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News on Surveillance Technology

Chelsea Barabas is a scholar and cultural organizer whose work emerges through collaboration with communities confronting the harms of surveillance and punitive technologies. Rooted in both research and the arts, […]

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.

In her recent book Mobile City: Emerging Media, Space, and Sociality in Contemporary Berlin, Jordan Kraemer examines how young adults in Berlin in the first decades of this century used social media and the internet to express German identity in a cosmopolitan context that was acceptable though overtime these spaces became polarized. In this excerpt, Kraemer looks at the tactics young Germans used to get online.

In this essay, 2023 Data Fluencies Grantee Sanjana Krishnan examines how the municipal governments of various Indian cities have been using satellite imagery to clear informal housing settlements. In particular, she looks at the case of Mumbai and how this technology undermines the rights of those living in these settlements.

In this essay, 2023 Data Fluencies Dissertation Research Grantee Zhaowen Guo examines how the public interacts with and views the surveillance state in China, focusing not just on the technological systems used but the human agents who interact with people enforcing rules and deterring dissent. 

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Nikita Sonavane has worked as a criminal defense attorney and legal researcher for nearly seven years. She is the cofounder of the Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project (CPAProject), an […]

Stephen J. Neville is a PhD candidate in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Canada. He is the recipient […]

Ashleigh Washington is a social worker dedicated to liberation for communities of color. Since 2005, her advocacy has made an impact in community-based services, public education, and social work education.  […]

Just Tech Program Officer Ever Bussey interviews Just Tech Fellow Tawana Petty about how data extraction and surveillance impact marginalized communities, working with policymakers, and how to address the proliferation of artificial intelligence in an inclusive and consentful manner.

The following passage is from Zara Rahman’s new book Machine Readable Me: The Hidden Ways Tech Shapes Our Identities. Rahman is an author and researcher investigating the intersection of power, […]

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