Improvising Resistance: What Tech Workers Can Learn from American Studies

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Discussion

Abstract

In the United States and the world, data and AI systems, and other products of Big Tech have become increasingly central to government practices of surveillance, policing, and capture. With tech workers beginning to organize across various sectors, both formally through unions like the Alphabet Workers Union (CWA), and informally through groups like the Tech Workers Coalition, the idea of resistance has emerged as a unifying (and welcome) strategy. Yet as scholars such as Mar Hicks and David Widder (2024) and Mohamed Abdalla (2025) have shown, these initiatives often lack connections to historical strategies of resistance and examples of reimagining. How can American Studies scholars forge these connections?

In this roundtable, six panelists will offer sketches of histories, strategies, and critiques of resistance, drawing out lessons for tech activism today. Examples include Indigenous language reclamation, C19 maroon communities, trans data refusal, and Cuban “technological disobedience.” Far from “building the plane while you fly it,” Big Tech’s approach to improvisation, our panel/ensemble will improvise in the moment on the basis of decades of American Studies techniques.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Nikko Stevens, Smith College

Panelists

• Lauren Klein, Emory University

• Sarah Florini, Arizona State University-Tempe

• Sierra Talbert, University of California-Los Angeles

• Thema Monroe-White

• Alexander Gil Fuentes, Yale University

Biographical Information

Sarah Florini is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at Arizona State University, where she is also co-chair of the AI and Ethics Work Group at the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. Her work focuses on technology, social media, technology ethics, and ethnography. Her current book project, AI and Race (Polity Press) examines how these interlocking phenomena reproduce and retrench the racialized postcolonial systems of extraction and exploitation.

Alexander Gil Fuentes is Senior Lecturer II and Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. His work includes Caribbean culture and history, digital humanities and technology design for different infrastructural and socio-economic environments. He is senior editor of archipelagos journal, co-organizer of The Caribbean Digital conference, and co-PI of the Mellon-funded Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective.

Lauren Klein is Professor of Data & Decision Sciences and English at Emory University, where she directs the Digital Humanities Lab and the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (Minnesota 2020), Data Feminism (MIT 2020), and Data by Design: Visualization and Power from Abolition to the Dawn of Data Science (MIT 2026). She also coedits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream.


Thema Monroe-White is Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Policy at George Mason University. She studies how artificial intelligence (AI) and policy systems intersect to shape education, labor, and innovation opportunities for minoritized and marginalized groups. Dr. White advances emancipatory data practices, leveraging critical quantitative and computational approaches to expose embedded racialized ideologies and reframe this knowledge for empowerment.

Nikko Stevens is an Assistant Professor of Statistical and Data Sciences at Smith College.
Stevens work demonstrates that data infrastructures—data models, databases, data structures—are key locations for both the propagation of social harms and the prevention of further damage. They are currently completing their first monograph, Abolitionist Engineering, about the role of software in the contemporary movement for prison abolition.


Sierra Talbert is currently a PhD student in the Information Studies department at UCLA, where she researches the political, cultural, and societal dimensions of AI technologies, with a particular focus on questions of gender and race within the digital humanities and critical AI studies subfields. Her current research includes a sociotechnical, worker-centered analysis of an “accent neutralization” algorithm marketed for call center workers.