"DeBugging Black Death in the Digital" with Tiera Tanksley
Channel: UCIBrenICS
Date: 2023-05-08

Tiera Tanksley, Assistant Professor of Equity, Diversity & Justice in Education at the University of Colorado Boulder, speaks on “DeBugging Black Death in the Digital: How Black Youth Survive, Resist and Redesign Anti-Black Technologies Towards Collective Change."

Abstract:
This presentation will highlight the experiences of 2 cohorts (n=40) of Black high school students who participated in a 5 week course, called “Race, Resistance and Technology,” that was taught in the midst of COVID-19 and the 2020 global demonstration for Black Lives. The goal of the course was to foster students’ ability to critically examine the ubiquity of anti-Black racism within socio-technical architectures (e.g., code, data, algorithms, etc.) of popular platforms and internet technologies. In addition to discussing material and discursive consequences of algorithmic anti-blackness, the course also examined ways Communities of Color transformatively resist - or “debug” - algorithmic anti-blackness through the design of abolitionist technologies. Consequently, the course culminated in a design project where Black youth worked collaboratively to dream up and design race-conscious and algorithmically-just technologies that could help - rather than harm - historically marginalized communities.

This presentation will center the voices, experiences and techno-social inventions of the youth, and take a closer look at how they used these technology projects to construct new worlds and Black digital futures that center life, joy and communal healing. It simultaneously examines Black life, joy and joyous learning as an invaluable approach to STEM+CS education, and showcases how Black joy was not only physically enacted through the collaborative design process (e.g., students laughed, played, and “acted up” while designing) but also algorithmically encoded into the sociotechnical infrastructures of the final projects (e.g., content moderation algorithms that would flag and delete micro-aggressive content, but hyper-circulate Black joy and wellness content).