Blog
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Timnit Gebru: Oral Histories of Surveillance
This field is pretty terrible you know [laughs]. It’s the combination of people thinking they’re so smart and objective, and that combination just really gets to me, like, it’s this combination. Regressive is the right word. —Timnit Gebru Our Data Bodies (ODB) is excited to present a series of oral histories from organizers, writers, and…
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J. Khadijah Abdurahman: Predictive analytics, Child Welfare, and Storytelling’s Power (Part 2 of 2)
[Cover photo credit: Mir Suhail ] Can you tell me about the oral history project at Roosevelt island- how it got started, what are the desired outcomes? So in response to all kinds like a racist debate on an online parent network, I did a public screening of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which was really…
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J. Khadijah Abdurahman: Predictive analytics, Child Welfare, and Storytelling’s Power (Part 1 of 2)
[Cover photo credit of J. Khadijah Abdurahman by Nkozi Tiewul found on @/ Webeimagining ] J. Khadijah Abdurahman shares her personal experiences with Administration of Children Services (ACS) in New York City and the critical work she does around archiving our own stories around power and systems. Too much of the literature about how certain…
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Context, Research, Refusal: Perspectives on Abstract Problem-Solving
By Seeta Peña Gangadharan Speaking to computer scientists at an academic workshop on machine learning, Seeta Peña Gangadharan challenges researchers to think about the problem of disappearing people and history into mathematical equations. Math is deeply political. Yet computer scientists tend to talk about the real world as if they are separate from it and…
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Watched and Still Dying
By Tawana Petty In 1985 my father died of AIDS. I was nine years old and it was nine days after my ninth birthday. Although a devastating loss for me, it would be years before I would learn the truth about why my dad died, what AIDS was, how the United States treated AIDS patients,…
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Vehicles of Surveillance: Detroit’s Project Green Light
In 2019, the city of Detroit caught the national spotlight with its efforts to resist facial recognition technology (FRT). The implementation of this technology was through an initiative called Project Green Light, a public-private partnership led by the Detroit Police Department. The project seeks to present itself as means of making communities safer. But as…