In this episode of "Technically Human," I talk to Dr. Rashawn Ray and Dr. Nicol Turner Lee, both Fellows at the Brookings Institution, about race, tech, policing, and the digital divide. We talk about the role of video technology and social media in police accountability, the dangers of surveillance technologies developed in Silicon Valley when deployed in policing, and the long history--and the consequences--of the digital divide in the context of social equity.

Dr. Rashawn Ray, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, is Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Ray has published over 50 books, articles, and book chapters, and roughly 50 op-eds. Recently, Dr. Ray published  How Families Matter: Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work (with Pamela Braboy Jackson) and another edition of Race and Ethnic Relations in the 21st Century: History, Theory, Institutions, and Policy, which has been adopted nearly 40 times in college courses. Ray has written for the Washington Post, New York Times, Newsweek,  Business Insider, Huffington Post, and NBC News. 

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee is a senior fellow in Governance Studies, the director of the Center for Technology Innovation, and the Co-Editor-In-Chief of TechTank. Dr. Turner Lee researches public policy designed to enable equitable access to technology across the U.S. and to harness its power to create change in communities across the world. Dr. Turner Lee has been cited in the New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Communications Daily, Multichannel News, and Washington Informer. She can also be seen or heard on NPR, NBC News, ABC, and more, she has testified before Congress, and she is Chair of the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC), which is committed to joining policymakers and academics around significant tech policy issues. Her new book, Digitally Invisible: How the Internet is Creating the New Underclass (Brookings Press, 2021), examines the history, and the consequences, of the digital divide.

And now some exciting news!

We are currently in the middle of a series of live events on ethics and technology, scheduled for the next few weeks. Next Tuesday, May 18, I will host a Fireside chat with former CIA officer and former NSA advisor to Joe Biden, Yaël Eisenstat, who oversaw Facebook’s Global Elections Integrity Operations for political advertising and has since become one of facebook’s leading critics.

The following week, on May 25, we will host a screening of the new documentary, Coded Bias, followed by a Q and A with the director, Shalini Kantayya, and All events are free, virtual, and open to the public, but space is limited. Check out our website, www.etcalpoly.org for more information about the events, and to reserve your spot.

Hope to see you there! 

Podcast produced by Ana Marsh and Matt Perry.
Podcast art by Desi Aleman.