Provincializing AI – Program
Sat., March 7, 2026 at the iSchool, 614 E. Daniel Street, 4th Fl, Multipurpose Rm
Overview:
The entangled rise of a techno-supremacist AI industry and political fascism around the world has driven what organizers and researchers in critical computing might describe as a growing crisis of criticism. We are confronted on the one hand with the forces of epistemological derangement [1] that homogenize cultures of information and aim to displace, disrupt or directly attack critical thinking. On the other hand, traditional knowledge institutions seem intent on sustaining “normal” operations in the wake of compounding political, economic, cultural, and environmental crises. Here, we find ourselves grappling with existential questions around critical practice.
What role/place for criticism still remains, given a world suffused with political and technological upheavals targeting critical thinking itself? How might we work to reclaim the work of criticism, even as we better account for the unmet promise of criticism (especially from the academy) to center the voices/concerns/work of everyday publics, including in relation to technology? And how might collective forms of public resistance and refusal that still independently emerge and persist – often at the local level – provide hints of other trajectories, genres and futures for revived critical pluralisms?
We anticipate presentations that highlight a past or existing method/strategy/project of critical computing [2], accounting for how they shaped resistant practices, while also manifesting new contradictions that curtailed critical potentials, including around grounding more inclusive and participatory knowledge practice. Inspired by feminist “heavy processing” in data practice [3], we hope these analyses can underscore the diverse methods, traditions, genres and frames that our work in critical computing draws from, while also accounting for their limits in (or under-tapped potentials for) sustaining reforms in order to imagine paths forward. Through such layered accountings, we hope to work towards reclaiming the critical potentials latent in critical computing methods – and to move our work from critical inquiry towards grounded commitments, restorative practice and situated forms of epistemic pluralism needed for an inclusive and accountable critical AI agenda.
Agenda:
| Time | Program | Description |
| 9-9:15A | Opening remarks | |
| 9:15-9:30A | Self intros | Participants/Audience of invited faculty |
| 9:30-10:30A | Session 1 | 1. Fred Turner, “Technofascism, or: What should we call what’s happening?” 2. Molly Steenson, “Minnesota Nice” 3. Danielle Chynoweth, “Remaking Democracy: Heuristic Interventions Facing Contradictions in Media and Technology” 4. Brett Zehner, “Critical and/or Compliant” |
| 10:30-11A | Discussion | |
| 11-11:15A | Coffee Break | |
| 11:15-12:15 | Session | 1. Karrie Karahalios, “Auditing AI” 2. Janet Vertesi, “We already got AI right – When we sent it to Mars” 3. Ben Grosser, “From Amplification to Demotivation: Defusing the AI Interface” 4. Stuart Geiger, “Critical Infrastructures for Making AI Otherwise: Alternative Tools, Practices, and Compute Regimes” |
| 12:15-12:45 | Discussion | |
| 12:45-1:30 | Lunch | |
| 1:30-2:30 | Session 3 | 1. Jeff Yost, “Routines of Resistances: Mobilizing Memory and Archives in An Age of Generative AI” 2. Becca Lewis, “Tech worker refusal: from the Polaroid Workers Revolutionary Movement to the Tech Workers Coalition” 3. Yousif Hassan, “Orality, African Language, and Unsettling LLMs” 4. Steven Renderos and Teresa Basilio, “The Right to Say No: How Communities Are Writing Their Own AI Criticism” |
| 2:30-3P | Discussion | |
| 3-3:15P | Wrap up |
Speaker Bios:
Teresa Basilio Gaztambide is a native of Puerto Rico, who migrated to Florida with her family at the age of 7. She has been a proud Brooklyn resident since 1996. She is the Senior Political Education Director at MediaJustice creating programming, curriculum and tools to advance our ability to understand and respond to the media and technology systems today. Prior to her work at MediaJustice, Teresa was the Deputy Director of the Resilient Communities Program at New America, where she ensured the successful completion of five neighborhood wireless networks built, maintained, and governed by local residents aimed at providing critical communications infrastructure for resiliency, emergency preparedness, and community organizing goals in flood-prone, hurricane Sandy impacted areas of New York City. As Co-Executive Director of Global Action Project (GAP), she provided executive leadership for nationally recognized social justice youth media organizations with a mission to work with young people most affected by injustice to build the knowledge, tools, and relationships needed for community power, cultural expression, and political change. Teresa is also a filmmaker. She is currently working on her first feature documentary “Everybody Wants a Revolution,” tracing the history of the U.S. branch of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party through the lives of those who were radically changed through their participation.
Anita Say Chan is a scholar and educator dedicated to feminist and decolonial approaches to technology, and is a Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book on the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism was released by MIT Press in 2014. She is founder and director of the Community Data Clinic at UIUC, is a Faculty Affiliate with the Data & Society Research Institute, and current Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute. Her second book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, has been featured in more than two dozen news outlets since its publication in 2025.
Danielle Chynoweth has been a community organizer for 30 years. As Cunningham Township Supervisor her office provides the last safety net for the lowest-income residents of Urbana, IL. From 2014-2016 Danielle was the Organizing Director at the Center for Media Justice, where she coordinated a national network to win campaigns for net neutrality, prison phone justice, and broadband expansion for low-income families. In 2009 she managed the national campaign that won passage of the Local Community Radio Act. In 2012, she managed the primary campaign for Carol Ammons for State Representative. From 2001-2008, she served on Urbana City Council, spearheading the creation of Urbana’s Public Arts Program, living wage ordinance, and Civilian Review Board of Police. For 14 years she was Vice-President and partner of Pixo Tech. Danielle co-founded the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, which has sponsored over 60 international media justice projects. She is co-author of Remaking Democracy: How We Make the World We Want (Common Notions Press 2026).
Stuart Gieger is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego with appointments in the Department of Communication and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. He is also affiliate faculty in Science Studies, Computer Science & Engineering, Computational Social Science, and the Institute for Practical Ethics, where I lead IPE’s Working Group on Data Governance & Accountability. His work is on the social, cultural, political, and economic aspects of quantification, data science, automation, and AI. He has long focused on the role of AI in the governance and moderation of social media platforms and online communities, but also cares about issues like fairness, privacy, accountability, and labor in many application domains where AI is being deployed. Finally, he take the institutions of scientific and technological research as his object of study, asking how the disciplines and professions are changing around or by quantification, data science, automation, and AI. His current research is around societal risks, impacts, alignment, and deployment of small and large pretrained language models, where he is working to imagine how AI could be otherwise.
Ben Grosser investigates how the designs of platform interfaces—from social media to AI chatbots— shape human behavior, desire, and culture. Through tactics such as software recomposition, interface reduction, and radical reimagination, his artworks expose software’s hidden politics and propose alternatives that restore user agency. Recent exhibitions include Centre Pompidou in Paris, Somerset House in London, ZKM in Karlsruhe, SXSW in Austin, and the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo. Grosser’s projects have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. The Guardian proclaimed his film ORDER OF MAGNITUDE to be a definitive artwork of the 21st century, “a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times.” RTÉ dubbed him an “antipreneur, ” and Slate called his work “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.” His artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface, and Investigative Aesthetics, as well as volumes centered on media art practice such as Electronic Literature and Digital Art. Grosser is Professor of New Media at the University of Illinois (USA), and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Yousif Hassan is an assistant professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and School of Information. His research focuses on the social, economic, and political implications of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, natural language processing, blockchain among other technologies with a particular emphasis on technoscientific innovation, development, and the digital economy. Hassan’s interest is at the intersection of social justice and technology and innovation policy. His most recent work investigates the development of AI and its innovation ecosystem across multiple African countries focusing on AI, data governance, the data economy, and the sociotechnical knowledge production and innovation practices of governments, scientists, and the tech industry.
Karrie Karahalios is an internationally recognized computer scientist whose research bridges computing, society, and systems design. In September 2025, she rejoined the MIT Media Lab as a Full Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, bringing a distinguished record of scholarship focused on algorithmic accountability, human-computer interaction, and responsible technology. Dr. Karahalios holds four degrees from MIT: an SB and ME in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and an SM and PhD from the Media Lab, completed in 2004. Her doctoral work helped launch an interdisciplinary career that integrates technical expertise with social, legal, and ethical inquiry. Prior to her return to MIT, she served as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She held affiliate appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the School of Information Sciences, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She also co-founded and co-directed the Center for Just Infrastructures, a cross-disciplinary initiative focused on inclusive, community-centered technology development.
Becca Lewis is an interdisciplinary scholar who examines the rise of right-wing politics in Silicon Valley and online. She holds a PhD in Communication Theory and Research from Stanford University and an MSc in Social Science from the University of Oxford. Her work has been published in academic journals including New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and American Behavioral Scientist, and in news outlets such as The Guardian and Business Insider. She previously worked as a researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she published the organization’s flagship reports on media manipulation, disinformation, and right-wing digital media. In 2022, she served as an expert witness in the defamation lawsuit brought against Alex Jones by the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim.
Steven Renderos (he/him) is the Executive Director of MediaJustice, a national racial justice organization that advances the media and technology rights of people of color. For the past decade, Steven has led campaigns that lowered the cost of prison phone calls, secured net neutrality rules, and got Donald Trump kicked off of Twitter. Steven is a regular commentator on media, technology, and racial justice, appearing in publications like the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian. Steven was a 2013 Rainbow PUSH Coalition Top Inspirational and Engaged Leader by and a 2020 Rockwood Leadership Institute fellow. He was a 2020 advisor for Just Futures Law’s Take Back Tech Fellowship, and serves on the board of Americans for Financial Reform and Upturn. Steven’s interest in media justice began in 2010 when he co-founded Radio Pocho, a radio program that still airs on KFAI in Minneapolis, which features a variety of genres that reflect the diverse musical influences of Latinx people. He is the creator and producer of Bring Receipts, a politics and pop culture podcast that launched in 2021, which he hosts alongside Brandi Collins-Dexter. A native of Los Angeles, Steven grew up in an immigrant household at the height of anti-immigrant fervor in California.
Molly Steenon is the President and CEO of the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, a nearly hundred year-old museum, mansion, and cultural center in Minneapolis that explores migration, identity, and belonging, and enduring cultural ties to Sweden. She’s also the Honorary Consul for Sweden for Minnesota and the upper Midwest. Before coming to ASI, she spent 20 years in higher education including in university leadership and as a tenured faculty member. At Carnegie Mellon University, she was CMU’s Vice Provost for Faculty and Senior Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine Arts, and was the inaugural K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics & Computational Technologies for my AI research, and an associate professor in the School of Design.
Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, where he studies the impact of new media technologies on American culture since World War II. He is the author of five books, including most recently, with Mary Beth Meehan, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar at New York University, a Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar at McGill University, and twice a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a journalist for ten years. He continues to write regularly for newspapers and magazines in America and Europe.
Janet Vertesi is associate professor of sociology at Princeton University. She has spent two decades studying NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams as a sociologist of science and technology, examining issues such as data sharing, remote collaboration, and work with AI-enabled robots. She is also a conscientious objector to the personal data economy and resists the harms of privacy-invasive systems through her well-known “opt out” projects: technical and evasive maneuvers to escape capture and envision a different technological future. Vertesi is solo author of the books Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars and Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams (University of Chicago Press), editor of the groundbreaking collection digitalSTS (Princeton Press) and the MIT Press Infrastructures series, and has published papers in top-ranked venues in the sociology of science and technology and human-computer interaction. She is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, and serves on the advisory boards of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, Microsoft Research, Yahoo!, and NASA.
Jeffrey Yost is Director, Charles Babbage Institute for Computing, Information, and Culture and Research Professor, HSTM, Univ. of Minnesota. He has published nine books, including Just Code: Power, Inequality, and the Political Economy of IT (Routledge, 2025; co-eds. w. G. Con Diaz); Making IT Work: A History of the Computer Services Industry(MIT Press, 2017); Computer: A History of the Information Machine (co-authored w 5 others), and FastLane: Managing Science in the Internet World (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2016; w Tom Misa). He is a past EiC of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and has co-edits a book series, Studies in Computing and Culture, for Johns Hopkins U. Press. He is also the founder and principal of Enterprise History, a business and organizational history consultancy specializing in researching and writing books, booklets, articles, and conducting oral histories for clients. On contracts or grants his business and tech history work has been supported by NSF, DOE, Sloan, IBM, IEEE, ACM, Unisys, UMN Computer Science, and others.
Brett Zehner is a Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and Communications in the Department of Communications, Drama, and Film at the University of Exeter. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Ohio State University in Comparative Cultural Studies and the Translational Data Analytics Institute. He holds a PhD from Brown University and an MFA from UC San Diego. His research focuses on Critical AI Studies from a cultural studies perspective. HIs current book project – Capital and White Anxiety – is a monograph theorizing the relationship between whiteness (as a cultural logic of racial capitalism) and the long history of artificial intelligence. He argues that whiteness is the social a priori to the behavioral dispossession necessary to create artificial intelligence in the early 20th century. He then argues that whiteness insulates itself from social movements and eases economic crises in the mid-20th century by declaring itself the general equivalent of so-called cybernetic economies. He ends the book by analyzing the present collapse of white anxiety into far-right extremism and the coming economic crisis of AI model collapse. He argue that these three historical movements of whiteness provide a genealogy of the collapse of the AI model. The hope of this book is to map the shifting grounds for anti-racist and anti-capitalist action against AI realism.
Participant/Audience Bios:
Luvell Anderson is a Professor of Philosophy. He is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language and The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race. He has published several academic articles on racial humor, racial slurs, hate speech, and hermeneutical impasses. He has also written for venues like The New York Times, Boston Review, HR.com, and Mediapost and has been interviewed on several podcasts. He is currently finishing up a book on The Ethics of Racial Humor, which will be published by Oxford University Press. He is also co-host of the podcast SNL101, a podcast for educators who want to use sketches from Saturday Night Live in the classroom. His latest book project is a philosophical meditation on Dave Chappelle, confrontation, and the relationship between humor, language, and freedom.
Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan (Sharath Chandra Ram) is an Assistant Professor of New Media + Design for Responsible Innovation. His research concerns the design of cognitive media interfaces, with the capacity to augment our perception of information in the surrounding world using multimodal cues, especially auditory and haptic interfaces that can augment visual and graphical mediums. His current research trajectory involves efforts that extend to more than a decade of being involved in community media networks, grassroot technology activism and communications technology design. This included setting up a technology policy and community lab at the Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India and involvement in several networks in South Asia and South America (HONF Foundation in Indonesia, Bricolabs, Plato Hedro in Colombia, to name a few). As a licensed amateur radio broadcaster (callsign: VU3HPA) he continues to extend his creative technology and media arts practice as a ‘transmission artist’ in various international curations and forums, to engage the public while addressing contexts that bridge the worlds of media, science and tech policy.
Amanda Ciafone is an Associate Professor in the College of Media. She is a cultural historian of capitalism, especially interested in culture industries and the role of the media in constructing meaning around economic and social relations. Her research and teaching is at the nexus of various fields including cultural history and cultural studies of the United States in the world, especially Latin America; political economy; culture and media industries; and social movements. Professor Ciafone’s first book, Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation (University of California, 2019), examines The Coca-Cola Company and the politics, cultural representations, and social movements around the multinational corporation. Additional research and teaching materials can be found in the Scalar-produced multimedia digital companion to Counter-Cola. She is currently at work on a new book project on the relationship between technology and old age, as part of the new, growing field of humanistic studies of aging. Professor Ciafone co-edits the University of Illinois books series, The Geopolitics of Information, which publishes critical studies of global media and political economy.
Kate Clancy is a Professor of Anthropology. Her research, teaching, and service all focus on reproductive justice. Broadly speaking she is interested in how environmental stressors (e.g., those related to energetics, immune function, and/or psychosocial stress) influence the physiology of menstruating people. Her work has had broad implications for the public and for science: she has provided Congressional testimony, co-authored a National Academies report on sexual harassment of women in STEM, and has written a book on misunderstandings of the menstrual cycle (out in April, more here). She has consulted on two Congressional bills on sexual harassment in science (H.R. 6161, H.R. 36). She has given talks and run workshops at national and international events, and provided expertise on legal cases involving sexual harassment in science. She also co-directs a project that looks at how menstrual experiences are under-explored in vaccine trials, particularly the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, and how this medical ignorance runs the risk of promoting vaccine hesitancy and refusal.
Camille Cobb is Assistant Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. Her research focuses on usable security and privacy. Her work aims to elucidate and address users’ security and privacy concerns, emphasizing how many perspectives have been historically left out of conversations about security and privacy.
Rochelle Gutierrez is a Professor in the College of Education and member of the National Academy of Education. Her scholarship focuses on issues of identity and power in mathematics education, paying particular attention to how race, class, and language affect teaching and learning. Through in-depth analyses of effective teaching/learning communities and longitudinal studies of developing and practicing teachers, her work challenges deficit views of students who are Latine, Black, and Indigenous and suggests that mathematics teachers need to be prepared with much more than just content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, or knowledge of diverse students if they are going to be successful. They need political knowledge. Her current research projects focus upon: developing in pre-service teachers the knowledge and disposition to teach powerful mathematics to urban students; the roles of uncertainty, tensions, and “Nepantla” in teaching; and the political knowledge (and forms of creative insubordination) that mathematics teachers need to effectively “rehumanize” mathematics in an era of high-stakes education. She also builds upon Indigenous principles and has argued for a new form of mathematics where humans are no longer centered. This form of mathematics is referred to as living mathematx.
James Hay is a Professor and Interim Department Head of Media & Cinema Studies in the College of Media. His research concerns a wide variety of media and contexts—from popular media of the 20th century (cinema, television, telephony, radio) to “new media” and forms of “media convergence” to technologies and appliances that are not usually considered “media” (such as cars, buildings, clothes, garage doors, and refrigerators). The forms of analysis that he typically uses are interdisciplinary, and informed by a wide variety of theories at the intersection of studies about citizenship and governmentality, media/space (with an interest in architecture, urbanism, design, and geography), Science Studies, and Cultural Studies. Although much of his research is about the U.S. context, some of his research concerns “global” media networks, and some has focused on Italy and Europe.
Laila Hussein Moustafa is an Associate Professor of Library Administration and the Middle East and North Africa subject specialist in the International Area Studies Library. She first came to the United States to attend a Human Rights Advocates Training Program at Columbia University in 1997, and subsequently worked as a consultant with Middle East Watch, and then with Human Rights First. She earned an MA in Near Eastern Studies at New York University, and an MLS at Long Island University in Information Management. She is interested in digitization and archives.
Rob Kar is a Professor of Law and Philosophy. He is an internationally recognized scholar of contract law, philosophy of law, moral and legal philosophy, and the evolution of legal systems and complex social structure (including modern markets). He draws on methods that include not only traditional legal studies but also philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, game theory, economics, neuroscience, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and comparative cultural and legal studies. These methods inform his research into what law is and how it functions in people’s lives.
Brian Jordan Jefferson is an Associate Professor in Geography and Geographic Information Science. He studies political theory, political economy, and science & engineering. He is working on a book that explores the integration of cybernetics into U.S. statecraft and its wider political consequences. His first book, Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020.
Kate McDowell is a Professor in the School of Information Sciences. She regularly teaches both storytelling and data storytelling courses and researches and publishes in the areas of storytelling as information research, social justice storytelling, and what library storytelling can teach the information sciences about data storytelling. Dr. McDowell has worked with regional, national, and international nonprofits including the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO, part of WHO) and the Public Library Association (PLA). Her nationally-funded project Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians with co-PI Dr. Matthew Turk is under development.
Judith Pintar is a teaching professor at the School of Information Sciences and serves as the director of the Game Studies and Design Program. She is a sociologist and game designer whose research and teaching interests include narrative design, game studies, and gameful pedagogies, which she pursues through the E-Literatures & Literacies Lab (EL3).
Gilberto Rosas is chair of the department of Latina/Latino studies and a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. With interests in “the state,” racism and its broad complexities, critical ethnography, and experimental writing, Rosas is author of the award-winning Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier (Duke University Press, 2012) and the recently published Unsettling: The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the US-Mexico Border (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). He is also the editor of The Border Reader along with Mireya Loza (Duke University Press, 2023). Professor Rosas is active Immigrant Rights movements both locally and nationally, and has given expert testimony on behalf of people in asylum and related legal proceedings, and has been active in an innovative scholarship collaboration, addressing health inequities.
Dede Ruggles is a Professor in the School of Architecture, and the Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. An historian of Islamic art and architecture, Dr. Ruggles’ research examines the medieval landscape of Islamic Spain and South Asia and the complex interrelationship of Islamic culture with Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism and the precise ways that religion and culture are often conflated in the study of these. She is the author of two award-winning books on gardens: Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (2000), and Islamic Gardens and Landscapes (2008). Additionally she has edited or co-edited numerous works, including Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (2000), the award-winning Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision (2007), Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (2007), Intangible Heritage Embodied (2009), On Location (2012), and Islamic Art and Visual Culture: An Anthology of Sources (2011).
Sharifa Sultana is a Responsible AI and human-AI interaction (HAI) researcher, and an Assistant Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. She investigates appropriate ways to co-develop AI with communities. She has been working with rural communities in Bangladesh and immigrants in North America for the last ten years. She uses both quantitative and qualitative (ethnographic) techniques and ethics frameworks to study and design AI tools and systems. She is a member of the AI & Trust Working Group for 2025–26 at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI) at the University of Toronto. She has remained a Facebook/Meta Fellow (2020-2022), while her research is supported by Meta and Jump ARCHES, DPI, and GIANT at UIUC, as well as the ICT Ministry, Bangladesh.
Acknowledgments:
Many thanks to Dede Ruggles and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the School of Information Sciences, and the Community Data Clinic for sponsoring this event, and to our team of PhD Students and UIUC staff, Bhavana Bheem, Julian Chin, Inyoung Jang, Jaime Keener, Jiwon Oh, Tai Wakabayashi, and Melissa Wilfley for their exceptional support throughout!
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[1] Thank you, Brett Zehner for this phrasing.
[2] The very origins of disciplines like science and technology studies (STS) and human computer interaction (HCI), civic networks like Hull House, Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), and varied free software projects came to mind when drafting this.
[3] See Jasmine Rault and TL Cowan’s Heavy Processing (Punctum Books, 2024)