Technological advancement has been co-defined with progress. Presumably, the two go together; the more technologically advanced something is, the more progressive it is. However, many tech scholars and workers have made important linkages between tech development and entrenched bias, essentially furthering white supremacy and its byproducts (such as ableism, classism, fatphobia, queerphobia, immigration status) when unexamined.
Our Data Bodies (ODB) is a research and organizing coalition that analyses how certain tech developments further marginalisation, with specific focus on tech that supports the police state (carceral technology) and surveillance apparatuses. Our work is rooted in storytelling as research, and we have produced a number of projects, including our Oral Histories Project detailing resistance strategies to discriminatory tech, and most recently Tracked and Targeted, which summarizes the insights from over 20 people who have or are currently working at Amazon warehouses, and their experiences with workplace surveillance. This project was completed by ODB and United for Respect.
This virtual talk discusses the implications of positioning punitive and targeted surveillance technologies as efficiency models or safety measures, as well as expanding on resistive methodologies ODB employs and has learned in community with other organisers and unions.
Kim M Reynolds is a writer, critical media scholar, and tech researcher from Ohio in the US, based in Cape Town, South Africa for the past 7 years. Kim holds two master's degrees in critical media and comms from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Cape Town. Kim focuses on the overlapping contemporary social justice and arts histories on the continent of Africa and the US. She writes and teaches on critical media and queer theories, and her writing has been published in the poetry anthology Woven with Brown Thread, alongside over 30 arts and politics bylines with the Mail & Guardian, VICE, and the Johannesburg Review of Books. Additionally, in 2024, Reynolds was chosen as one of 12 residents at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD) in Accra, Ghana. Reynolds is currently a co-lead of US-based research and organising collective, Our Data Bodies.
The Data for Access and Opportunity summer webinar series is co-sponsored by the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis, the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission.
