Institute for Intuition
Study Groups
Collective learning cohorts organized to support individuals in deepening connection to their intuition and practice through interdependent re-membering, studying, creating.
Black Digital Technologies Reading Group
2023
Online
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SUM’MOR SCHOOL 2023 was an ad hoc collective learning initiative developed by ITS-IN-SCOPE to hold space for our community members to share in study with one another — free from the nonsense of academia, higher education, and imperial school systems. Our aim was shared liberation through Self-education, and we’re deeply inspired by the spirit of radical community education efforts like SNCC Freedom Schools, Cassandra Classrooms, and the Black Panther Party’s Intercommunal Youth Institute.
Black Digital Technologies Reading Group was one of the study groups piloted and stewarded by Dr. Brooklyne Gipson.
This group will read and discuss emergent texts from Black scholars of Critical Race and Digital Studies. The goal is to acquire a deeper understanding of how critical perspectives on race, gender, and digital technology can help us better understand the current hyper-mediated moment we live in. Special attention will be paid to issues related to digital inequity, the spread of racialized misinformation/disinformation, emergent technologies (such as AI, large language modeling software, deep fakes, and facial recognition technology), as well as what’s at stake for Black people, indigenous people, and other people of color. We will conclude by reading Ruha Benjamin’s “Viral Justice” as an impetus for discussing interventions, the next steps, and the role of creativity and imagination in disrupting digital inequality.
As the facilitator for this discussion, Dr. Brooklyne Gipson will suggest readings. However, she will also meet with students before the class begins to discuss what’s covered in each reading and then co-create a syllabus that’s most relevant to the interests of the entire group.
Suggested readings include chapters from the following books:
Safiya Noble Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018)
Ruha Benjamin Race After Technology: The New Jim Code (2019)
Ruha Benjamin Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022)
Andre Brock Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020)
Catherine Knight Steele Digital Black Feminism (2022)
Legacy Russell Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020)
Raven Maragh Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age (forthcoming, 2023)
Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction (2016)