What does it mean to be in community? This panel brings together activists, scholars, and writers to explore connections between critical social issues—health justice, discrimination, technofascism, and surveillance—and the possibilities of grassroots response. Panelists will discuss tensions between collectivizing and collaborating: How do we negotiate care when our access to care hinges on being identified and enumerated by the state? What tactics for resistance might we use in digital communities that are subject to increased surveillance? How can we be there for and with each other?

All are welcome and we strongly encourage undergraduate and graduate students to attend.

Refreshments will be provided to the first 100 in-person attendees.

Advance registration is recommended:

Register to attend in-person: https://myumi.ch/kPNb2
Register to attend on Zoom: https://myumi.ch/g3bqG

Meet the Panelists

Victoria Copeland is a disabled organizer and researcher based at the UCLA Center for Resilience and Digital Justice. She is interested in abolitionist approaches to addressing harm, specifically that which is mediated by data and technology. Their research is often conducted in collaboration with grassroots organizations and explores the various ways that state violence permeates through our relationships with institutions, ourselves, and each other and how we can resist it. Victoria received her Ph.D and Masters in Social Welfare, and was formerly a Senior Policy Analyst focused on technology and social policy.

Megan Fereday is a nonbinary, multiply-neurodivergent PhD student based at the University of Southampton. Their PhD project (funded AHRC) investigates the role of social media platforms in young people’s queer-neurodivergent resistance practices, and explores the possibilities and potentials of digital neuroqueering among younger users. Megan is a member of the Narratives of Neurodiversity Network and the Queer Medical Humanities Network, and is currently enrolled in the Neurodivergent Humanities Network’s mentorship scheme. Megan’s work has been recently published in the Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change.

Kim Fernandes is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, their work lies at the intersections of disability, data, and emerging technologies. Their research lies at the intersections of disability studies, science and technology studies, and the anthropology of South Asia. Kim explores how assumptions about normalcy and the body shape and are shaped by the development of various technologies. Focusing on urban India, Kim's first book project looks at how the body meets and moves through the world. This ethnographic project studies how national enumeration and identification infrastructures are shaped by numerical representations of everyday experiences with disability. Their interest in disability and technology has led them to begin a new collaborative research project on neurotechnologies and disability. Focusing on North America and centering the perpsectives of disabled people, this ethnographic project attends to the development of neurotechnologies that targeted specifically toward experiences of disability.

Wells Lucas Santo (he/she/they) is a queer, non-binary, and disabled Indonesian and Taiwanese American PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information focusing on critical race and algorithmic justice, in particular on how algorithmic technologies disparately impact marginalized communities across the interlocking axes of race, gender, sexuality, and disability. Prior to his return to academia, he worked in the non-profit education equity space, where he built inclusive, accessible, and culturally responsive curriculum on artificial intelligence and social justice, serving as the Director of Education at SMASH (Kapor Center), the original Education Manager at AI4ALL, and an Advisory Board Member for the AI4K12 initiative. In these capacities, he has spoken about the societal implications of AI at venues such as the United Nations Youth Assembly, the Annual oSTEM Conference, and top universities such as Columbia, NYU, and CMU. His current research focuses on the “Asian” racial classification and its formation and history in the United States, specifically how state data, diasporic community activism, image datasets, and facial analysis algorithms reify and essentialize a US-centric, pan-Asian racial category, which is then exported transnationally as a racial/colonial project.

Cheng-Hsiu (Shin) Yang is a digital governance strategist and interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of AI-integrated product design, legal frameworks, and community infrastructure. She holds an LL.M. in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies from National Chengchi University and is currently pursuing her LL.M. at UCLA School of Law (Class of 2026). With a hybrid background in law and product management, Shin has led cross-functional teams in privacy-focused AI product development, and separately, in building open-source infrastructure for independent community platforms. Her work focuses on designing ethical governance frameworks for digital spaces that operate without identity verification, public profiles, or algorithmic enforcement—prioritizing anonymity, relational trust, and rhythm-based moderation. For a decade, she has maintained a self-hosted digital community platform centered in Taiwan and serving primarily Mandarin-speaking gender and sexual minorities. The platform has grown into a pluralistic ecosystem with over 50,000 monthly users, governed by ethical, and community-led practices. She has also contributed to global discussions on the governance of intimate and stigmatized content online, especially in contexts where overregulation limits expression and safety. Her research explores plural digital publics, platform ethics, and post-verification governance models.

Meet the Moderator

M. Remi Yergeau (they/them/theirs) is an associate professor in Communication and Media Studies. Their scholarly interests include critical disability studies, rhetoric, digital studies, trans and queer studies, and neurodiversity. Yergeau is an autistic academic. Their knowledge of the autistic internet is informed by the scholarly and the personal: they once ran a neurodiversity blog, led a student chapter of an autistic-led org, and coordinated local protests. Their book, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Duke UP), is a winner of the 2017 Modern Language Association First Book Prize, the 2019 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Book Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship, and the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award.

We want to make our events accessible to all participants. CART captioning services will be provided. If you anticipate needing additional accommodations to participate, please email Cherice Chan at chericec@umich.edu.