We Be Imagining

How does caste get articulated on the internet? Or where does caste creep in to our studies of media and technology? Can you dismantle Hindutva without dismantling caste? Black women organizers like Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie have emphasized police abolition in their work with survivors of sexual atrocities in the US, what are the overlaps and distinctions in how Dalit women activists are engaging with these political projects in the Indian context. This inaugural episode of season 4 for the We Be Imagining podcast interweaves commentary from Riya Singh, the founder of Dalit Women Fight, Murali Shanmugavelan, resarcher at Data and Society alongside some provocations from Thenmozhi Soundararajan of Equality Labs and the concluding plenary of the Dismantling Hindutva conference. 

Please write us at [email protected] with feedback on this episode or to share your perspective on caste and the digital :)

**Please note, there are some descriptions of sexual violence and killings within the episode due to the realities of caste violence and brahminism. 

Riya Singh is a doctoral researcher in Women & Gender Studies at Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi - Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University, Delhi. She is a part of Core Leadership Group in India’s single and largest Dalit women-led collective, Dalit Women Fight. She works on ground with the survivors of caste based atrocities of Dalit community  in six states of Northern India.

Murali Shanmugavelan isa Faculty Fellow, Race and Technology at Data and Society. He researches caste in media and communication studies and digital cultures. Murali is currently working on the re-manifestation of caste and social hierarchies in digital cultures such as hate speech and platform economies. At Data & Society, Murali’s work will scrutinise communication and technology studies from (anti)caste perspectives. His work will analyse everyday casteism on the Internet and develop actionable policy recommendations and build pedagogic content about caste in communications and technology studies.

Lightly Edited Transcript Available here and you can find out more about We Be Imagining on our website or @WeBeImagining on Twitter and IG. 

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImagining
Support Us: On Patreon
Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for Episode:
Dalit Women Fight
EQUALITY LABS
Caste-hate speech Report by Murali Shanmugavelan
Dismantling Global Hindutva
DGH: Multidisciplinary Perspectives Closing Statement
How to write anti-caste solidarity texts
Cast(e)ing Indian Media: Unsettling Secular Mythologies
Practice of Caste in USA - Series#1- Q&A with Dr. Balmurli Natrajan & Dr. Murali Shanmugavelan
Advocacy Group Fights India Caste System Discrimination in Silicon Valley
Trapped in Silicon Valley's Hidden Caste System | WIRED
Opinion | California's lawsuit against Cisco shines a light on caste discrimination in the US and around the world - The Washington Post
Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImagining
Support Us: On Patreon
Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman and Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

Who is responsible for safeguarding the biometric data of refugees collected in a humanitarian and mass atrocities context? The canonical justification for collecting biometric data in a humanitarian context is to mitigate the risk of fraud by recipients. However, this claim has been thoroughly debunked including because it assumes fraud is most prevalent among recipients rather than the organizations that operate as intermediaries between donors and aid recipients. What is driving this competition between the UNHCR and the World Food Program (WFP) to create and own the largest multinational biometric database? Zara Rahman joins the WBI show to discuss these questions with a focus on how the Rohingya have resisted digital identification schemes that violate their collective autonomy.

Zara Rahman is a researcher, writer and linguist based in Berlin, Germany, and working internationally. She’s currently the Deputy Director at The Engine Room, an international non-profit organisation strengthening the fight for social justice by supporting civil society to use technology and data in strategic, effective and responsible ways. 

**This episode was recorded April 1, 2021, prior to this report being released, but please note Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented that the UN shared Rohingya Data Without Informed Consent

Links for the Episode:

Myanmar coup: What is happening and why?
Black Lives Matter protesters aren’t being tracked with Covid-19 surveillance tech. Not yet
Rohingya refugees protest, strike against smart ID cards issued in Bangladesh camps
Bangladesh cuts access to mobile phone services for the Rohingya
When technology improves the lives of refugees
Biometrics in the Humanitarian Sector
Automating Inequality | Virginia Eubanks | Macmillan
Denied visibility in official data, millions of transgender Indians can't access benefits
4 Cultural, Social, and Legal Considerations | Biometric Recognition: Challenges and Opportunities
LiveCast Episode 13 Infant Identity Management – ID4Africa
How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual, Bouk
Rohingya Refugees Protest, Strike Against Smart ID Cards Issued in Bangladesh Camps
Burma: Amend Biased Citizenship Law
AP Exclusive 'Leave no Tigrayan': In Ethiopia, an ethnicity is erased By CARA ANNAa few
A fiduciary approach to child data governance
DHS/USCIS/PIA-081 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Information Data Share
Tested on millions Non-volunteers (Jordan EyeHood Technology)
Use of Biometric Data to Identify Terrorists: Best Practice or Risky Business?
Palantir and WFP partner to help transform global humanitarian delivery | World Food Programme
Palantir's partnership with the UN World Food Programme has humanitarians worried.
ID 2020 Agenda
Irresponsible Data Risks Registering Rohingya
The Biometric Assemblage: Surveillance, Experimentation, Profit, and the Measuring of Refugee Bodies - Mirca Madianou, 2019
Digital payments to refugees A pathway towards financial inclusion
Bangladesh Will Demand Biometric Data From All SIM Card Users
Sharifa Sultana

Zara Recommends 
Native American DNA — University of Minnesota Press
She Would Be King

Prior to COVID-19, a significant percentage of academic revenue –particularly in terms of New York University (NYU) and Columbia University– came from real estate. COVID-19 has jeopardized the security of those assets and underlined the importance of teaching staff in order to establish value for classes that are online for the same full tuition as in person learning. So why is Columbia University refusing to agree to the demands of the Graduate Student Workers Union? Why are graduate students who typically make below the Federal Poverty Line having their pay withheld by Columbia in lieu of redistributing money from the university’s endowment?

Yasemin Akçagüner (representing the Columbia Graduate Student Workers Strike) and Dylan Iannitelli (representing the Graduate Student Union at NYU) join We Be Imagining to share an inside view of being a scholar during the austerity politics of COVID-19, the scope of their demands which include the right to neutral arbitration for workers experiencing sexual harassment and the stakes of their labor organizing given graduate students are the life blood of a university.

Yasemin Akcaguner Graduate Student Worker, 3rd year PhD and TA in History Department a member of Graduate Workers of Columbia University: GWC-UAW Local 2110 , UAW Local 2110 and Academic Workers For a Demcratic Union (AWDU)

Dylan Iannitelli  6th year PhD student in Biology studying neurodegeneration, a member of the Grad Student Union at NYU and a member of the Academic Workers For a Demcratic Union (AWDU).

**PLEASE CONTRIBUTE TO THE COLUMBIA ACADEMIC STUDENT WORKERS HARDSHIP FUND Solidarity with Columbia Academic Student Workers

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImagining
Support Us: On Patreon
Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
The graduate workers union strike: explained
Columbia reports $310 million increase in endowment during pandemic while smaller schools flounder
NYU strike authorization vote begins as graduate workers continue strike at Columbia University
Ivy League Presidents Take Pay Cuts Up to 25% in Crisis
Columbia TAs who say they can't pay their rent due to COVID-19 launch work stoppage
Columbia University graduate students demand rent freeze
Columbia People's COVID Response
Columbia still refuses to give the GWC-UAW neutral, third-party arbitration. Is this indicative of a deeper institutional issue?
FY 2020 Financial Statements for The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York
GSOC Petitions for NYU to Stop Stonewalling Contract Negotiations
Columbia Grad Students On Strike Over Wages And Harassment Policies, NYU Counterparts Voting On Similar Actions
Columbia canceled housing contracts, so 14,000 students moved into the city. What does this mean for the local housing market?

How do we think about “Nah” vs  the “I would rather not to” of Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville- in other words, how does Blackness re-situate refusal? Samaria Rice and Lisa Simpson, mothers of Tamir Rice and Richard Risher who were murdered by the police, released forceful statements calling out the opportunist infiltration of BLM LA and Shaun King into the movement. This inadvertently catalyzed a conversation on Twitter around “Abolish Black Men” This episode unpacks what that phrase means, What is gender abolition? How does class mediate this discussion around gender and is leaving the hood a precondition for Black studies? Marquis Bey joins the WBI show to vibe on Lil Wayne’s A Milli, Katrina, digital infrastructure for mutual aid, and the utility in being unrecognizable to the state. 

Marquis Bey is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, and core faculty member of critical theory, at Northwestern University. Their work concerns black feminist theorizing, transgender studies, abolition, and critical theory. The author of several books, including Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism, most recently they are in the midst of revising a monograph entitled Black Trans Feminism to be published in 2022 with Duke University Press. Bey is committed to thinking rigorously and radically about subjectivity, blackness, nonnormative gender, and thoroughgoing abolition.

**You can send personal donations to the CashApps of $SamariaRice and $LisaLee693 and/or make contributions to the Tamir Rice Foundation

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImagining
Support Us: On Patreon
Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism
Tina Campt: Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity - Classroom
Melville, Herman. 1853
Spike Lee turns cameras on New Orleans
Spike Lee Paid $200,000 By NYPD For Consulting On Ad Campaign
Fred Moten Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)
Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next) – Dean Spade
Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures
Samaria Rice Calls Out Prominent Black Activists In Scathing Statement
Samaria Rice Has Demands for Shaun King, BLM Activists
2Pac Speaks On Malcolm X Grassroots Movement 1992
Otherwise Movements – The New Inquiry
Nikki Giovanni Speaks on her "Thug Life" Tattoo
Denise Ferreira da Silva – Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism, Refusal, and the Limits of Critique
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book Author(s): Hortense J. Spillers
Alondra Nelson
The Race for Theory by Barbara Christian

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Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being
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How do layers of content moderation infrastructure shape sociality and anti-sociality? What are the incentives motivating algorithms used by Facebook, Google and Amazon? How do algorithms shape our sense of time, how we register social information and what content is produced by users? What are the implications for digital consent?  Unsettling the myth of “organic content” we discuss Spam and who gets to decide which media is categorized as deviant.

Elinor Carmi joins the WBI show to discuss the history of Bell Telephone regulating sound as a form of urban planning in New York City-where Black Americans were deemed noisy (and certain decibels were criminalized), the way digital infrastructure mediates discourse around Israel/Palestine, and the connections between digital literacy and grassroots digital activism. 

Elinor Carmi is a Postdoc Research Associate in digital culture and society, at the Communication and Media Department, Liverpool University, UK. She’s the author of: Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise and Other Deviant Media

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImagining
Support Us: On Patreon
Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:

The Organic Myth — Real Life
Me and my big data: developing citizens' data literacy
Being Alone Together: Developing Fake News Immunity Being Alone Together: Developing Fake News Immunity- Faculty of Humanities & Social
THE playlist – Media Distortions
Dear Science and Other Stories - playlist by demonicground | Spotify
Social media's erasure of Palestinians is a grim warning for our future
Black Siren Radio — The American Assembly
He got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can't fix its misinformation addiction
Architectures of Sound : Acoustic Concepts and Parameters for Architectural Design / Michael Fowler.
Over*Flow: Digital Humanity: Social Media Content Moderation and the Global Tech Workforce in the COVID-19 EraSarah T. Roberts / University of California, Los Angeles – Flow
Netanyahu presides over a social media empire. Here's how he runs it
'Go home,' chant anti-Netanyahu protesters ahead of Israel's snap polls
Operation Restart (May 14 Social Media Walk Out)

What’s concealed by the American narrative around Wuhan’s response to COVID-19? Can we attribute the speed at which the virus was contained to the repressive top down measures of an authoritarian government or were there decentralized human infrastructures built up to provide mutual aid and fact check news reports at the height of the pandemic. Digital ethnographer, Tricia Wang (pronounced Wong which we discuss) joins the WBI show to discuss the role of hyperlocal networks on WeChat, how SARS-COV-1 racialized mask wearing and the importance of regulatory frameworks for indoor ventilation to mitigate the occupational dynamics of transmission. Tricia raises that the issue with the privatized infrastructure hyperlocal networks rely on, is not fundamentally about violations of data privacy but violations of personhood. 

PLEASE GIVE TO STRIKING COLUMBIA GRADUATE STUDENT UNION IF YOU CAN: Solidarity With Columbia Academic Student Workers (GoFundME)

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImagining
Support Us: On Patreon
Write Us: [email protected]
Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
what disturbs me is how quickly the world can forget centuries of anti-Asian violence, each time the cycle of forgetting is the only certain thing
Coronavirus: We Can Lean Something From The People Of Wuhan
Unmasking the racial politics of the coronavirus pandemic
Tricia Wang thinks hyperlocal collaboration thrives after Covid — Quartz
Chinese Americans fear loss of WeChat conduit to friends, family
China's new vaccine passport could expand the state's already vast surveillance program
COVID Straight Talk /Hablando Claro del COVID
Understanding the real impact of the novel H1N1 influenza pandemic: Why your colleagues need to know
I'm A Survivor: The Rhythm of Public Health Systems 
East Harlem Neighborhood Health Action Center
New EPA Rules Will Increase Air Pollution As The World Suffers A Respiratory Pandemic
Our Data Bodies
Logic School
You are not your data but your data is still you
Listen to 'The Daily': Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm
On Owed (with Joshua Bennett)
Joshua Bennett on the Use of Animals in the Work of Black Writers
Machine Bias — ProPublica
Apple and Facebook's Fight Isn’t Actually About Privacy or Tracking. This Is the Real Reason Facebook Is So Worried
He got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can't fix its misinformation addiction
1 - A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari ...https://www.youtube.com › watch
Gilles Deleuze - Philosopher of Difference

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barbara smith | Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building
Smith Caring Circle is creating The People's Pension

How can the Left respond to the declining hegemony of finance and the rising hegemony of Big Data? We have more socialization of economic life and collaboration at a scale that was never possible in the past so in this sense you have more socialization. The problem is this socialization is governed by private entities that orient this socialization process not only in service of their quest for profit but to reinforce their own power. What are the limitations of the anti-trust in confronting Big Tech’s monopolization of quasi-public infrastructure? For example Amazon replicates the United States Postal Services (USPS) in some sense, so how do we see part of the reconciliation of political contradictions produced by financialized tech companies as needing to plan and re-organize the economy towards the public good rather than towards the desires of capital? 

We discuss the possibilities and constraints of implementing a Green New Deal, the role of fictitious capital in proffering a solution to social contradictions in the immediate but producing financial crises that require increasingly greater amounts of state intervention in the mid-long term. 

Cédric Durand teaches Economics and Development Theories at the University of Paris 13 and the EHESS. Working within the tradition of Marxist and French Regulationist political economy, he is the author of several articles on the euro–crisis, the financialization-globalization nexus and the post-Soviet transformation. He is a member of the editorial board of the radical online journal ContreTemps. 

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImagining
Support Us: On Patreon

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
TECHNOFÉODALISME Critique de l'économie numérique Cédric DURAND
Fictitious Capital How Finance Is Appropriating Our Future
The Financial Instability Hypothesis. Working Paper No. 74. Levy Economics Institute 
Capital, Vol.3, Chapter 25 (Credit and Fictitious Capital)
Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism
Financialization Is Marketization! A Study of the Respective Impacts of Various Dimensions of Financialization on the Increase in Global Inequality
Debt Relief Is Not Enough — Cancel the Debt of the Global South
The Global South Must Be Freed of Its Debt Servitude
DEBT THE FIRST 5,000 YEARS - DAVID GRAEBER
What Is the Green New Deal? A Climate Proposal, Explained (Published 2019)
https://academic.oup.com/cpe/article-abstract/30/1/31/329999?redirectedFrom=fulltext
BlackRock, the World’s Biggest Money Manager, Expands Again (Published 2017)
Shadow banking is now a $52 trillion industry, posing a big risk to the financial system
Color of Change Calls on Larry Fink to Stop Supporting NYC Police Foundation
Finance-Led Capitalism - Shadow Banking, Re-Regulation, and the Future of Global Markets | Robert Guttmann
MARGUERITE CASEY FOUNDATION 990 (2018)
What the Luddites Really Fought Against | History
We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says.
Big Tech’s Next Big Problem Could Come From People Like ‘Mr. Sweepy’
Europe's Android 'choice' screen keeps burying better options
Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports

The Algorithmic Ecology is an abolitionist framework and organizing tool that can be critically applied to any algorithm. Developed by Stop LAPD Spying and Free Radicals, it unsettles central assumptions about how predictive policing actually functions and makes visible key areas of intervention for those fighting for a world without police. 

Academics tend to present algorithmic harm in the narrow language of privacy – failing to address the ways policing shows up in people’s lives. Grassroots organizations often see predictive policing as a false reform or a useful entrypoint to discuss what we already know about policing or incarceration in general. But do predictive analytics produce new modes of surveillance and social control? How can not just go beyond “dirty data” but make the infrastructures algorithms build up visual and concrete?

An investigation of PredPol heat maps of Skid Row (a community on the east side of downtown Los Angeles and home to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition) pursued these questions, resulting in surprising insights:   

“Given the prevailing notion that algorithmic policing would create ‘feedback loops,”’ our expectation was to find Skid Row — the area around the star marked on the map — to be laden with PredPol hotspots. But the hotspots were instead clustered at the periphery of the community. Rather than visualizing the hyper-policing that we know occurs in Skid Row, the PredPol hot spot maps appear to be drawing a digital border to contain, control, and criminalize Skid Row.”

Guests: 
Sophie is a co-founder, organizer, and zine gremlin at Free Radicals, an activist collective dedicated to creating a more socially just, equitable, and accountable science.

Shakeer Rahman is a community organizer and lawyer working with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImagining
Support Us: On Patreon
Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, 
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:

LAPD ends another data-driven crime program touted to target violent offenders
'Secret' body cam video finally shows what happened in 2015 LAPD shooting
Los Angeles Community Action Network: LACAN
Before the Bullet Hits the Body – Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles
Did Garcetti achieve his $250 million LA pledge?
Monitoring and Analysis Profiles: 2015-2019 New York State (MAPS Race Rubric)
Desperate to slow spike in killings, LAPD redeploys controversial units in South L.A.
A pioneer in predictive policing is starting a troubling new project
The Complicity of Academia in Policing of Families Opinion Victoria Copeland
No Tech for ICE
US police employ mass surveillance systems
The Microsoft Police State: Mass Surveillance, Facial Recognition, and the Azure Cloud
Tech Companies’ Complicity in State Violence Runs Deep
Policing Is an Information Business
Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing
Chronic Offender Purpose and Check List (StopLAPD Report)
Defund Surveillance Campaign

Suddenly everyone is an expert on platform governance but how do we situate the current widespread public concern around how privatized commons are ruled? Where is the moral brightline for the researchers and critics of big tech when the financial incentives to join the very same companies are high? How do we understand platform governance in a longer history where big tech corporations refused access to researchers and many felt the harm was something that would happen much further down the road? Should we resurrect the analogy to media (TV, Radio, Print) to better understand what regulatory approaches are useful?  We discuss these questions and more with Robyn Caplan.

Robyn Caplan is a Researcher at Data & Society, and a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University (ABD, advisor Philip M. Napoli) in the School of Communication and Information Studies. She conducts research on issues related to platform governance and content standards. Her most recent work investigates the extent to which organizational dynamics at major platform companies impacts the development and enforcement of policy geared towards limiting disinformation and hate speech, and the impact of regulation, industry coordination, and advocacy can play in changing platform policies.

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImagining
Support Us: On Patreon
Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
Who Controls the Public Sphere in an Era of Algorithms
When Media Companies Insist They're Not Media Companies and Why It Matters for Communications Policy by Philip M. Napoli, Robyn Caplan
Content or Context Moderation?: Artisanal, Community Reliant and Industrial Approaches
Listening to Black Women: The Innovation Tech Can't Crack

Tech companies are divesting from California claiming bad governance and high taxes are the cause. The gentrifiers leaving seems like a victory in the immediate but echo a history of colonization– invaders extracting what they want and leaving when everything is ruined–in the long term. How do people in the hood feel about big tech corporations and what does tech got to do with abolition? How do we frame our organizing around gentrification in the wake of these seismic economic shifts and environmental disaster? Abolitionist and scholar Alejandro Villalpando comes through to discuss these questions from the perspective of living in the same community he grew up in. 

Alejandro Villalpando received his Ph.D. from the Department of Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Riverside. He is a born-and-raised South Central Los Angeles and son of a Guatemalan immigrant mother and Mexican immigrant father. Dr. Villalpando is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pan African Studies and the Latin American Studies Program at Cal State LA. His work can be understood generally as lying within the intersection of Black, Ethnic, and Central American Studies.

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImagining
Support Us: On Patreon
Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
Chicanx/Latinx Caucus
The Rams’ Stan Kroenke Represents the Worst of the NFL
Businesses Are Fleeing California. Blame Bad Government.
The Abolition Open School: How We Spread the Message (an ASA 2020 Freedom Course)
Living next door to Elon Musk's SpaceX is hellish. Musk's fans disagree
Number of Latinos dying daily from Covid soars 1,000% in Los Angeles
The University of California has fully divested from fossil fuels. It's the largest school in the US to do it.
If CalPERS Divested from Coal, Why Does It Still Have $6.5B Invested?
On Dray: a remix + zine
Huawei's surveillance tech in Africa worries activists — Quartz Africa
Facebook’s Role in the Genocide in Myanmar: New Reporting Complicates the Narrative
The Gig Economy Is White People Discovering Servants
Margari Hill Muslim Anti-Racist Coalition (MARC)
"East of La Brea" Is Changing How Writers Rooms are Formed
Central American Studies Twitter Handle
CSU Cops Off Campus IG
“Why Did You Kill that Boy?” Los Angeles Sheriff’s Officers Fatally Shoot Salvadoran-American Teen
Stop LAPD Spying Coalition

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