This summer, the CITAP affiliate community will hold three book club meetings to gather and discuss common reading material. We’ve picked:
Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing by Sarah Brayne
Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures by André Brock
You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape by Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner
If you’d like to read along, we’ll hold the first discussion in late June, the second in late July, and the third in early August and will share some of the highlights and questions in future newsletters. If you’d like to share your own thoughts, or share question prompts, and join a virtual book club alongside us, the comments are open!
Nikole Hannah-Jones
The Hussman faculty published a second statement last Friday, as the deadline for a tenure vote passed with no response from the UNC Board of Trustees. They conclude:
To maintain our commitment to excellence, to enrich the next generation of leaders, and because of her exceptional merit, we again call on the Board of Trustees to tenure Nikole Hannah-Jones as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism — with immediacy and ease.
Recent publications and appearances
"If I want to protest something and I don't know whether or not I'm going to get arrested for protesting, I'm just going to sit at home. That's me not engaging in constitutionally protected activity." Faculty Affiliate Enrique Armijo spoke to Law 360 about why plaintiffs stand a better chance of overturning “anti-riot” laws by emphasizing the chilling effect they may have on free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.
The university profiled Francesca Tripodi and her work as part of its “Dynamic Minds” series. As she describes her work:
“Algorithms are designed to feed you information that they’ll think you’ll like the most… Proprietors of problematic content are really good at tagging their content to exploit the algorithmic loophole. They understand how SEO works. This isn’t a new or sophisticated strategy. It’s something that marketers have been doing for decades. I don’t think we understand that the same tactics are being used in the same way for information.”
Coming soon
June 19: Tressie McMillan Cottom will be speaking alongside Jasmine Griffin during the Schomburg Center Literary Festival and literary competition. Registration is free and open to the general public.
Rest of Web
Tressie McMillan Cottom shared new research on unfounded diversity narratives:
Asian Americans Advancing Justice is hiring a Mis/Disinformation Policy Analyst:
Congrats to our friends at Data & Society – including CITAP affiliate Will Partin – on winning the UW-CIP Award for Excellence for their work on countering Census disinformation!