The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race presents "Reimagining Race and Technology," a roundtable featuring emerging scholars working at the intersection of race and technology. Panelists will discuss how digital technology is deployed in war zones, how corporations manage access to democratic expression online, how digital surveillance works in U.S. higher education, and how race and racism appear in the digital collections at Columbia's Libraries. Their presentations will be followed by conversation and audience Q&A. Please reach out to cser@columbia.edu with any questions.
SPEAKERS
Ali Musleh is Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies here at Columbia. Prior to that, he was a researcher at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UH-M) Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies. In 2022, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at UHM, where he taught global politics and alternative futures. His first book project is titled To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? Using his dual background in design and political theory, he focuses on Israel's design, development, and deployment of drones, autonomous weapons, and artificial intelligence, treating them as technological processes of managing and differentiating forms of life.
Irina Kalinka is a Fellow, Society of Fellows at Columbia and a lecturer at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society as well as the Department of English and Comparative Literature. A scholar of political theory and digital media with a global purview, Irina centers her research around platform studies, democracy, and digital publics. She completed her dissertation, "The Political Imaginary of User Democracy," in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in 2023. In this project, Irina argues that tech-corporations promote and engender their own normative conceptualization of democracy through the services they oversee.
Madi Whitman is the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Assistant Director of Curriculum Development in the Center for Science and Society and a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. As a sociocultural anthropologist and science and technology studies (STS) researcher, Madi studies how technologies, institutions, and subjectivities are made together. This research is currently animated by questions about surveillance and marginality in changing regimes of data collection in higher education in the United States. Prior to coming to Columbia, Madi was involved in collaborations with the National Science Foundation Center for Science of Information. Madi earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Purdue University in 2020, and was previously a Visiting Research Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Brian Luna Lucero is the Digital Projects Librarian at Columbia University and a lecturer at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and in the History Department. He assists Columbia’s librarians and faculty in creating digital collections and exhibits from Columbia’s extensive physical archives. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of New Mexico in 2012. His dissertation, "Invention and Contention: Memory, Place, and Identity in the American Southwest, 1848-1940," examines memory and commemoration of the Spanish colonial past in three Spanish settlements that grew into prominent American cities: Tucson, Arizona, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and San Antonio, Texas.
