Who We Are
Our inaugural intervention is the result of a collaborative, multidisciplinary effort; more than twenty scholars made significant contributions to early drafts. These contributions were facilitated and synthesized by a core editorial team that includes: NM Amadeo, Chelsea Barabas (MIT), Audrey Beard (RPI), Dr. Theodora Dryer (NYU), Dr. Beth Semel (MIT), and Sonja Solomun (McGill). Our inaugural intervention is the result of a collaborative, multidisciplinary effort; more than twenty scholars made
The academic collective that has emerged from this process will engage in future conversations as the Coalition For Critical Technology. We are part of a growing community of scholars who are challenging academia’s key role in the creation and maintenance of carceral technology. The Coalition aims to support larger movements of scholars, technologists, and organizers who are working for justice by resisting technologies that exacerbate inequality, reinforce racism, and support the carceral state.
Our approach involves continuous reevaluation of epistemic norms and interrogation of how knowledge is valued, created, and employed through academic power structures.
Our Mission Statement and Values (a living document) can be found here.
Our Publications
Abolish the #TechToPrisonPipeline
- Original Publication
- PDF Download (thanks to Momin Malik for formatting with LaTeX)
This open letter to Springer Publishing is a response to the growing trend of neo-phrenological research in data science and machine learning. We address a specific paper announced in May 2020 that claims to predict criminality from images of faces, but this pathologizing of “criminality” and bio-essentialist view of race is far from unique to this paper. We (and many others) have noticed this trend of building on the long-debunked pseudoscience of phrenology and the role that academia plays in making this work possible. From the funding system, to the publishing apparatus, to the model for tenure-track promotion, the academy is complicit.