Ahead of the release of her new book, Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis, to be released in January 2025, scholar Tao Leigh Goffe spoke with former Data Fluencies program officer Dannah Dennis about her research, unpacking how the histories of technology, race, and climate in the Caribbean can help us better understand the climate crisis and imagine new futures.

In this essay, 2023 Data Fluencies Grantee Jason Ludwig examines how race and data in the labor market manifested by looking at the history of the US Employment Service, which aimed to create equitable employment opportunities through colorblind computing and data practices. However, as Ludwig argues, race remained embedded in the data despite its overt omission.

Meet Danielle Blunt, one of our 2023–2024 Just Tech Fellows. A sex worker, community organizer, public health researcher, and the cofounder of Hacking//Hustling, Blunt leads community-based participatory research on sex work and equitable access to technology from a public health perspective.

Following the recent release of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Emma Vossen and Sarah Stang examine the trajectory of the representation of gender roles in the iconic video game series and how, until this latest game, Zelda embodied the damsel-in-distress trope. Though in Echoes of Wisdom players can now play as Zelda for the first time, Vossen and Stang question whether this change will have an impact on gender representation in video games.