The Hood (@occupythehood.mtl)Protesters set to 'Occupy Congress'Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture | AtlantaWestview Community OrganizationHABESHA – Helping Africa by Establishing Schools at Home and AbroadCenter for Civic InnovationBlack Sustainability NetworkRon Finley - Gangsta Gardener for the Urban CommunitySoutherners on New Ground: HomeFort Negrita for earth-inspired folksNational Black Justice Coalition |Green Is The New BlackMetro Atlanta Mutual Aid FundSAAFON: HomeHigh Hog Farm: HomeRecommendations:No Disrespect by Sista Souljah

Megan Wolff, Chair of Mental Health Policy at DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College joins the WBI show alongside Dan Bouk, Associate Professor of History at Colgate University and author of How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual. Dan researches the history of bureaucracies, quantification, and other modern things shrouded in cloaks of boringness. His work investigates the ways that corporations, states, and the experts they employ have used, abused, made, and re-made the categories that structure our daily experiences of being human. You can now support the WBI Podcast by becoming a Patreon member!Please share your feedback and questions! You can reach us at WeBeImagining@gmail.com or via Twitter and Instagram at @WeBeImaginingHost: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:The Myth Of The Actuary: Life Insurance And Frederick L. Hoffman's Race Traits And Tendencies Of The American NegroA Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1Fact Sheet: The Impact of Pandemic Disease on Mental HealthLife Insurance And COVID-19: All You Need To KnowMedicalizing Blackness | Rana A. Hogarth | University of North Carolina PressThe Health and Physique of the Negro AmericanNumbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media By Jacqueline WernimontThe Emotional Epidemiology of H1N1 Influenza Vaccination The Condemnation of Blackness — Khalil Gibran MuhammadRecommendations:Megan: “The Birchbark House” Series by Louise ErdrichDan The Beautiful Bureaucrat — Helen Phillips, The Need — Helen Phillips,Census Stories, USA | Reading the stories in the data.

How do you get freshman undergraduates to take on complex immunological research? How did colonization enable the spread of HIV in Central Africa and Haiti? Does the militarist language of immunology- ie “fighting the war against viruses” undermine the complexity of the human immune system which is more comparable to tending a garden?Brianne Barker, Associate Professor of Biology at Drew University with expertise in vaccine development, HIV biology and understanding immune responses to viral infection joins the WBI show. She shares that the privilege of working at a non-R1 institution solely with undergraduate students is an opportunity to pursue your research interests relatively autonomously and without the same external pressure to publish. Brianne is also the co-host of the Immune podcast, part of the TWIV (This Week In Virology) podcast suite that inspired our show. We cover a lot of ground in this show, from pattern recognition receptors to science pedagogy and a discussion of the Barker Lab’s recently published paper, Polyglutamine binding protein 1 (PQBP1) inhibits innate immune responses to cytosolic DNAPlease share your feedback and questions! You can reach us at WeBeImagining@gmail.com or via Twitter and Instagram at @WeBeImaginingHost: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:Colonialism in Africa helped launch the HIV epidemic a century agoThe Impact of Globalization on Infectious Disease Emergence and ControlThe 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine - Press releaseInterferon discovery and ferret fluHVTN StudiesBlack in ImmunoImmune 37: Black in Immuno | ImmuneRecommendations:Pandemic by Sonia ShahBraiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall KimmererSpillover by David Quammen

Assistant Professor of Communications at Hamline University, Endalkachew Chala joins the WBI Show to share his research on digital surveillance, content moderation and mis/disinformation in Ethiopia. Transcript Linked Here**This interview was conducted in August 2020 as part of an deeper investigative look into the history and political climate of Ethiopia as it intersects with data and tech policy. In particular, We Be Imagining is concerned about the role of mis/disinformation on social media platforms like Facebook which fail to provide adequate content and context moderation. However, the slow scholarship this requires was outweighed by the urgency of the current political moment so we are sharing some of the stories recorded then. Please note, inclusion in this series in now way indicates agreement among each interviewee or is fully comprehensive of the political history, we simply aim to provide more nuanced and thoughtful insight given the dearth of coverage. Links and notes are subject to change.Host: J. Khadijah AbdurahmanMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:How the murder of musician Hachalu Hundessa incited violence in Ethiopia: Part IIIn Ethiopia's disinformation epidemic, the crumbling ruling coalition is the elephant in the roomHow Ethiopia's ruling coalition created a playbook for disinformation

Senior Lecturer at Keele University and political analyst, Awol Allo shares his journey from ardent advocate of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to most vocal critic. Through assassinated Oromo musician, Haacaaluu Hundeessaa’s hit song Malan Jira (What Existence is Mine?), Allo thinks out loud about the Oromo Protests, the motivations of those who allege Qeeroo are committing ethnic cleansing and the cloud of mis/disinformation that hovers over the political discourse. Transcript Linked Here**This interview was conducted in August 2020 as part of an deeper investigative look into the history and political climate of Ethiopia as it intersects with data and tech policy. In particular, We Be Imagining is concerned about the role of mis/disinformation on social media platforms like Facebook which fail to provide adequate content and context moderation. However, the slow scholarship this requires was outweighed by the urgency of the current political moment so we are sharing some of the stories recorded then. Please note, inclusion in this series in now way indicates agreement among each interviewee or is fully comprehensive of the political history, we simply aim to provide more nuanced and thoughtful insight given the dearth of coverage. Links and notes are subject to change.Host: J. Khadijah AbdurahmanMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:Haacaaluu Hundeessaa: A towering musician and an Oromo iconWhy I nominated Abiy Ahmed for the Nobel Peace PrizeWhat is Medemer?Ethiopia PM Fires Defence Minister, a One-Time Ally, in Major ReshuffleEthiopia's Abiy wins Nobel Peace Prize for resolving conflict with EritreaWhy Abiy Ahmed's Prosperity Party could be bad news for Ethiopia

Getu Teressa, Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine and political analyst joins the WBI show to share his insight into Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s “Medemer”, his insights into the existential and material crisis of the Oromo people and the weight of Oromo musician and activist, Haacaaluu Hundeessaa’s assasination.Transcript Linked Here**This interview was conducted in August 2020 as part of an deeper investigative look into the history and political climate of Ethiopia as it intersects with data and tech policy. In particular, We Be Imagining is concerned about the role of mis/disinformation on social media platforms ie. Facebook which fail to provide adequate content and context moderation. However, the slow scholarship this requires was outweighed by the urgency of the current political moment so we are sharing some of the stories recorded then. Please note, inclusion in this series in no way indicates agreement among each interviewee or is fully comprehensive of the political history, we simply aim to provide more nuanced and thoughtful insight given the dearth of coverage. Links and notes are subject to change.Host: J. Khadijah AbdurahmanMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:The media's crisis on EthiopiaAbiy Ahmed—a Philosopher King or a Sophist? By Getu TeressaHaacaaluu Hundeessaa: A towering musician and an Oromo iconWhat is Medemer?Ethiopia PM Fires Defence Minister, a One-Time Ally, in Major ReshuffleEthiopia's Abiy wins Nobel Peace Prize for resolving conflict with EritreaWhy Abiy Ahmed's Prosperity Party could be bad news for Ethiopia

Phd student of oral archival traditions, silences in written records/archives, and anti-colonial struggles, Ayantu Ayanna joins the WBI show to discuss the assassination of Oromo musician Haacaaluu Hundeessaa in June and what it means to contest official state narratives of Ethiopia through the archives. Transcript Available Here**This interview was conducted in August 2020 as part of an deeper investigative look into the history and political climate of Ethiopia as it intersects with data and tech policy. In particular, We Be Imagining is concerned about the role of mis/disinformation on social media platforms like Facebook which fail to provide adequate content and context moderation. However, the slow scholarship this requires was outweighed by the urgency of the current political moment so we are sharing some of the stories recorded then. Please note, inclusion in this series in no way indicates agreement among each interviewee or is fully comprehensive of the political history, we simply aim to provide more nuanced and thoughtful insight given the dearth of coverage. Links and notes are subject to change. Host: J. Khadijah AbdurahmanMusic: Drew LewisLinks for the Episode:The media's crisis on Ethiopia by Ayantu Ayanna

How do we put the significant changes of the Earth’s atmosphere we’re experiencing now due to anthropogenic or human caused CO2 into context relative to the natural variability our planet has experienced? Rates of mass loss similar to now occurred in the early Holocene Period (~11,500 years ago) but simulations predict the 21st century will far exceed that rate of loss. If we deviate from the business as usual model, commit to low carbon emissions, can we mitigate or reverse sea level rise due to a melting Greenland Ice Sheet?Assistant Scientist at UCI Department of Earth System Science Joshua Cuzzone joins the WBI show to discuss Rate of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet will exceed Holocene values this century. He co-authored this recently published paper in Nature alongside an interdisciplinary team of paleoclimatologists, glacial geologists and geochemists. Check out this episode to learn about the 5 years they spent examining these questions. We also take an in depth look at the high-resolution Ice Sheet and Sea-level system Model (ISSM) used for simulating rates of GIS mass change from 12,000 years ago to AD 2100.Host: J. Khadijah AbdurahmanMusic: Drew LewisShow Notes: Chernobyl: data wars and disaster politicsRecommendations:The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future by Richard AlleyPlease rate, review and write us at WeBeImagining@gmail.com

How does a child welfare system claiming to help families in need systematically target, punish and separate Black, Hispanic and poor families? Why aren’t we better connecting the dots between police abolition and the need to abolish child services and their implementation of surveillance in the name of *support*? How has the federal Family First Prevention Services Act passed in 2018 changed the priorities and funding for state level child welfare agencies?Author of Catching a Case: Inequality and Fear in New York City’s Child Welfare System and Anthropology Professor at University of Wisconsin Stout campus, Tina Lee joins the WBI show for our 3rd episode examining the child welfare or family regulation system. We need systems that provide support for families instead of punishing and surveilling them.Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisShow Notes:Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse by Richard WexlerChildren as Chattel: Invoking the Thirteenth Amendment to Reform Child Welfare Note 1 Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal 2003Shattered Bonds The Color Of Child Welfare by Dorothy RobertsKilling the Black Body by Dorothy RobertsA Fiji Junket, a Padlocked Office and a Pioneering Nonprofit’s CollapseAn Interview with Richard Wexler, Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection ReformAn ‘Exemplary’ Foster Father, a String of Suspicions and Sexual-Abuse Charges (Published 2016)Elisa W. v. City of New York - Amended Complaint (Class action lawsuit against ACS and OCFS)THE PARENT LEGISLATIVE ACTION NETWORK HAILS PASSAGE OF HISTORIC CHILD WELFARE REFORM IN THE NEW YORK STATE LEGISLATURE AND URGES THE GOVERNOR TO SIGN THE BILL INTO LAWFamily First Policy Forum Slide Deck (Slide 90 features Virginia Child Welfare Commissioner's slide of kids in large suits counting money)State-level Data for Understanding Child Welfare in the United StatesData Brief: Child Welfare Investigations and New York City Neighborhoods (2019)Some Parents Awaiting iPads Got Visit From Child Welfare - THE CITYRecommendations:AUTOMATING INEQUALITY How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia EubanksAlgorithms of Oppression How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

From poultry plants in the US South pushing low-wage workers to process 175 birds per minute (BPM), to the slow violence of pesticides in Punjab causing premature disability to the European food sovereignty movement challenging strategies of resisting capitalist discipline imported from digital rights activism- scholars, Carrie Freshour, Divya Sharma and Barbara Van Dyck join the WBI show to connect the dots of agroecology across the global south.How can we trace the lineage of poultry production to the plantation? What do the oral histories of 80 year old farmers in the Punjab region tell us about ecological degradation and the green revolution? How does transforming our relationship to food, land and each other require a transformation of the state? This extended cut episode addresses these questions and more.Hosts: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelGuests: University of Washington Assistant Professor of Geography Carrie Freshour, University of Sussex Lecturer in Sustainable Development Divya Sharma and Associate Professor at Coventry University in the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience Barbara Van DyckMusic: Drew LewisShow Notes:Capitalist agriculture and Covid-19: A deadly combination (Interview w/ Rob Wallace)Racial Capitalism: A Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Inequities in the United States - Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, 2020Divya Sharma - Mobilization for Socio-Ecological Sustainability in post-Green Revolution PunjabPoultry and Prisons by Carrie Freshour (Monthly Review)“Ain't No Life For A Mother!” Racial Capitalism And The Crisis Of Social Reproduction by Carrie FreshourScholar-activists in an expanding European food sovereignty movement by Barbara Van Dyck(PDF) Articulating Agrarian Racism: Statistics and Plantationist Empirics by Brian WilliamsTheir Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery. The Reels Brothers Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave It.What is Revolutionary About The Green Revolution?Recommended Organizations/Movements:Saturday Free SchoolAgroecology Now! - Knowledge, Action, TransformationMississippi Minority Farmers AllianceKheti Virasat MissionStudy and StruggleCooperation JacksonPeople’s Archive of Rural India

Brooklyn Law Professor Frank Pasquale joins the WBI show to discuss his latest book, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI. What are the challenges and promises of serving on the federal health committee as an expert on the legal frameworks of emerging technologies during 45’s reign? How do we reconcile the need to prioritize human expertise while acknowledging the harm often committed by professionals against marginalized communities? We discuss these question and more on the latest episode of the We Be Imagining Podcast. Please send us your questions and comments at WeBeImagining@gmail.com.Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisRecommendations:Competition is Killing Us; How Big Business is Killing Our Society and Planet- and What To Do About ItCompetition Overdose by How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us from Citizen Kings to Market Servants By Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel EzrachiLPE Project - The Law and Political Economy Project

What becomes available when Black people come together? How do we understand Mike Brown, a child unjustly slain by the state as a kind of Christ? Poet and Scholar, Joshua Bennett joins the WBI show to discuss operating out of an archive of air, the shape of Black ideas, Black exuberance and joy. We chop it up about the praxis of police abolition, the choreography of anti-colonial navigation in the academy, the indebtedness of America to Black folks and the the debt owed by America to Black folks. Read Owed, the second book released by Bennett this year and check out this episode. His many references are in the show notes.Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan MandelMusic: Drew LewisLinks to the episode:Still Life With First Best FriendAgainst Consuming Images of the Brutalized, Dead, and DyingBeing Properly Once MyselfSobbing SchoolHow It Feels to Be Colored Me, by Zora Neale HurstonOwed to Eminem by June JordanLegendary Nikki Giovanni Speaks on her "Thug Life" Tattoo + New Book "Chasing Utopia"CHANGE: A World Without Prisons - Ruth Wilson Gilmore in Conversation with Mariame KabaNAACP | NAACP History: Lift Every Voice and SingThe Mis-Education of the NegroIn the Break — by Fred MotenGwendolyn Brooks | Primer for Blacks

Episode TranscriptHow does legislation touted as protecting children from sex trafficking actually harm consenusal sex workersand serve as a trojan horse attacking encryption and privacy rights of our broader society? What does it mean to do racial justice as a dominatrix? We discuss these questions as well as uplift the work of organizations led by and for sex workers around unionization and digital rights.Selena the Stripper and the Goddess Cori, hosts of Heaux in the Kneaux podcast join the WBI show to discussthe 2018 Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) as well as their 2020 descendant, the Earn It Act. This is the kick off to our second season where we look forward to inviting hosts of our favorite podcasts onto We Be Imagining to diversify the conversations around privacy, surveillance and digital rights beyond academics.Host: J. Khadijah AbdurahmanMusic: Drew LewisLinks to the Episode:Hacking and HustlingSoldiers of Pole: A Stripper Union Movement - Learn About Your RightsStrippers Are Workers With the Power to UnionizeStrippers And Giggers: Unionize Now | by Antonia Crane | PULPMAGL.A.'s Exotic Dancers Are Launching a Labor MovementSWOP USAAnalysis | Has the sex-trafficking law eliminated 90 percent of sex-trafficking ads?FOSTA-SESTA anti-sex-trafficking law has been a failure: opinionAnalysis | The Four-Pinocchio claim that ‘on average, girls first become victims of sex trafficking at 13 years old’Warren, Sanders back bill that could uncover violence against sex workersFollow on IG:#stripperstrike (@pdxstripperstrike) EastLondonStrippersCollective (@ethicalstripper)Hacking//Hustling (@hackinghustling)For more information, navigate to https://americanassembly.org/wbipodcast

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.For show notes and to learn more, navigate to https://americanassembly.org/wbipodcast

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?

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.

4 women with direct personal experience being investigated by the New York City’s Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) join the WBI show to share how the agency works to systematically separate Black and Brown families. They also lift up the ways in which families are thriving now in the absence of the surveillance typically executed via the public school system.In response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, National Bailout is bailing out Black mamas and caregivers now through May, to ensure our people are alive, well and safe for Mother’s Day and beyond. We encourage you to give directly on their site in the spirit of Mother’s Day.For complete show notes, visit americanassembly.org/wbi-podcast.

Host: J. Khadijah AbdurahmanMusic: Drew LewisMichael Nugent of It’s Up To Us To End Mass Incarceration joins the WBI show alongside people currently incarcerated in Rikers Island and their families. Rikers Island currently has almost 9 times the rate of community transmission of COVID-19 relative to the rest of New York City. Listen to the testimonies of those most profoundly impacted by the virus and unable to socially distance. #FreeThemAllYou can follow It’s Up To Us on their Facebook page or contact them at ItsUpToUsToEndMI@gmail.com. To support their work, you can make a donation via Venmo @ItsUpToUsToEndMI.For complete show notes, visit americanassembly.org/wbi-podcast.

Ali Winston joins the WBI team to continue to discuss the privacy implications of surveillance enacted during COVID-19 containment measures and what it means for the world to rely on social media and Zoom video conferencing to mediate most relationships outside of their home. For complete show notes, visit americanassembly.org/wbi-podcast.

Author of Networks of New York: AN ILLUSTRATED FIELD GUIDE TO URBAN INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE joins the WBI podcast to discuss the impact of COVID-19 “shelter-in” on internet infrastructure, examines the role of Amazon Web Service as daytime streaming has increased and the vulnerabilities data centers when the people who do repairs are quarantined. For complete show notes, visit americanassembly.org/wbi-podcast.

Chris Gilliard and Jasmine McNealy join the WBI team to discuss the privacy implications of surveillance enacted during COVID-19 containment measures and what it means for the world to rely on social media and Zoom video conferencing to mediate most relationships outside of their home. For complete show notes, visit americanassembly.org/wbi-podcast.