0518 - Power, Resistance and Inequality in Tech: A Conversation with Ruha Benjamin, Anita Sarkeesian, and Tressie McMillan Cottom

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

Tech has a justice problem, and three prominent scholar-activists come together here to talk about it. Ruha Benjamin’s work helps to expose inequalities in how technology is made. An associate professor at Princeton University, Benjamin is the author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, a book about machine bias, discriminatory design, and liberatory approaches to technoscience. She has written two other books and many articles that diagnose and explain racism in science and technology, and has been published in Science, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Theory and Society. Her work has been covered by Nature, the Washington Post, NPR and a host of other venues, and funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Anita Sarkeesian is an award-winning media critic, whose efforts to wrest gaming culture from misogyny brought her both positive attention and extraordinary harassment. Her website Feminist Frequency has analyzed representations of women in popular culture since 2009; she has been named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, and received an honorary PhD from the New School. Tressie McMillan Cottom is the author of four books, including Thick, a collection of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Award, as well as the popular edited volume Digital Sociologies, co-edited with Karen Gregory and Jessie Daniels. She has also written about Black cyberfeminism, algorithmic inequalities and the uses of technology in education and other fields. McMillan Cottom has won multiple awards, including several outstanding early career awards, as well as the 2020 ASA Public Understanding of Sociology Award and the 2017 SWS Feminist Activist Scholar Award. In this event, Benjamin, Sarkeesian and McMillan Cottom will each speak for ten minutes, and then participate in a Q&A session moderated by Allison Pugh, a University of Virginia professor of sociology who is writing a book about person-to-person work, technology, and the stratification of human contact.

Sub Unit

• Plenary Sessions

Presider

• Allison Pugh, University of Virginia

Panelists

• Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University

• Tressie Cottom, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Anita Sarkeesian, Feminist Frequency

Session Organizer

• Allison Pugh, University of Virginia

Moderator

• Allister Pilar Plater, University of Virginia