Digital Infrastructures of Race and Gender
Till the end of January, Safiya U. Noble explores the intersectional ways race and gender are embedded in digital infrastructures. Noble suggests that logics and structures of race are a matter of network and platform design, which encode values that cannot be divorced from the digital. To open, she investigates the erosion of humanities and social science courses from the education of engineers, and suggests that the erasure of sociality impacts conceptions of technology’s promise. Later in the series, she explores other dimensions of the social stack and how race and gender are embedded in contemporary conceptions of the digital.
Safiya Umoja Noble
Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School of Communication. Previously, she held appointments in the Departments of Information Studies, African American Studies, and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award. Noble’s academic research focuses on the design of digital media platforms and their impact on society. Her monograph on racist and sexist algorithmic bias is entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and co-editor of two books: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online (2016), and Emotions, Technology & Design (2015). Dr. Noble holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Sociology from CSU, Fresno. Follow her on Twitter @safiyanoble or at her website: safiyaunoble.com.