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The DISCO Network is a collaborative, intergenerational research group of scholars dedicated to analyzing digital technology, race, disability, sexuality, and gender. The network comprises of six laboratories across five universities (University of Michigan, Northwestern University, The University of Maryland-College Park, Stony Brook University, Georgia Institute of Technology), each of which stands alone and a network node to write, talk, and think about the past, present, and future of technology, Blackness, Asianness, disability, and liberation. The DISCO Network is supported by the Mellon Foundation.

This panel will be a conversation with the Principal Investigators (PIs) of the DISCO Network, André Brock, Catherine Knight Steele, Lisa Nakamura, Rayvon Fouché, Remi Yergeau, and Stephanie Dinkins. What can an equitable digital future look like? In our contemporary moment, is it possible to create transformative movements, rooted within humanistic inquiry, to address inequities, histories of exclusion, disability injustice, techno-ableism, and digital racial politics? Over the past few years, the DISCO Network began a portion of this work. The collective will reflect on its collaborative effort and explore the tensions between digital optimism and technoskepticism.

Panelists:

André Brock (he/him) is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, Black technoculture, and digital media. His scholarship examines Black and white representations in social media, video games, weblogs, and other digital media. He has also published influential research on digital research methods. His first book, titled Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, was published with NYU Press in 2020 and theorizes Black everyday lives mediated by networked technologies.

Catherine Knight Steele (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland - College Park where she serves as the Director of the Black Communication and Technology Lab. Her research focus is race, gender and media with specific focus on Black culture and discourse and digital communication. She examines representations of marginalized communities in the media and how groups resist oppression and utilize online technology to create spaces of community. Her book Digital Black Feminism (NYU, 2021), examines the relationship between Black women and technology as a centuries-long gendered and raced project in the U.S. Using the virtual beauty shop as a metaphor, Digital Black Feminism walks readers through the technical skill, communicative expertise, and entrepreneurial acumen of Black women’s labor—born of survival strategies and economic necessity—both on and offline.

Lisa Nakamura (she/her) is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Culture, and the founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Since 1994, Nakamura has written books and articles on digital bodies, race, and gender in online environments, on toxicity in video game culture, and the many reasons that Internet research needs ethnic and gender studies. These books include, Race After the Internet (co-edited with Peter Chow-White, Routledge, 2011); Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minnesota, 2007); Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002); and Race in Cyberspace (co-edited with Beth Kolko and Gil Rodman, Routledge, 2000). In November 2019, Nakamura gave a TED NYC talk about her research called “The Internet is a Trash Fire. Here’s How to Fix It.”

Rayvon Fouché (he/him) is a Professor of Communication Studies at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrative Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. His scholarship on invention and innovation explores the multiple intersections and relationships between cultural representation, racial identification, and technoscientific design. He has authored or edited Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (Minnesota, 2004), Technology Studies (Sage Publications, 2008), the 4th Edition of the Handbook of Science & Technology Studies (MIT Press, 2016), and Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).

Remi Yergeau (they/them) is Associate Professor of Digital Studies and English, and Associate Director of the Digital Studies Institute, at the University of Michigan. Their book, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness, was awarded the 2017 MLA First Book Prize, the 2019 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Book Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship, and the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. They are currently at work on a second book project about disability, digital rhetoric, surveillance, and (a)sociality, tentatively titled Crip Data. Active in the neurodiversity movement, they have previously served on the boards of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) and the Autism National Committee (AutCom).

Stephanie Dinkins (she/they) is a transmedia artist who creates platforms for dialog about race, gender, aging, and our future histories. Dinkins’ art practice employs emerging technologies, documentary practices, and social collaboration toward equity and community sovereignty. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to co-create more equitable, values grounded social and technological ecosystems. Dinkins exhibits and publicly advocates for equitable AI internationally. Her work has been generously supported by fellowships, grants, and residencies from United States Artist, The Knight Foundation, Berggruen Institute, Onassis Foundation, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, Creative Capital, Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab, Eyebeam, Data & Society, Pioneer Works, NEW INC, and The Laundromat Project. Dinkins is a professor at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Professorship in Art.