Thank you so much. Thank you kindly. Book tv continues now on cspan2, television for serious readers. Good evening. Good evening. Welcome to the john f. Kennedy junior forum. My name i am a junior studying government at college and i am a member of the jfk junior Forum Committee at the institute of politics. Before we begin, please note the doors located on both the parkside and the jfk streetside of the form. In the event of them emergency, locked to the exit closest to you and congregate in the jfk parking lot. Please also take a moment to silence her cell phones. You can join the conversation online with the jfk junior forum live and interact with our student run instagram at jfk junior forum for behindthescenes highlights. Please take your seats out and join me in welcoming our guests and director of the center on media, politics and Public Policy, nancy gibbs. [applause]. Good evening and for those of you that have not had a chance this semester to make it across the charles hotel, the center over is focused on the intersection of media, politics and Public Policy which means we are looking at the quality of information in a free society, so a lot of that means working to get the best research into the hands of journalists to help newsrooms with hard questions that they are facing. All of that is promoting good highquality information, but you will understand why at this moment in our history and a lot of our work is also focused on information contaminants, on bad information, on the ways in which information streams are polluted and a poisoned. And deleting that work for us is doctor john donovan who will moderate tonight. I think of joan as the model of the scholar who bridges theory and practice with realtime, highly relevant research. She is building a casebook of 100 case studies and media manipulation that wont only be invaluable to researchers, it will be actionable intelligence bar newsrooms and soul Society Leaders at a time of these questions could not be more and audible so the work we are doing that we are talking about in on meetings and classes and brown bag lunches is work i hope you will all engage with us on because i do believe it is critically important at this moment in our countrys history. I am so pleased our inaugural or form of an is on topic that is this urgent and with a group of people that bring so much to these questions and so please welcome joan donovan and her panel. [applause]. Thank you so much to nancy. Its been a Pretty Amazing sort of journey out of getting my work with data society in a nonprofit and ended up here where i grew up about 10 miles from here in the saugus, so its a pretty big deal. My spouse has alerted my mother that there is a live stream that you should tell your friends as well that there is a live stream tonight so i can fulfill my dream of getting out of room one and being in cambridge. Before we get started, we will do something thats not traditional within cambridge, but i think its a really important thing that we start to do here, which is a territorial acknowledgment and so luckily today we have erika violated lee who is a writer, Community Organizer and graduate student who embodies geography and d colonial of desire in the future. Are covered with many in the pursuit of indigenous feminist freedoms. She is part of the pretribe and the thunder trial nation and world in the Masters Program at the university of toronto peer violet, if you come erica, violet, lee club here and talk to us about recognition in the land acknowledgment. Thank you, joan. Ident went to turn my back to anyone, but my name is eric up by the end as a visitor from the territory of north im honored to deliver this land acknowledgment in support of this panel. Thank you to the Harvard University native American Program for their assistance with this acknowledgment. Often landed on this can knowledge can be tokenizing or upset. I tried my best to make this one different. We acknowledge the intertwined legacy of the devastation of transatlantic slavery and colonialism which contributes to the creation and continued wealth of this university and this nation. We acknowledge the reparations 02 black and indigenous communities in the impossibilities of return for generations past and the ancestors in the room tonight as we fight together for better futures. We acknowledge we are alive in an era of necessary resistance to preserve this planet and all of the beautiful creation we have no doubt [inaudible] we acknowledge the land on which harbored since his traditional territory of the massachusetts people and they place long served as a side of meeting and exchange among nations. Thank you. Thank you so much, erica. We appreciate you being here. I will talk to your bit about the workshop we held today in a minute, but first i should introduce our panel tonight. At the far end we have looked fully up peterson who is a television veteran specializing in emerging technologies, awardwinning race and culture writer for major outlets as well as a threetime judge for the world videogame hall of fame. Named one of Forbes Magazine 30 after 30 rising stars shes best known for the blog which used to pop talk about pop culture and her newest is building the future of interactive entertainment. In the center we have Khalil Mohammed did who is a professor and the seizing young professor at the Radcliffe Institute for advanced studies in currently leading a project on institutional antiracism and accountability nicknamed the iraq project. Please check out what they are doing. They have some talks coming up in the former director for research in black culture. Thank you for coming down the street. Im joking, but he has been on sabbatical and this is a very special occasion for us to have you here. And Ruha Benjamin who admittedly is one of my sort of academic idols, i aspire to be like you and i have got a lot of work to do because you are an associate professor in the department of africanamerican studies at Princeton University where she studies social dimension of science, technology, medicine, race and power. She released to amazing books, receptor technology, and Captivating Technology which is an edited collection of essays mrs. Light i say i should aspire to, but no one should expect me too publish two books anytime soon. One is ambitious. Welcome everyone here today. I want to welcome my class. Thank you for coming. Nice of you to show up, because i made you. Definitely make sure you see jen for attendance. Tonight we will talk about the politics and difference with rhetoric of inclusion and we had a wonderful workshop today called please do not include us, led by digital justice professor leading advocates on human rights in information security. I want to thank you both for hosting this event here at harvard and what we were able to do today was bridge product managers, journalist, data scientists, policy makers and activists to speak about the public conversations we should be having about the limits of inclusion as an unmitigated social good and acknowledging differences can be discomforting , but the recognition of difference can help us think differently about building intentional communities. One of the points of being in university sometimes is that theres a lot of inclusionary rhetoric at the same time that we traffic and a lot of exclusionary politics and so even in convening this conversation went to open with a provocation and question to think about what can inclusion mean and so when im talking about inclusion and exclusion paradigm, and thinking about some recent examples are for instance, in july there was public outcry against former governor Rick Schneider getting a fellowship here. He resigned later this summer and my key faculty and researchers were called out to respond publicly about funding given by epstein, several faculty resigned and we are also in the midst of a Culture Shift relating to technology and inclusion as well as accountability. While each of us felt some type of way about what could inclusion mean, we also are in some ways perplexed because some powerful people are being held accountable, but also that it seems pretty rare inside went to open by asking if you like to respond to this, what do you think about when you think about the politics of inclusion and exclusion within institutions are industry and where do you see potentials for a powershift . Anyone of you can jump in. I will start by saying with respect to the snyder issue that i want to acknowledge that the individual who really galvanized public attention around that was black feminist abolitionist marry him, so i went to call for the idea that people outside of the academy understand the stakes, sometimes better than we do that are situated here. For me what that entire sort of organizing effort indicates is that people are ready and willing to hold a mirror up to these ideals that we get a lipservice to to say you cant just put it on your website, you can just invoke these idea when youre at a practices run directly counter and are hypocritical essentially and so for me one of the things i took away from that was not only that we have to protest and refusing withholds support from institutions that are being hypocritical, but that i think lasting change really has to make the alternative to that motive desirable like what the alternative is with the status quo. We have to make it so its more attractive and desirable. I love that point about alternatives is a lot of the focus of our has been removing people like in media we are about three four is out from metoo an in game mean they had a wave of metoo and who gets to gatekeeper who doesnt, but what we notice as well is that you can remove people from power but the system will continue to perpetuate if there is in that reckoning that has to come with it thats the part thats been harder. There are individual [inaudible] its harder to change a system that will allow that and accept that money enough for that person a fellowship. Is harder to look at what we see as morality and i think thats been part of the conversation in terms of what types of institutions sometimes and nation do we want to be and how and what is our ethical core and we do find that in a different way that has been done its when we will see structural change. Im just glad to be included in this conversation. Really terrific thinkers. First, went to acknowledge that doctor benjamin rescinded her acceptance to be here tonight over schneider and so this isnt just about what activists do on the outside, its also about the responsibility of those of us on the end side who can be complicit in accepting certain norms that are unacceptable, so i went to applaud you because [applause]. I know firsthand that helped make a difference in the outcome the other thing i want to say is what webs epstein and snyder together and in this with limitation to the work that Ruha Benjamin has done in the work we will talk about tonight and that is that they are powerful and to some degree money shapes both politicians career as well as epstein as a donor and of the degree to which a conversation about inclusivity is really marketing for the purposes of a broader Goodwill Campaign coming much of what diversity has passed for the 20th century has led to drive consumer sales by virtue of condensing Broader Consumer base that we care about you too, please buy our products. So, when we talk about morality at think its important to remember the relationship of morality is in stark contrast to institutions that are driven by moneyed interests and of course everyone has got his salary here in mice to be paid, but where do you draw the line . Between how those moneyed interests shape decisionmaking in the degree to which inclusion runs against any kind of formal change is really i dont want to reduce it to money, but i want to suggest it plays a big part of it. Very interesting. I went to two by way of doing some general introduction to the work talk to you, ruha, about these amazing books. Race after technology is what i think fred moten would call an active fugitive scholarship which is to say its a playbook for the way technologists and activists can seek each other out so theres lots of citations and ways to connect direct relationship between research and practice and in seeking each other out they learn from one another how to evade systems of surveillance. Most of the book has this surveillance undertone were together they work to know these systems, expose these systems of the next those these systems in the collection of essays and Captivating Technology are very broad and those tend to link car several technology that is being deployed already to classify and course specific populations and the authors tend to question if there is resistance even possible or can technology liberate us what are some of the major takeaways especially about the way data is harnessed and activated that perhaps is happening all around us but we dont see them readily. Absolutely, so i have straddled different fields in the made motivation was trying to bring together conversations i saw happening in different corners of various discipline so theres two main conversations i was trying to draw together and Captivating Technology where what is happening in the field of science and Technology Studies and i went to shout out sheila, so thinking about the insights that grow out of this and putting that in conversation with critical race studies and trying to bring together scholars who thought about these things historically in terms of our contemporary moment and also speculatively in the future so the way the text is organized and the kind of take away from that structure are that there are more traditional sites of policing in prisons and even plantations where you can see more explicitly how technology can be oppressive, so that is the kind of first section and set of conversations, but then it comes into our contemporary moment looking at places you dont necessarily think our sites of karsh or Old Technology or like the Digital Service economy or florida three or retail industry, h m, forever 21, thinking about how it shows the same tools and logic that is used by Police Department are sold big retail giants in order to surveillance is, so those are the things where you see that the tools in the logic of surveillance jumped ship, scaled the prison walls in many ways and are inspecting so many of our institutions, but then through the conversations with contributors and i think this is the thing i learned most from putting together this volume is that i didnt eventually just stick with diagnosing this problem of Race Technology kars rowdy, but i was pushed by one of the more senior contributors to think about now what and if so what happened was i was fielding titles for the text and i had some really bad ones and they were honest with me like thats not work and one individual said you know when the way you are framing this text in the title, you are giving it a lot of intellectual space to diagnosing the problem that you set out to and giving almost no space for trying to envision what an alternative would be, what would a more liberatory approach to Technology Look like . What has it looked like so in that exchange with this individual where he said you know, we have in general have scholars attend to seat a lot of intellectual space to naming what we dont want to the world rather than naming and opening up conversations and space bar what we do want, actually seeking alternatives, many alternatives we want to flourish that pushed me not just in terms of the title, but to flesh out this part of the book which is about how groups that have been they have always and reimagined these practices from the top and so you will find in that last section both historically and in terms of our contemporary moment ways in which all different types of this around the world even redefine what we think of as innovation and so that especially is what i hope readers especially students will take away. Its a kind of energizing base around seating cd what we want to see. Excellent and cleo, you written extensively about the history of incarceration and talked about the transition from slavery to the cockerel estate and i can see this true line with moments where the technologies have jumped the prison wall and we are talking this morning, chris and i, and he blew my mind that said a fit to bits and and at apple watch are just an ankle monitor. We looked around the room and we would like oh, no. We love our stuff, but are we in a way creating metadata, surveilling ourselves . One of the concepts you bring up is the concept of the racial Data Revolution and you really bring statistics into the conversation about making up people and so can you talk more about this racial Data Revolution as you have understood a historically and what i have to do with the way in which our lives are turned into data today . Sure your just a basic definition of terms just because i think its important for me too sort of put my work into the context. The data is little more than administrative data that state produces by virtue of registration voter registration, getting a drivers license, god for bid you get arrested, school records, all of that stuff when you fill out those forms from Social Security application throughout the course of your life has become increasingly accessible. Used it to be literal analog or written the cards and it just took effort for people to collect that information and to do something with it, so part of the what we all be behind, the traces of our lives and the dimensions of our live from 1 degree or another with Computer Technology is essentially what we are talking about here. Now, take us back 125 years when the nation was in turmoil over immigration and all sorts of people were coming here from abroad mostly at the invitation of business to make money because they needed labor and offer can americans were