Meet Catherine Knight Steele, one of our 2024–2026 Just Tech Fellows. She is an educator, researcher, award-winning author, and public speaker who specializes in race and media, with a particular emphasis on Black discourse, culture, technology, and social media. Steele’s research explores the interplay between resistance and joy as technologies of liberation, extending beyond media representation.

In this field review on “the digital divide,” Roderic Crooks argues that access to computing in education or in any other domain can only meaningfully contribute to equality when minoritized and racialized communities are allowed to pursue their own collective technological goals.

Recently Google introduced a feature in its search engine that algorithmically creates summaries of one’s search results. Though it could be viewed as a useful tool, researcher Anna Beers argues this feature’s unsuitable safeguards allow for the spread of disinformation. In this essay, she examines how these algorithmically created search summaries introduce disinformation from biased and anti-trans sources on searches about transgender identity.

In this essay, Julian Posada argues that AI governance should not overlook, the relational, environmental, and political nature of this data-intensive technology.