Data & Society

Meredith D. Clark, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the Media Studies department at the University of Virginia. Her professional journalism background informs her primary research on the relationships between Black communities and news media in social media spaces. Her secondary research in critical journalism studies addresses questions of systemic racism in U.S. news media, with a focus on culture and processes in print and digital newsrooms. Her current work contextualizes Black Americans’ use of Twitter to create digital counter-narratives to mainstream news coverage of Black lived experiences as contemporary forms of resistance.

Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY, where they also serve as Chair of the Gender Studies and Global Black Studies Programs. Their work stages encounters between Black study, queer theory, media, and art. Their research focuses on networked intimacies and messy computational entanglements as they interface with QTPOC lifeworlds.

Algorithmic impact assessments have emerged as a centerpiece of the conversation about algorithmic governance. Impact assessments integrate many of the chief tools of algorithmic governance (e.g., auditing, end-to-end governance frameworks, ethics reviews) and speak to the challenges of algorithmic justice, equity, and community redress. Impact assessment (or similar accountability mechanisms) are at the core of recent headlines about procurement practices in Canada, leaked regulatory proposals in the EU, and new efforts to regulate the tech industry in the US. But do impact assessments promise too much? Multiple national and state governments have instituted, or are considering, requirements for impact assessment of algorithmic systems, but there is a surprisingly wide range of structures for these regulations.

Sarah Chander leads EDRi's policy work on AI and non-discrimination with respect to digital rights. She is interested in building thoughtful, resilient movements and she looks to make links between the digital and other social justice movements. Sarah has experience in racial and social justice, previously she worked in advocacy at the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), on a wide range of topics including anti-discrimination law and policy, intersectional justice, state racism, racial profiling and police brutality. Comment end

Fenwick McKelvey is an Associate Professor in Information and Communication Technology Policy in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. He studies digital politics and policy. He is the author of Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) winner of the 2019 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Award. He is co-author of The Permanent Campaign: New Media, New Politics (Peter Lang, 2012) with Greg Elmer and Ganaele Langlois.

Jacob (Jake) Metcalf, PhD, is a researcher at Data & Society, where he is a member of the AI on the Ground Initiative, and works on an NSF-funded multisite project, Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research (PERVADE). For this project, he studies how data ethics practices are emerging in environments that have not previously grappled with research ethics, such as industry, IRBs, and civil society organizations. His recent work has focused on the new organizational roles that have developed around AI ethics in tech companies.

Brittany Smith is the Policy Director at Data & Society. Prior to joining Data & Society, Brittany worked at DeepMind and Google in policy, ethics and human rights roles. Brittany also currently serves on the Advisory Board of JUST AI, a humanities-led network inviting new ways of thinking about data and AI ethics. Brittany graduated from Northwestern University and the London School of Economics.

In the final episode of our season, “Becoming Data,” scholars Sareeta Amrute and Emiliano Treré join our host, Natalie Kerby, to discuss the concept and lived reality of racial capitalism. The episode explores how data-centric systems perpetuate racial capitalism, and how different communities, particularly in the Global South, have resisted this datafication.

Sareeta Amrute (@SareetaAmrute) is an anthropologist, associate professor at the University of Washington, and Director of Research at Data & Society.

Emiliano Treré (@EmilianoTrere) is a senior lecturer in Media Ecologies and Social Transformation and co-director of the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University.

"Becoming Data" is co-produced by Data & Society and Public Books.

Scholars Laura Forlano and Ranjit Singh join our host, Natalie Kerby, to explore the different infrastructures that data interacts with and flows through. Whose values get embedded into the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives? How are these data infrastructures complicating what it means to be human?

Ranjit Singh (@datasociety) is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Data & Society.

Laura Forlano (@laura4lano) is associate professor at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology.

"Becoming Data" is co-produced by Data & Society and Public Books.

Over the past year, Covid-19 has exacerbated suffering across every section of life. Harassment and hostility, work pressure, and the strain of a pandemic, along with trauma from ongoing racism, sexism, and other discrimination, have taken a toll on our mental health. Until now, little research has been done on the impact of Covid-19 on the tech workforce. Project Include surveyed almost 3,000 people and interviewed dozens more about the shift to remote online workplaces. In their latest report, “Remote work since Covid-19 is exacerbating harm: What companies need to know and do”, they take an intersectional lens and data equity-focused approach to understand specifically who has been harmed, how they were harmed, and how to fix it.

Speaker Bios

One of Silicon Valley's leading advocates for fairness and ethics, Ellen Pao is also a long-time entrepreneur and tech investor. Her landmark gender discrimination case against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins sparked other women, especially women of color, to fight harassment and discrimination in what’s been called the "Pao Effect.” Currently, Ellen is CEO of nonprofit Project Include, which uses data-based, practical solutions and recommendations to give everyone a fair chance to succeed. At reddit, she was the first major social platform CEO to ban revenge porn, unauthorized nude photos, and cross-platform harassment, with other social media sites quickly following suit. Ellen has written and spoken extensively, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Recode, and WIRED. Her book “Reset” recounts her long-time advocacy of diversity and inclusion and her own experiences with discrimination.

Yang Hong works as Shoshin Insights, an in(ter)dependent data and machine learning consultancy with a justice-centered approach for societal issues. She’s worked on the global refugee crisis, hearing aids, data poverty, climate justice, tech equity, and more. As a community builder, she has tended to gardens such as Work On Climate, Activist Teahouse, and South Park Commons. Yang is a creative apprentice to lifelong practices of tea and collective liberation.

McKensie Mack (pronouns: they/them) is a trilingual anti-oppression consultant, researcher, facilitator, and the founder & CEO of MMG. MMG is a global social justice organization that specializes in organizational change management through a lens of data equity; helping people transform culture, practices, and policies at the intersection of race, gender, class, disability, and LGBTQ+ identity. Their clients are currently based all over the world in the U.S., the UK, France, South Africa, Nigeria, Germany, Spain, and Peru. McKensie is the former inaugural Executive Director of Art+Feminism, one of the largest gender equity focused projects on Wikipedia.