really well for me but you know for some folks it does so as i said facial recognition works really well if you are white men and we've seen a lot in the news over the past few years a lot of incidents such as this one where  are recognized or incorrectly identified as having closed eyes when in fact they were not so that's one of them oh or the popular google photo scandal where google was tagging photos of black people as guerrill hp's face tracking software that could not recognize black faces but could only track white faces you should definitely check out that video that's hilarious basically there's a really big lack of diversity assets to train machine learning models so these incidents kept popping up in the media and company after company kept getting very cool online for incidents such as the ones that we just saw and there's a lot of them that happen yeah so you have the universal and typical response to something like this is is to be like oh we need because the collection of data actually has a dark side and it's not the first time that technology has been used to reinforce systems that are already biased and already racist so predictive models have been used by courts for years to determine bail and sentencing for the prison system essentially weighing in on matters of freedom captivity life and death from a lot of people and the truth is that surveillance is just going to keep getting more and more pervasive and intensive and it does predominantly affect communities of color and marginalized groups so it becomes really difficult to celebrate the improved effectiveness of a technology that just automates surveillance but i want to snapchat yeah i want to snapchat well when it comes to surveillance like i said communities of color actually not smart let me say ready over overly  surveilled and has been the case for hundreds of years and technology is applied in all kinds of ways to reinforce these systems are already biased and racist so when we introduce facial recognition into the equation while it can be applied to snapshot and really awesome filters it can also be used for surveillance this is already happening for from companies such as geofeedia that law enforcement uses to basically tap into the api of social  sites and then track people's photos and cross reference that with facial recognition software to basically protect the public during during riots or protests such as what happened during the freddie gate of freddie gray protests and it's also being introduced in police body cameras and this is an article from two or three days ago actually where facial recognition technology is being introduced in the body cameras that police are wearing actually there's it there's actually a really great coalition right now that's fighting back against that so it's important for us to recognize that not everyone is for this kind of diversification of data and the use of facial recognition on body cameras so there's a really great coalition that you should definitely follow and i think you know i think about this quote quite a bit and the reason why i think about it is in the process of constantly fighting for inclusion like oh we really want to be included i promise like i want the google art tab to be able to recognize my face what's the art that looks like me you know i think it's important for us to recognize that these systems weren't meant for us to begin with right we're thinking is like black and brown folks they're not this is not meant for us an option is used against us so do we want to support the development and implementation of tech that allows existing power structures to continue to achieved by the destruction of those systems and so that's why i dre lorde quote right here the masters tool will never dismantle the masters house is important because in these conversations about like talking about you know having diverse faces so that you can make sure actually have to build our own tools i know most people would be like oh but the facial recognition software will be will be used for like healthcare technology yeah but it could be used for other things as well and you know we often find all these reasons to mitigate issue their face can you know identify them as queer or gay or label them as such it's important for us to be like hey let's stop mitigating and let's actually like like let's abolish it completely and making sure that that's actually an because it's really easy for us to constantly think about mitigating risks and not actually thinking about abolishing it and so i often think about for example stop lapd when the stories came out about predictive policing they actually were like what do you mean mitigating risks you're like just shut it down completely and they were right and so you know i know it's not often the easy route to shade just shut it down but i think it's important for us to constantly think about the ways in which we can do that because we know that we're constantly being surveilled and especially from corporate surveillance that these tools getting better is not gonna like i would rather snapchat not see my face and like have a crappy like variation of where the filter is if it's actually better for me and so i think be examining the attempt to collectively narrative eyes experiences of sexual assault through the hashtag me to movement and think through some of the things the movement both obscured and revealed online on the website of her organization justbe inc there's some information written about the goals of burke's mattoon movement the movement is to give young women particularly young women of color from low wealth communities a sense of empowerment and seventeen red suggested by a friend if all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote me to as a status we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem the fact that the mainstream public started to pay attention to accusations of sexual assault when it was white and famous women speaking out is especially visible in the history of th with people publicly sharing an experience of sexual violence one point of the exercise to demonstrate this year a number of people who have been survivors of sexual violence did have an effect on some including a friend male coworker who said i knew it was common but i've never been so confronted by this issue and it's really making me think great i guess why is it that some people possibly many people did not feel safe comfortable or that their experiences are even included under the hashtag me too to be able to post the hashtag required inability to name it acquired an ability to claim something as someone's own and i wonder about those who did not feel up to the task to name violence is not a neutral activity and has historically been a way of keeping power in the hands of the most violent and the most powerful doctor patricia h collins black feminist theorist writes on this saying definitions of violence lie not in acts themselves but in how groups controlling positions of authority conceptualize such acts we see this to be true in the total lack of accountability when police murder assault and abused black people as compared to the privileges of white bodies within the justice system under the hashtag of me too it was easy to call certain experiences violent and inappropriate while at the same time disregarding others as not relevant as rapper cardi b said in reference to the movement a lot of video vixens have spoke about this and nobody gives a fuck i bet if one of these women stands up and talks about it people are going to say so what you're a ho it don't matter cardi b makes clear that when certain people speak out or possibly post  too if it doesn't accord with white supremacist understandings of what counts as violence it is much less likely anything will be done because of milano's emphasis on women in her original tweet the viral they wrote honestly the resurgence of sexual assault conversations has just made me dysphoric and suicidal because there just isn't meaningful language being used it's entering certain women when assault is about power first there is nothing lost from transcending the gendered conversation growing up a black boy in quotes the access women especially older as specially whitehead over my body completely undermines this forced narrative honestly the only thing worse than being a victim is feeling like you don't deserve your story in some cases this kind of collective narrative izing of experience emphasizes a solidarity erasing rather than paying attention to the gendered class differences that can resist collectivization we can look again to doctor patricia hill collins to think about a more inclusive model of understanding how violence works in our society collins writes it may be more useful to think about violence as dynamic and highly contextual thinking violence in this way allows us to begin to shift focus away from a singular kind of victimhood the allowance for me to to include experiences of physically violent assault and threatening behavior made a clear connection between ranges of violent experiences the hidden violence of everyday life violence that occurs on the walk to work or in the home became briefly visible what was lacking was an awareness of the social positioning of the people posting about these situations the internet attempts to provide a cover of relative safety but it also helped to mask racial and social positioning that creates and defines the context or in define nuances of violent experiences within the context of the united states one example of an experience that did not fit into the narrative of me too but still became part of a mainstream conversation was the short story cat person by christina by penny n cat person a new yorker short story about a white college student named margot who goes on a date with an older man named robert goes back to his place and  doesn't want to have sex but has sex anyway because she feels pressured blogger ella dawson calls this bad sex the sex we have that we don't want to have but consent to anyway i find cat person interesting because it subtly pushes the boundaries of what may or may not be included under the hashtag me to and whether this bad sex may or may not be understood as violence looking at margot experience in cat person margot seems to freeze up at the prospect of vocalizing her own desires then he was on top of her again kissing her and weighing her down and she knew that her last chance of enjoying this encounter had disappeared but that she would carry through with it until it was over margo attempts to claim agency over her own body but ultimately is unable to she gives up control and gives in to providing th pleasure the story ends with robert texting margo calling her a whore this serves to demonstrate the slippage between uncomfortable sex and potential violence roberts final text comes after the sexual experience  thereby disrupting the idea of a linear continuum of sexual violence the nonlinear and non fixed nature of violence is important to recognize and hold space for margo may not have posted me too with reference to her experience with conceives of sexuality not as a discrete object whose violation will always be painfully and instantly apparent but as an intelligible process whose individual instances can be reinterpreted and renamed over time repentance shows us how the social scripts force how social scripts can force people to act in ways that seem nonsensical or contradictory that's saying yes doesn't always mean yes and thinking no doesn't always being rape one note though is the overwhelming whiteness and straightness of cat person indigenous australian writer evelyn orlin wrote for overland org i won't lament another useful dissection of contemporary white middle class gender politics if that background for a sexual encounter the fact that both of the people involved were white the sexual encounter was heterosexual vanilla and occurred in a home means that it falls well within gale reubens charmed circle or the kinds of sex that are considered normal and good by dominant culture the story pushes back against a certain heterosexual sex script and it is useful to recognize and it is also but it is also useful to recognize the social positioning of the characters as part of that maneuvering from my perspective me too revealed many important aspects of sexual violence while at the same time concealing differences i know these differences can begin to be recognized if we pay attention to the nuances underneath the umbrella  so we're downloading some slides we appreciate your patience yes so in the meantime while those slides are downloading does anyone have any questions for our first two presentations yes being recorded so yeah i think commercial genetic testing is a scam it's my thing so i personally don't believe in that stuff so like i i think if i'm not wrong in that case though it was like an open source like i think it wasn't it was there was something it wasn't like the populate andme or ancestry com that was responsible for that i think it was like another platform and i think there's something that we have to constantly recognize and this is like the data privacy rules and so i think it's just like another reminder about how like legal system especially like police officers are able to access data and so like how do we control where we place our data because and like how do we also push for you know for profit corporations are gonna be doing this anyways like how do we push for them to like not accept the subpoena or like fight back against it but i personally don't like every time i  to gets to get access to information on people's profiles and it's usually because law enforcement is investing in investigating a case and there's always a legitimate reason the same way that there was a legitimate reason for asking for that information from whatever genetic company was the thing is like when we're when were thinking about these things we have to think about the abuse of power like if we're thinking about the system's i already exists they already racist and there are very biased and so when you're introducing things like um an extra like the netic testing and the reach of law enforcement and tada they're going to be used again to reinforce these systems that are already biased and alre so that argument the argument is one that's always going to pop up we just have to remember that it doesn't really matter if it's a question of like the the genetic testing or just the law enforcement investigating a crime now  people of color are already at a disadvantage and we have been for four years so just that advancement in technology still feeds into the same systems of power and racism so that's that's pretty much my  communities or the communities that are like disadvantaged like because of these technologies how are they supporting that um first of all everyone should read simone browns book dark matters it's  why i feel like we shouldn't be fighting to be included because i think exactly what simone brown talks about about the fact that like you can subvert these systems whether you're trying or not trying just because of like them being inherently racist and so i think that when we talk about like oh yeah like we want this to be better it takes away our power of subverting the system in itself right cuz you're like oh no we want you to know it's like we want you to know more information about us we want you to see our faces i think that there isn't there are some really good examples by like adam harvey does really great work about like how you can subvert the system like facial recognition cameras and he said that actually now they've gotten quite powerful so it's really hard for you to like you know make your face it was like you bit like it's really hard for you to  basically switching the gaze from basically if i want you to one choice which is what we do but something as simple as people recording the police and whenever there's an incident or something comes up but basically putting back these tools into our hands and trying to so record to surveil or to watch the system by something as simple as you know taping the police day making an arrest or something like that so just trying to think about the technologies that exist and using them instead for us as opposed to leaving them in the hands of the powerful and sometimes like i'm okay with something being racist and like letting that be a view like the thing like you mean like i'm okay if you don't know who i am like that's perfectly fine with me like when you go through like when you go through customs for example like the camera doesn't really work and now they got really cool lighting situations which is like slightly terrifying i was like oh no the lighting is so good now you can recognize me and so i think that even though we try to fight back against like inherently racist systems i think that's where i think simone browns work and a lot of other folks to work about like it's all good like like we don't need to be included in all that stuff it's really important for us okay so and we'll hold the rest of your questions until after our last presenter dante presents that will be very much appreciated thank you so good okay so later in the presentation we will discuss how this comment expresses ambivalence so in light of a string of recent shootings police brutality against black people has emerged as a contentious topic and national dialogue one of the more polarizing  as reported by diamond officer yana shot and killed falando castile la he was retrieving his license americans are profoundly polarized in their conversations about the police shooting of falando castillo and one corner people condemned officer yanis and express users are having these conversations about the police shooting of falando castile for instance the collapsing of social networks on facebook may present impression management challenges for users in general but wide users in particular in face book different social groups with different expectations are integrated into a single network which may problematize the ways in which white facebook users respond to police shootings as an example white facebook users may be expected to express  support for falando by one social group which makes a moral claim and contrast white facebook users may be expected to express support for law enforcement by another social group which makes a normative claim choosing which claim to convey to overlapping fa agents and individuals operate in tandem to reproduce social systems so agents may refer to individuals or groups whereas structures may refer to rules and resources so whiteness as structural refers to rules and resources of has a right leaning news audience and this is according this is these results are according to a pew research center study that was conducted in two thousand and fourteen so drawing on a drawing on racial formation theory white facebook users first letters say that facebook does not ask you about your racial identity and so in order to actually label someone as a white facebook user i had to kind of create a criteria to say this person is a white facebook user and this person is a non white facebook user and how i did this is was  drew on racial formation theory and so i created a criteria based on white physical features wide sounding name and identity claim so first white physical features may include but not limited to blonde hair blue eyes light skin which were observed or assessed by looking at profile pictures and photo albums like a second so drawing on a list of popular and distinct names given to white people white male sounding names may include but not appealing to another segment of his facebook population which may expect him to defend law enforcement drawing from structuration theory as an agent of structural whiteness dylan positions the crusade to eradicate systemic racism and policing as white heat views combating racial injustice as a personal attack because he cannot draw a distinction between his whiteness and the structures of law enforcement as a white man he sees himself as the structure and any structural changes affect his doses of white privilege so third police encounter which in turn helps to protect structural whiteness from accusations of racism so as an agent of law enforcement dylan employs colorblind discourse to not only help legitimize the police shooting of falando castillo but also as an impression about that everyone talks about black on black right so do not believe it say do not blame all police officers for the actions of a few and then we see here that he's reducing systemic police violent violence to a few bad apples right and then it's a it is hard job for them well it's hard being black the criminals of all colors now let's let's get this clear right now police officers are more likely to be shot and killed by a white man and it's talking about of all colors but we know it doesn't impression management tactic there and then he said or is that okay no one ever said it was okay so everybody so everyone here is a hypocrite it has no solution for a small problem really police brutality is a small problem in like a thousands of people are killed every year you know at the hands of police officers and then he says yes there is racism in america okay yes sir that's a moral claim right can you say that so that's a moral claim yes again that's a million pressure management tactic because watch what he does after this mainly by the news media is so much from the poor uneducated people of all races now he's just talking all right let's keep on it so people need to take some responsibility for their own actions now we know our sop need to take responsibility for their own actions and for how their lives have turned out now we know that this is universalist meritocratic rhetoric that's always telling black people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps right but we never hear about this when you're talking about like the the differentiation between moral and normative claims i'm wondering what led you to consider the normative claims normative when you could also consider them moral just on a different spectrum because often the terminology of like self respectability put yourself pull yourself up by the bootstraps is in and in essence the idea of moralism as being self responsibility i'm so i'm wondering if you thought about that in differentiating between moral and normative and if so what led you to give those two differentiations yeah and to be quite honest with you was it was definitely my dissertation chairs recommendation he was like you should definitely call this moral claim and different call this a normative claim but the reality is does it matter what we call for black victims of police violence and support for law enforcement officers so i think i think we could i mean we can we could call anything i could change it from cont ambivalence and name it contradictions right you know where there's like oh it's not his fault you know where you making a comment that says philander castil ambivalence but you still you you still see where these sort of claims that express supports like for example like i support affirmative action but i also don't think that black people are or women really good question tomorrow you know a government issued id so you can verify you are who you say you are right and so of that being the case we know if you're on facebook and you have a picture of you and you're white and you have a picture of like white kids running around in the yard then you're probably a white person the the character limit no one in this room knows how many characters are allowed on facebook if someone has that answer like i'll be very impressed but we know how many characters are allowed on twitter it was like one hundred and forty at the time i did this study but now is two eighty but so imagine trying to study on twitter with one hundred and forty characters it was no way i would be able to get those patterns right because you won't see how people waver between the moral and normative claims because it's just not enough space for them to do so but how many of you have ever looked at a comment on facebook like oh this just too long i'm not gonna read it exactly so when i when i'm looking at those responses and i'm looking at those responses i mean those comments and response to news articles i'm actually looking at and i'm excited to like look at oh man this is interesting were clean over the clean over the claim work like oh my gosh i said oh really she selects she literally i gave this presentation or clash like oh man your races and i was like oh really so i was like and then she was just like it's all just like she's like you're racist because how are you gonna identify white people on facebook well i said have you heard of black twitter she's like yeah i said your racial identity and she doesn't know she said well i don't know i said it doesn't so how do we know about black twitter if twitter doesn't ask you about your racial identity so we have to stop with the colorblind politics and then and so that's that goes along with facebook you are who you accuracy but no one is wrong with labeled me white and if you do as a problem yeah well and on top of that um facebook now with their like affinity groups or whatever they're called julie it's automatically labeling y whether or not you self identify so based on the patterns of things that you're posting that your friends are posting to you the things that you're sharing they're gonna tell you whether or not you're conservative or liberal whether or not you're black white latino or asian so there's definitely some validity in because like it's the same thing but it's not is the same thing in regard to comment and like you know you have like you don't have those necessarily like limitations but have you tried to test it out on different forums to see if you have the same kind of conversation so people have do you mean like public forums like comments under like coworkers right are you kind of like skeptical of posting certain things because how my co workers may see this but you also want to post it because your friends may like may expect for you to post something like that i don't i don't know that occurs on reddit and if it does to what degree it occurs i'm not sure but i think that would be interesting to see like do these patterns emerge and i'll be honest with you i did that when i when i this study emerged from a project that i conducted in the summer of last year where i was looking at breitbart comments on the actual website but everything was just normative claims or just like basically supportive of law enforcement so but on facebook when i looked at that same article the comments you could see that the right leaning news audiences were vacillating you know  moral claim i support filete okay still he shouldn't have died he was a great man but we should not punish all law enforcement officer you know so i don't know that would occur on ready and if i do then i would have to change my theoretical framework yeah all see here and they're very much mirror my experience speaking with other white people about this topic on other things around race where i'm not even sure if they have a you know you know theoretical framework about how they're addressing these things but there is always degrees of ambivalence going back and forth even among their own peer group and so to a certain extent i don't know if that's happening because i'm talking to them and i'm presenting a  very very non normative storyline so to speak or if it's something that is sort of part of sort of white respectability politics where like there are certain there are certain things that you have to box you have to check off in terms of decrying racism sort of nominally but then going forth with various normative claims yeah i know and i'll tell you this in response to your comment this study looking at ambivalence as if you want to call them villains from worldly normative claims am at and my next study if anyone wants to help me with this will be looking at how men respond to me to movement wow yeah i've been in conversations i've had conversations with men and every like you know i i don't you know i support those women but i don't think that which the russell simmons should be fired for it how do you like you know sorry it's like one of those things where like even men do it as well like you know and not to take the conversation about men not to take the conversation away from white people but i think that you you know i think that you know surgeons but i think that you what i'm trying to say is that these patterns are something that you may experience whenever you have individuals who are groups of people wherever in positions of power and because men we live in this patriarchal male dominated society we have to protect that we have to protect this patriarchal system by using ambivalence like we don't want to come on like like i just don't believe those women at all but we're gonna do we're gonna protect it in an ambivalent way and we have to understand that discourse is intertwined with which structures right guess that's like one of the reasons why i think in a previous conference someone asked why didn't you focus on like black people in that x people it's because we're not in positions of power right and we especially when it comes to local law enforcement bright white people occupy seventy five percent of local you know local and enforcement officials right and so why people are in position to or at least to help to eradicate or police violence to the extent that is address policing i remember someone having a conversation about it and there well like what didn't i make it just look cheaper cuz like you could easily quickly know if someone should get bail or not and you don't have to go through this entire process instead of being like no that actually shouldn't exist at all so i think that that stuff actually currently happens when we're talking about like ai for good we're talking about tech for good stuff it's like you know you're like mmm like it's not that bad like it's okay like we know it's a problem but like we'll be able to like fix some parts of it and i'm like no actually like if you just shut it down so you know like i think that's often it exists also in our everyday lives right like it's like and and i think that exists in the tools that we create it's and exists in like the systems that we're currently in and so i think it's important to recognize that as well it's not just the like you know being in this industry and in this field there is this like moralization of solution ism and intervention ism that i've been struggling a lot with especially in academia and so i was wondering you know i think in my dissertation in my research i'm going to be calling for a lot of separation as tools that i work in international development and statistics so i think that african people should be able to measure african statistics as they want so i was wondering i feel like the conversation is changing away from this moralization of technological solutions we should include people in these surveillance systems i feel like the conversation is moving away from that i was wondering what what you all think like being practitioners being researchers in this field what is the so first like fuck tech solution ism like completely i'm tech no solution ism and i don't know i think about that a lot actually i almost said in international development and then i ended up studying public policy and i remember when i got back into like the tech space i was like systems and so like a really great example i'm from toronto this is like very anto content but like there is like there's a land trust right now issue in toronto and then have data to like fight back against it or like you know be able to make claims your like community make claims for the different things that they wanted and so they actually sorted collecting data in their own community and like they have that localized and they have it protected within their own community and so i think that there's more and more examples of people create decentralized systems that doesn't necessarily mean that like i have to be from toronto and like coming to another country to like help them set up their infrastructure or anything like that so i think there's more and more push for decentralization and localization and i think that that's the future in many ways like i don't  like the larger conglomerate like large monopolies and so i think that you know if you think about like mesh networks for example and you just also like indigenous communities also collecting data for the within their own communities and not sharing it  choosing when to share it i think it's really important for us to think about and so i think i think i think there is a future there but we just have to we have to also allow and support for that to occur because i think it's the funding issue is also a huge thing is that a lot of the funding is for like international like larger projects and not local projects and not local decentralized projects and so i think it's also we have to understand the ways in which capital plays a huge role and why us to create tools for us by us as opposed to having i mean for me specifically i'm from lebanon so i grew up in the middle east and i've seen so many big tech companies from the us or from europe introduced tech solution into our  communities and they're being developed by people were not from the community people were not as people who live in a different country as well and in every never really works out and for in the field that i work in which is data privacy and data security a lot of the tools that are being used in the middle east to circumvent say government surveillance are being developed in the u s something as simple as signal has it do people know what signal is it's a it's an application application like what's up and it's being developed here in the us but then when you go to the middle east and you try to use it there and it's an encrypted platform where you can exchange text messages with someone else and not be and if those text messages are intercepted by someone the text messages are actually encrypted so it really helps with things like government surveillance where the government can actually read the messages are being exchanged by people but for a tool like signal which is really the like one of the best messaging tools that you could be using when you are trying to use that in the middle east the the internet speed is literally just not fast enough and signal doesn't work so these tools are also being developed in countries where that just have a different broadband like bandwidth for the internet so there's so many so many so many groups and so many so many folks in the middle east and elsewhere in the world or different communities that are trying to develop these tools and that are trying to create these systems but we see the same folks being funded and being supported over and over again and i really i think we just need to start shifting the conversation even in terms of funding and in terms of like supporting folks away from just the big the big companies that we always that we know and that we supposedly trust  are pretty famous in their field but really just shifting and helping folks from the ground up cuz it's like really white savior complex stuff that's going on right now in the tech space so it's important to recognize that i'm this question for dante i'm you mentioned that you had you might as a practical question so i'm sorry it's very very boring i'm image that you might about three thousand eight hundred comments was like yes yeah so that's a lot of comments i'm practically did you use any automation to for victims of black victims of police violence i did not want to leave that up to nvivo to tell me what was ambivalent and i'll tell you this it was definitely an undertaking but there so there were three articles in each stage right so there are nine articles in total so what the some of the comments were one word sad shouldn't have happened right so you can you blow through that you know what i mean so like i think i analyzed like comments it took me like maybe two days for each news article so i didn't take it didn't take long at all so yeah yeah we have time for one more question hi this question is for julia and i just i think you're redefining sexual assault and violence contextualizing it and making it stopping or stopping it from being one nonlinear is really important and so that's good and kind of moving forward and redefining things but in terms of getting justice or how it looks like in the legal system how do you with these new definition s apply that so that we can now figure out how to get justice in these smaller redefined definitions of what violence means what sexual assault means yeah yeah that was also something i've been thinking about with you guys talking about ambivalence as something that is working often to maintain hierarchies and maintain white supremacy in these white facebook users comments whereas i had been talking about spaces of ambiguity as important to hold and allow for in a different a very different way but i'm wondering they're in so and also when you code ambivalence that's kind of a previous question when you start to code it you are putting it out of its ambivalent state and into the sea or that you know putting it into a code which is not ambivalent in its nature which can then be used to potentially target or a negative way possibly by structures so i mean i was thinking in a more radical sense of allowing that look to like the expansion of the carceral state would want legal easily  definable legal definitions of what counts as assault and that maybe isn't the way to go for thinking about restorative justice and thinking about community based like working through these issues so