Freedom Dreaming in the Digital: How Black Youth Design Abolitionist Technologies for Hope, Healing and Futurity

Dr. Tiera Tanksley, UCLA Post Doctoral Fellow & Public Voices Fellow with the Op Ed Project and the MacArthur Foundation

Thursday, March 21, 2024 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM EDT
Merten Hall, 1203

This presentation will highlight the experiences of 3 cohorts of Black high school students who participated in a 5 week critical race technology summer program at UCLA, called “Race, Abolition and AI.” The goal of the course is to foster students’ ability to critically examine the ubiquity of anti-Black racism within socio-technical architectures (e.g. code, data, algorithms, etc.) of artificially intelligent technologies. In addition to discussing material and discursive consequences of algorithmic anti-blackness within AI, 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 sociotechnical freedom dreams of the youth in this study, and take a closer look at how they (re)designed anti-Black AI systems to center Black hope, healing and futurity as the new “default settings” of digital tech.

If you can't attend in person, you can attend virtually by signing up at this link.