Keynote. Justice inclusion and imagining and building alternative platfor platforms. To introduce our guests, im going to turn it over. Well kick start that panel with that. Thank you. All right. For our panel today we have four wonderful speakers. Im going to start by introdu introducing them. We have margine. He earned tenure there and he will shortly have the exciting new title of associate professor. [ applause ] all right. Sarah jay jackson is an associate professor of communication at North Eastern university and in july shell be starting a new position as the president ial associate professor of communication at the university of pennsylvanias school for communication. [ applause ] math thu matthew is at the school for communication. [ applause ] im an associate professor of Communication Arts at the university of wisconsin madison. In this panel we want to explore the question of how we can use new Media Technologies for the specific purposes of Racial Justice and inclusion. It connects really well to the themes of the Previous Panel but i think all of our research will take it in a different direction. These scholars look at antiracist interventions including alternative media production, archives, hashtag campaigns and counter mapping platforms. Building on their wide array of experiences, they will discuss potential lessons, themes and strategies for a more radically and racially inclusive future of new media and technologies within and outside of pipelines of production, distribution and consumption. Together we seek to engage with and produce scholarship activism aimed at combatting the flattening discourses of diversity and multiculturism. Im going to open with a broad question that will help tell us about the general work youve been doing this this area. How do you see your research as an intervention in the larger political context around Racial Justice . We can just go in the order here. Hello. I view Racial Justice as critical to my work as also as linked from gender justice, sexuality and Economic Justice especially in all the other forms of difference that we contend with. In my specific work right now ive been interested in what independent creators do online and how so i after writing a book about independent web creators called open tv, where i interviewed people like lisaraye, who is probably the most famous person in the book, i started a platform called Artist Television to show items who are identified and working on their own shows. I do this because when i was doing my work, i thought why does the internet matter, i learned and got deeper into how much money there is in hollywood and how systemically excluded people of color have been in that system for so long. Netflix spends now 13 billion a year on original programming. Thats one channel. All of them gross several billion a year, hbo several billion a year. Its a lot of money. But the people who are executive producers and creators or shows, of all of those networks streaming and otherwise are less than 5 to 7 , thats all people of all colors for television. Thats a lot of money that doesnt go to our communities and allow young people and creators tell stories and help people understand what its like to be racialized in america. For me Racial Justice about getting people access to these systems and also Building Systems that could sustainably develop our communities when those systems inevitably lose interest and the waves go. Right now were in a diversity wave. I sort of knew that starting open television, there would be an opportunity to get people in and build an audience that might sustain these communities going forward. So my training is in arcable studies. So im primarily interested in records and evidence, and in the specific context im also very much interested in digital memory and also as carvkaren san the previous pam on the digital traces we leave behind. From that perspective i look a lot at gaps in the arcable record. I look at how people are represented in records. I look pretty specifically at how records are contributing to our carsonal state. So the gathering of data and social media records, the sort of push towards using those kinds of things, and i also have sort of deep investments in in critical understanding decisions to move analog records into digital environments, which i will talk a little bit more about later. So in terms of a larger intervention and records and archives and digital memory, there are there are so many ways that records are used in our everyday lives that were just not aware of. And someone on a Previous Panel said something about how we dont know how long were did he dont know how long Homeland Security records are going to be kept, for example. For an archivist, thats actually not true. For archivist and records managers there are laws that governor and mandate how long those records are kept. So looking at those kinds of concerns and being able to address the racialized as spengts of them e. The race overlay, very typically when youre looking at gaps in our historical record, its black people and other people of color and clear people that are falling into these gaps and whether its just a lack of kepgs representation or work in our descriptive practices, how we name things, what we call people, theres sort of a lack of empowerment right now in terms of people being able to name and call themselves to record themselves, to create their open evidence and historical record. And the gap in the vagary and the violences tend to happen with communities of color and also, again to clear communities. Those are sort of my primary engagements and investments. How that plays out in the research looks all kinds of ways but it really always comes back to the record and the evidence in front of us. So my work, as some of you know, focuses on media activism and also the ways in which journalists and other media makers cover black activism, feminism activism, et cetera. The question what does Racial Justice look like in relation to my work, its basically what my work is about from a media studies framework and perspective. I would say that that means theres a lot of nuance and complication in that because historically there have been some sort of we can take technology as an example and folks on Previous Panels have noted this. There have been some myopic and very hopeful ideas spread that so, for example, technology will save us or erase inequalities, it will do et cetera, et cetera, that lacked the interventions to sort of acknowledge that, for example, the internet is a tool of military technology primarily. Its a surveillance tool primarily and it actually reinforces many of the very hierarchical structures in our society and many activists are using that tool to try to upend. So my work really considers and centers the question of the agency of activists and order people and thinking through the importance of the central story telling of these people. Hopefully we all know theres no media outlet or tool that is perfect or that was created for the purpose of social justice, and yet we know that activists and ordinary folks use the tools available to them to tell really important and compelling stories that can change public narratives, that can change public politics, that can create Community Within groups that really helps to in some cases save lives, frankly. So thinking through some of those issues in terms of the question of Racial Justice means thinking through how are the media makers who are often at the margins really working on and helping to support projects of Racial Justice but also how are those projects going to and this is an important part to the many projects and Many Organizations wearying on Racial Justice we dont often see covered in the media or that we the things that are happening offline or the things that dont get covered because theyre not compelling enough or whatever, which means thinking through the relationship of media activism and framing of activism in media to on the ground organizing and sort of whats happening every day in communities where folks are trying to make change. As one of the earlier scholars on this panel, i have multiple projects to answer the question. Im working out my longterm agenda how racial inequality is shaped and also propagated through technology. For one, my colleague and i just got this forthcoming article about how telecommunication policy structures are very white and center whiteness. We didnt think it was an original idea to say theres a need for centering and grounding Diverse Communities of color and actually the interchanges within that communities of color are not monolithic. That was an original contribution we did not think would get through but it is. Secondly im working on a chapter thats talking about ethics and things how in light of ai ethic as a dominant paradigm, why is it problematic some boards dont even have representatives from marginalized communities that are the most vulnerable. Think about the lack of representation of black folks in the room or even other endangered communities. Lastly, the disdisoortation im working on and hopefully will be finished in a year is urban science as tools for data and how do we bring to light racial politics of data and visibility. And we will talk more about that later. Great. Thank you very much so much. Lets dig in a little bit more to the specificities of your work and your research. We will start with amar. Lets talk more about open tv. You guys are creating tons of content but i think we could have a conversation about the idea of ownership and what you do with all of the content that youre producing. And what negotiations you make in thinking about where you post your media and then who owns it as a result of that. Can you talk a little bit about the decisions that you have made or the conversations that you have had with your media creators about posting content on sites like youtube or facebook versus starting your own platform . Sure. Theres a lot there. Ownership, we dont really think about it when we think about Creative Media but hollywood is ravenous for intellectual property. Most of the shows you watch are owned by the corporations that distribute them. There used to be restrictions on how much an entity could own that they distributed but that got killed with deregulation. The result of that deregulation in the 1990s was actually the death of black television because corporations figured out a way to make money without necessarily having to actually cater to communities and actually build new audiences. And i think this is a real problem for inequality sustainability. If youre a young creator and you have a story and you bring it to hollywood, youre almost immediately given this proposition, well, if you want your story made, you have to sell it to us and then you lose control over it. They can bring in other writers who might not share your political perspective, who might not share your culture, to actually make it. So when i started open television, i very explicitly started with the idea that artists own their intellectual property on our platform. We have very basic letter of agreement where it states like really . Part of that was practical as a professor, i didnt want people and i wasnt trying to get into television and i didnt have money to defend it legally and it wasnt practical. Plus it was an ethical thing, i wanted them to walk into the room and say this is my story and i own it and i want to and should be able to profit from it. What i have learned, as many artists have since gone on to hollywood and sold feature films and written for television is because theyre new and havent been in the system for decades as many other people have and they dont look like a traditional executive producer, theyre still in this sort of position where they made to sell their story, and sometimes they walk away. And i really cant blame them for that. Theres a way in which when you put something on the internet, you have some control over it. There are terms and conditions like to say they have the rights to certain things and, yes, youtube can put anything you post on youtube in like an ad but they generally accept the proposition youre the creator and ip holder of that property. Yet at the same time if you actually want to profit from that, most people, unless you have been on youtube for a decade or have 80 million subscribers are not making anything off their videos. They need to enter another system to profit. We need infrastructures to figure out how to correct these systems. For me thats really the research question. Like can you actually create a structure that is equitable, that brings people in from the ground up and allows them to soar and make their own money and build their own systems so they can support other people. Thats the work of social transformation. And i dont have the answers yet. Theres possibility of spinning off corporations and nonprofits and doing deals but its very complicated and very heady. Thinking about liberation in any of these systems is very difficult. I will also say youtube and their algorithms, facebook, twitter, make it very difficult for any independent creator to build an audience or get seen. Maybe ten years ago when lisaraye was starting out, it was a little more possible to spread, but now theres so much content. And all of the companies are now spending money on their own intellectual property right, youtube had has youtube premium, vimio and facebook are entering television. They want to be innovative creators for the free ip but they dont because they dont want people to compete with their own thing. Algorithms are just as inherently discriminatory and might be inherent to people of color. So there are barriers. As researchers, its important to be in that space because thats where we get the rich, thick data this is whats going on on the ground and these are the specific barriers to justice. So in this conversation about alternative platforms and how we can get around that, where are you seeing some of the hopeful areas . That was kind of a bleak answer, but the with the limited barriers. Hopeful things. I would say people are really hungry for stories that reflect them, right . So we released this hoe in 2017 called brown girls, ended up being our hit show. Premiered basically right around the time about a friendship between a black woman and muslim woman. The black woman and muslim woman were good friends for years and the music is very good and look it up if you havent heard it. I think their narratives artfully told can heer guienter communities and there was multiple forces that helped that show and same bally just sold her first feature several months ago. They wrote a book and are touring. And they will support creators after them. So i see how youre actually building solidarity sort of project by project. But of the 40something programs that otv released, it was that one and a couple of others that were success stories. But even the ones that were little seeds has been able to get writers gigs in hollywood and getting them credit and professionalization. I think theres ways im learning we even though we fetish size whats visible, spreadable, big data, sometimes small data can have a much larger impact than we think, especially for the lives of those artists. I have seen a lot of artists, everything is chicago based, a lot of artists support each other. They support about each others shows, they collaborate with each other. And this idea some people are hyper individualistic and only chair about themselves, it may be true for some context but not all context. People understand film and television productive is highly collaborative. You have to support each other if you want to get anywhere and its only through collectivest we will make these systems. Thank you. Tony tonja, lets talk about your work on digital memory. What kind of practices have you seen and how does race play a role in those practices . And how do people of color fight for the right to be remembered and the right to be forgotten and what rules do technology play in both of those . Okay. So in terms of digital memory practices, one of the things that i have been looking really closely at is the is digital afterlife practices. What im calling digital remains, im sure im not the first person to use that term, but its the one singing to my heart right now. I have several examples for you. The first is i sort of gestured towards earlier is this practice of moving records that were analog records into digital environments, digitizing them and moving them into digital environments. So some of what that looks like is taking slavery records, for example, or colonialera records and mass digitizing them and putting them up online. Which in theory is fantastic. It means people who didnt who previously may not have had access to say geological materials or stuff like that can help to build out ancestral histories, et cetera. Thats the Positive Side of it. The negative side of it, and i will give a really clear example here, the Danish National archives just digitized Something Like a kilometer of colonial era records from the virgin islands. And they sort of did it without any real context or without putting it into any kind of context. They just digitized all of the stuff and threw it up online. So now you have people who are looking at these records and being like whoa, wait a minute. Thats my ancestor and the image of them is of them ripped and bleeding or, you know, the image that im seeing online here is a violent image. And i didnt consent and my ancestors certainly didnt consent and my family didnt consent to have this image up online where it will now live in perpetuity. Its different than sitting in a box in a physical archive somewhere and enjoying this digital afterlife that goes on in perpetuity. Another case that comes to mind in terms of digital memory and digital afterlife is henrietta wax. Theres been a lot of research and writing about henrietta lapse. The hilo cells. For those of you who are not familiar henrietta was a black woman who died of a very aggressive form of cancer in 1951. She was treated at Johns Hopkins hospital and they took de rigueur at the time, nothing untoward about it, they took cell samples from her cancerous cell samples from her. But this form of cancer was so ag