In the United States, Black maternal health is in steep decline. Despite increased awareness and better data about the depths of racial health disparities, outcomes for Black birthing people remain poor. At the same time, a revolution in healthcare technologies is underway, and as they provide care at the frontlines of a crisis, birth workers are figuring out how to make digital health technologies work for them and their patients.

In "Establishing Vigilant Care: Data Infrastructures and the Black Birthing Experience," Joan Mukogosi explores how digital health technologies can produce new forms of harm for Black birthing people — by exposing Black patients to carceral systems, creating information silos that impede interoperability, and failing to meet privacy standards. By paying close attention to how clinical contexts and their associated digital technologies impact how care is delivered, this research offers a glimpse into possibilities for improved cohesion between digital health technologies and birth work.

Learn more about Data & Society at datasociety.net.

Generative AI has seeped into many corners of our lives, and threatens to upend the economy as we know it, from education to the film industry. How do workers’ encounters with it differ from their experiences with other systems of automation? How are they similar, and how might this help us understand the shape and stakes of this latest technology?

In this three-part Databite series, Data & Society’s Labor Futures program brings together creators, platform workers, call center workers, coders, therapists, and performers for conversations with technologists, researchers, journalists, and economists to complicate the story of generative AI. By centering workers’ experiences and interrogating the relationship between generative AI and underexplored issues of hierarchy, recognition, and adaptation in labor, these interdisciplinary conversations will uncover how new technological systems are impacting worker agency and power.

Learn more about the speakers, series, and references at datasociety.net.

This public keynote was part of Trust Issues, a Data & Society workshop organized by the Trustworthy Infrastructures program. That team includes Sareeta Amrute, Livia Garofalo, Robyn Caplan, Joan Mukogosi, Tiara Roxanne, and Kadija Ferryman.

Purchase your own copy of Queer Data Studies here: https://bookshop.org/a/14284/9780295751979.

Generative AI has seeped into many corners of our lives, and threatens to upend the economy as we know it, from education to the film industry. How do workers’ encounters with it differ from their experiences with other systems of automation? How are they similar, and how might this help us understand the shape and stakes of this latest technology?

In this three-part Databite series, Data & Society’s Labor Futures program brings together creators, platform workers, call center workers, coders, therapists, and performers for conversations with technologists, researchers, journalists, and economists to complicate the story of generative AI. By centering workers’ experiences and interrogating the relationship between generative AI and underexplored issues of hierarchy, recognition, and adaptation in labor, these interdisciplinary conversations will uncover how new technological systems are impacting worker agency and power.

Learn more about the speakers, series, and references at datasociety.net.

About the Series

Generative AI has seeped into many corners of our lives, and threatens to upend the economy as we know it, from education to the film industry. How do workers’ encounters with it differ from their experiences with other systems of automation? How are they similar, and how might this help us understand the shape and stakes of this latest technology?

In this three-part Databite series, Data & Society’s Labor Futures program brings together creators, platform workers, call center workers, coders, therapists, and performers for conversations with technologists, researchers, journalists, and economists to complicate the story of generative AI. By centering workers’ experiences and interrogating the relationship between generative AI and underexplored issues of hierarchy, recognition, and adaptation in labor, these interdisciplinary conversations will uncover how new technological systems are impacting worker agency and power.

Learn more about the speakers, series, and references at datasociety.net.