This week, we welcome a new Dis/Organizing Toolkit from Rachel Kuo and Lorelai Lee!
Organizing is all about relationships , but getting people together can be messy, especially when people have different and uneven material relationships to labor and work.
As they write: “When groups come together in moments of heightened urgency and necessity, infrastructures may come together quickly. Internal infrastructures and processes, such as decision-making, communication, and leadership development, can be left less clear. Additionally, as groups grow to meet the needs of participating communities, the pace and scale of work can become less sustainable, with individual organizers experiencing exhaustion and burn-out. Yet, in order to maintain their formation and access resources for longer-term sustainability, groups also may be forced to incorporate into the very institutional systems that have created and upheld barriers for participation and resource distribution. This means simultaneous forced exclusion and enforced inclusion.”
The toolkit offers resources for discussing and navigating decisions about resource access, money management, leadership, technology, and more.
The Promise of Access
On September 10, CITAP hosted Daniel Greene to discuss his book The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope in conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom and Alice Marwick. That conversation and transcript are now available as a special bonus episode of Does Not Compute.
Have you guys had any issues with taking rich people’s money lately?
I take it every time they offer it.
—Daniel Greene & Tressie McMillan Cottom
Our panelists discuss how the problem of poverty became a problem of technology and the skills to use it, how philanthropic donations have changed how public institutions operate, and how ‘learn to code’ became the default response to the broken labor markets of the twenty-first century.
Recent publications and appearances
“One of the main problems is ultimately the decision-making seems to come down a very small and limited group of people, most notably Mark Zuckerberg, and so breaking them up means it at least disrupts that dynamic,” Shannon McGregor told Quartz in a piece on whether or not breaking Facebook up would address the platform’s challenges. Dr. McGregor also appeared on WRAL to explain the underlying causes of these issues: "It isn't necessarily profit that's the problem—it's thinking about engagement as ends-neutral.”
“Trust can become especially strained when you’re talking about gaps of power. These sorts of gulfs in power tend to create trust difficulties.” Deen Freelon took part in a panel discussion on shared governance and academic freedom hosted by the Royster Society of Fellows.
“Most of higher education has been very comfortable with tenure being narrowed as long as they could control its boundaries. COVID-19 has shown the weaknesses in that. Now that we need solidarity to defend tenure, we don’t have it. Now that we need student buy-in to defend tenure, we don’t have it. Because we did not make a case that what tenure ultimately does is gives students power and voice.” Tressie McMillan Cottom joined a panel discussion on academia after the pandemic for Dissent magazine.
“In our sexist society, advice — or mansplaining — is taken as natural. There is always an unspoken politics to our everyday speech. In many ways that matter, it is better that those politics are more evident even if that makes for coarser everyday chitchat.” Dr. Cottom writes on why people are always giving unsolicited advice.
Coming soon
October 12: Tressie McMillan Cottom will appear live for readings and conversation with Kate Bowler and Kelly Corrigan at Durham’s Carolina Theatre.
October 13: Kathy Roberts Forde will present “The White Press Helped Build White Supremacy in the New South” in the first of five planned events in the Hussman Media Justice Speaker Series, co-sponsored by CITAP. Future speakers include Danielle Kilgo Brown, Nikki Usher, Eric Garcia, and Wesley Lowery.
October 13: Deen Freelon will demonstrate PIEGraph at a demo day hosted by the IDeaS Center at CMU. Curious how research centers across the Knight Foundation research network are using software to support research? They’re all gathered here.
October 15: Amelia Gibson, Francesca Tripodi, and Rachel Kuo will join a panel discussion on “Technology, Inclusiveness, Structural Racism, and Silicon Valley” hosted by the Center for Media Law and Policy.
October 19: Student affiliate Daniel Johnson will be moderating a virtual conversation with Howard Nathaniel Lee, U.S. Army veteran, social worker, and first African-American mayor of Chapel Hill. Email stonecenter@unc.edu to register.
October 22 & 27: Rachel Kuo will give a two-part series of virtual talks at Duke University. October 22 she will be discussing misinformation in Asian diasporic communities, and October 27 will be a research workshop on transnational and intergenerational histories of information.
October 27: Faculty affiliate Caitlin Petre will give a research seminar at the University of Leeds on how metrics are transforming the work of journalists.
Rest of Web
UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media announced searches for multiple new faculty, including the Richard Cole Eminent Professor; a Knight Chair in Local News and Sustainability; an open-rank Health Care Communication and Marketing professor; and an open-rank Business Journalism professor.
The FTC continues to recruit an impressive technical and research team. Congratulations to new Senior Advisor Olivier Sylvain!
The Tech Worker Handbook, released this week, offers resources for tech workers “who are looking to make more informed decisions about whether to speak out on issues that are in the public interest.”
“Whether the problem is disinformation, hate speech, teenagers’ depression or content that encourages violent insurrection, governments cannot institute sound policies if they do not know the character and scale of these problems. Unfortunately, only the platforms have access to the relevant data, and as the newest revelations suggest, they have strong incentives not to make their internal research available to the public. Independent research on how people use social media platforms is clearly essential.” We’re following proposals to require research access to platform data with great interest.
One final thought: