Here, Chelsea Barabas and Clarence Okoh (a 2022 Just Tech Fellow) reflect on the work of the No Data about Us without Us Fellowship (NDAUWU), a program of the NOTICE Coalition: No Tech Criminalization in Education and the Edgelands Institute. This fellowship brought together grassroots organizers and community leaders to examine how tech surveillance impacts school discipline.

Over the past several years, New York City’s Administration for Children Services (ACS) has been one among many child protection agencies to introduce AI tools. In this essay based on her research 2024 Data Fluencies Grantee Ashleigh Washington looks at how ACS’s tactics, including use of algorithms, create a tech-enabled biomedical surveillance apparatus targeting the most disadvantaged families.

Meet Kriangsak Teerakowitkajorn, one of our 2024–2026 Just Tech Fellows. He is a labor geographer whose work engages with issues at the intersection of labor, technology, and alternatives to capitalism. He is also the founder and director of the Just Economy and Labor Institute (JELI), a nonprofit organization focused on empowering platform workers through strategic research and movement-building in Southeast Asia. Since founding JELI in 2018, he has led action research and empowerment projects with grassroots, migrant, and platform workers, culminating in the formation of a platform worker movement in Thailand.

The recent increase of airborne hazards—caused by, for example, wildfire smoke or industrial pollutants—has coincided with the proliferation of access to air quality monitoring data. However, having access to this data and, in particular, the air quality index (AQI), does not necessarily mean we understand the information given. Here, Just Tech Fellow Todd Whitney provides a guide to better understand air quality data and how to make it work for you.