This panel is in-person and will also be livestreamed at msrc.howard.edu/livestream
AI and emerging technologies are rapidly transforming our world. For Black people and communities, they often deepen systemic racism through biased algorithms and data, surveillance, environmental harm, inequities in education, and more. This panel will convene Black scholars and researchers whose work critically examines these issues. Together, we’ll explore how tech and AI are shaping our lives and futures, how we can collectively resist and reimagine these tools, and how to advance equity and self-determination through an Afrofuturist lens.
Moderated by Dr. Kweli Zukeri
Panelists
Dr. Simone Browne
Dr. Simone Browne is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and Director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Her research focuses on the social and ethical implications of surveillance, both AI-enabled and not. Simone is currently writing her second book, which examines the interventions made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of Black life. She is an EPIC Advisory Board Member, and A People's Guide to Tech Advisory Board Member.
Dr. Charlton McIlwain
Dr. Charlton McIlwain is Vice Provost for Faculty Development, Pathways & Public Interest Technology at New York University, where he is also Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication.
Author of the recent book, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter, Dr. Charlton McIlwain is Vice Provost for Faculty Development, Pathways & Public Interest Technology at New York University, where he is also Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication. He works at the intersections of computing technology, race, inequality, and racial justice activism. He has served as an expert witness in landmark U.S. Federal Court cases on reverse redlining/racial targeting in mortgage lending and recently testified before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services about the impacts of automation and artificial intelligence on the financial services sector. He is the author of the recent PolicyLink report Algorithmic Discrimination: A Framework and Approach to Auditing & Measuring the Impact of Race-Targeted Digital Advertising. McIlwain is the founder of the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies, and is Board President at Data & Society Research Institute. He was recently appointed to the U.S. National Committee For CODATA, and serves on the executive committee as co-chair of the ethics panel for the International Panel on the Information Environment.
Dr. Tiera Tanksley
Dr. Tiera Tanksley is an educational research scholar whose work examines the socioemotional, mental health and academic impacts of digital and artificially intelligent technologies on Black youth. Her scholarship, which theorizes a critical race technology theory (CRTT) in education, examines anti-Blackness as the “default setting” of schools and school-based technologies. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist, and rewrite racially biased technologies to produce more-just and joyous digital experiences for Communities of Color across the diaspora. In 2020, Dr. Tanksley founded the Race, Abolition and Artificial Intelligence summer program - a critical science and technology program that prepares young people to have more critical, agentic and algorithmically-conscious relationships with digital technologies that exist within and beyond the educational setting.
Dr. Gloria Washington
Dr. Washington is an empathetic technology researcher that focuses on the intersection of human-centered computing, affective computing, and biometrics. She likes to say her research seeks to give voices to the underserved and marginalized by asking questions like: how can technology impact positive human emotions while reducing systematic racism and barriers to equity and how can technology build lasting social impact through requiring persons to feel empathy...not just look away?
She is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Howard University in Washington, DC. She runs the Affective Biometrics Lab with her bright students. Check out the cool projects we do within ABL. Take a listen to her National Geographic Interview on AI Bias!
