We are filled with grief and anger at the recent and ongoing police brutality against Black communities, and we remember the lives and names of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Regis Korchiniski-Paquet, and Tony McDade. We know that the police forces in colonially-called Canada and the US are part of the settler colonial system. We have begun to assemble a series of readings on how race, racism, and anti-Blackness are produced, supported, and amplified in and with the digital. Any digital research and pedagogy that claims to be anti-colonial must inevitably contend with and work to end anti-Blackness, and must support Black liberation and the abolishment of settler colonial structures like the police force. These issues are not separate from but, rather, are utterly enmeshed in current digital and surveillance infrastructures. We invite you to contribute to this list as we reaffirm our commitments to restorative learning and teaching practices.
Bailey, Moya. “#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics.” Disrupting the Digital Humanities. Punctum Books, 2018. doi: 10.1353/book.66813.
Benjamin, Ruha. Introduction: Discriminatory Design, Liberating Imagination edited by Ruha Benjamin. Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. doi: 10.1215/9781478004493-001.
Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge, UK Medford, MA: Polity, 2019. Print.
Brock, André. “Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis.” New Media & Society, vol. 20, no. 3, 2018, pp. 1012–30, doi: 10.1177/1461444816677532.
Brock Jr, André. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. NYU Press, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/2333.1/k3j9kppk.
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015, Print.
Castagno, Angelina E. Educated in Whiteness: Good Intentions and Diversity in Schools. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/educated-in-whiteness.
Jackson, Sarah J, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles. #Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, 2020. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/hashtagactivism.
Jefferson, Brian J. Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/digitize-and-punish.
Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text 1 December 2018; 36 (4 (137)): 57–79. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press, 2018, doi: 10.2307/j.ctt1pwt9w5.
Noble, Safiya, and Sarah Roberts. Technological Elites, the Meritocracy, and Postracial Myths in Silicon Valley. 6, UCLA, 22 Aug. 2019, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z3629nh.
Please also see this post from the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, which offers 15 books by Black scholars that folx in tech industries should be sure to read: https://www.c2i2.ucla.edu/racial-justice-and-tech/
— Arun Jacob, Ashley Caranto Morford, Kush Patel