Eyes Cool Podcast

In the final episode of the season, we discuss Jenny Odell's How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.  How can we reclaim control over our most precious resource in the 21st-century information economy: attention? Odell theorizes withdrawal, refusal, and self determination an puts the digital attention economy within the larger context of human history and ecology. 

Then, at the end of the first season, our host reflects on the end of season one and teaching with podcasts! 

This week we discuss Amy Lonetree's 2012 book, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. Lonetree, who is an enrolled citizen of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, discusses how museums can shed centuries of colonial violence at the core of their collecting and display practices by centering Indigenous worldviews and ways of knowing. She also discusses Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums, or TLAM, a specialized area of libraries and archives that UW-Madison iSchool staff and faculty have been involved in for over a decade.  

This podcast is produced in Madison, Wisconsin where University of Wisconsin–Madison rests in the ancestral land of the Ho-Chunk Nation, the People of the Big Voice, who have called this place Teejop (day-JOPE) for time immemorial. We as a university community continue to create and build upon our partnerships with the 12 First Nations of Wisconsin. We as a state university respect the inherent sovereignty and unique legal status, as affirmed and set forth in state and federal law, of the First Nations of Wisconsin.

This week we discuss Michelle Caswell's Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia. Then a discussion of the prod-Democracy protests in Hong Kong and how the tech industry has been involved. Closed out by a conversation about digital humanities and book history in the UW-Madison Special Collections library. 

On this week's pod we discuss Melissa Adler's Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge (Fordham 2017, https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823276363/cruising-the-library/). From there, we learn about the Madison LGBTQ Archive and the Madison LGBTQ Oral History Project. Finally, a look at parent challenges of LGBTQ books in school libraries. 

Misogyny in tech industries and the information professions isn't an accident. It was created and has a long history. And it comes with great costs to individual people and society at large. This week the pod's main segment is on Mar Hick's award-winning 2018 book Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing.  

.A look at Sarah T. Roberts' new book Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media.

Mark Zuckerberg went before Congress last week and tried to defend facebook's positions on privacy, truth in targeted advertising, and cryptocurrency. And this week we're reading Siva Vaidhyanathan's Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. 

When did you first feel represented by the media you read and viewed? A group of students sit down to discuss Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's new book, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games. Episode also features an interview with iSchool professor Rebekah Willett whose work focuses on youth and media. Rounding out the episode is a look at the Wisconsin Book Festival.

Show Notes

On Being Included:

Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2012). 

Sara Ahmed: The Institution as Usual: Diversity Work as Data Collection 

Solid Ground, Definition & Analysis of Institutional Racism 

Current Events:

Mettler, K. (2019, April 14). A black college student went looking for free food. He ended up pinned down by campus officers. The Washington Post. 

Cutlup, C. (2019, April 19). Black columbia student restrained by campus security [Video]. The New York Times.

Peet, L. (2019, April 22). Columbia student physically restrained by security in Barnard library. Library Journal.

Jaschik, S. (2019, April 15). Entering campus building while black. Inside Higher Ed.

Umanah, U. (2019, May 3). How a Columbia student’s run in with Barnard cops is breeding intercampus resentment. Observer.

Raum, M. (2019, April 20). In defense of Barnard Public Safety. The Columbia Beacon. 

iSchool:

https://news.wisc.edu/report-uw-madison-should-expand-computing-efforts/

Resources

Bystander Intervention Tips and Strategies. National Sexual Violence Resource Center. 2018.

ActWise (UW-Madison University Health Services Sexual Violence Bystander Intervention Program, replaces Green Dot)

Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment (PAVE, UW-Madison student organization focused on violence prevention)

https://www.shatteringthesilence.org/

24-Hour Crisis Services (UW-Madison University Health Services)

Show Notes

content warning: In this episode, hosts read the content of an anti-semitic tweet in order to analyze how AI bots learn and repeat racist language. 

Sources Referenced in Podcast

Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim code. Polity Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/WISC/detail.action?docID=5820427

Vincent, J. (2016, March 24). Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist

Connor, J. (2019, April 19). Racial profiling or nah? TSA scanners are singling out black women.The Root. https://www.theroot.com/racial-profiling-or-nah-tsa-scanners-are-singling-out-1834164809

Benjamin, R. TEDx Talks. (2015, February 5). From park bench to lab bench: What kind of future are we designing? [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/_8RrX4hjCr0

Oluo, I. (2018). So You Want to Talk About Race. Seal Press.

Additional Resources

Corcoran, N. (2019, April 26). Twitter won’t autoban neo-Nazis because the filters may ban GOP politicians. Yahoo. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/twitter-won-t-autoban-neo-193850606.html

Hern, A. (2019, March 13). The racism of technology - and why driverless cars could be the most dangerous example yet. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2019/mar/13/driverless-cars-racist