COLUMN: Letter from the Editors
Technology is Not Neutral: Locating Sites of Resistance as Computing Students
By Jasmine Lu, Jiayi Li
Magazine: Summer 2024 | Volume 30, No. 4
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COLUMN: INIT
Shifting Power Through Resistance: Social Justice in Practice
By Cella M. Sum, Alicia DeVrio
SECTION: Features
No Tech For Apartheid and No Tech For Tyrants: A Conversation Around Organizing and Technology
Organizers at the intersection of anticolonial justice and technology, Gabriel Schubiner and Nikhil Dharmaraj discuss their journeys, the historical context of their work, and organizing strategies.
By Gabriel Schubiner, Nikhil Dharmaraj
Ethical Tech Begins with Ethical Workplaces: Power Dynamics in Companies and Universities
My research shows how engineers in companies often feel little power to account for the ethics of what they create, and my student activism shows how universities often reproduce similar dynamics, harming their community in the process. Here are some ways students can---and must---resist.
By David Gray Widder
OPEN ACCESS
What Can AI Ethics Learn from Anarchism?
AI ethics is experiencing two crises: It is disconnected from communities being impacted by AI and largely funded by and dependent on tech companies profiting from harms. Drawing on anarchist ideas, AI ethicists have recently started building tools to challenge this status quo. What else can AI ethics learn from anarchism?
By William Agnew
OPEN ACCESS
Up Against the Firewall
In a revolt against techno-optimism and the real-world violence it upholds, members of radical research collective Lucy Parsons Labs (LPL) call for an empiricism rooted in technopolitical critique. Drawing from their own years of labor in the struggles against racial and surveillance capitalism, current work in HCI, and radical theorists like Alfredo M. Bonanano and Modibo Kadalie, LPL invites us to incorporate an ethics of rebellion and progress our tech practices into principled, anti-authoritarian praxis.
By Alejandro Ruizesparza, Freddy Martinez
OPEN ACCESS
Data for Whom, Data from Whom: How Social Movements Might Create Value for Their Community Data Practices
Belief in the power of data-driven decision-making has expanded from corporate environments to include all sectors of society, including social justice efforts. The problem with this newfound trust in "data" is that it can be hard to agree upon what exactly data are, recognize when they are useful, what they are useful for, and whose data should be valued as worthy of informing decisions.
By Tajanae Harris
OPEN ACCESS
Lessons from Workers' Inquiry: A Sociotechnical Approach to Audits of Algorithmic Management Systems
How can we support audits of algorithms in the workplace? Throughout U.S. labor history, unions have led investigations into management technologies to advocate for and win systematic change in the workplace. This piece draws lessons from the historical practices of worker inquiry to identify the socio-technical infrastructures needed to translate audit findings into impactful change in the workplace.
By Samantha Dalal
OPEN ACCESS
Anti-Caste Lessons for Computing: Educate, Agitate, Organize
South Asian caste systems are one of the many forms of historical, social hierarchies like race, gender, sexuality, and disability that shape the worlds of technology and media. The experiences of Dalits in hyper-Brahmanical spaces show how caste needs to be navigated in worlds of technology.
By Divyanshu Kumar Singh, Palashi Vaghela
Hammering It Out: On Worker Cooperatives and the Question of Transforming the Tech Industry
This article describes what it's like to work at an employee-owned technology cooperative, grappling with working conditions and the present state of the tech industry. The benefits of unionization are described, as are attempts to resist and refuse oppressive tech through consciousness of and engagement with struggles for justice around the world.
By Alex Ahmed
OPEN ACCESS
Challenging Ableism: A Critical Turn Toward Disability Justice in HCI
A reflection on our learnings from the CHI 2022 "Dreaming Disability Justice in HCI" workshop, and why we continue to call for disability justice, despite the limitations of how we practice it within academia and industry.
By Cella M. Sum, Franchesca Spektor, Rahaf Alharbi, Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony, Erika Devine, Hazel Anneke Dixon, Jared Duval, Tessa Eagle, Frank Elavsky, Kim Fernandes, Leandro S. Guedes, Serena Hillman, Vaishnav Kameswaran, Lynn Kirabo, Tamanna Motahar, Kathryn E. Ringland, Anastasia Schaadhardt, Laura Scheepmaker, Alicia Williamson
For Black Femmes, An Animation: Translating Research Into a Creative Inquiry
In this article, I write about the journey of translating academic research into creative inquiry to produce "For Black Femmes," a four-minute animated documentary. This project stemmed from a desire to explore online experiences faced by Black women and femmes, often overlooked by technology companies and researchers. Through storytelling and animation, I aimed to shed light on complex issues such as online harassment and cultural betrayal trauma theory, bridging the gap between academia and broader audiences.
By Tyler Musgrave
DEPARTMENT: Labz
Revolutionizing Cancer Research with AI: Health Data Science Lab, UT Arlington
By Aarti Darji