Informatics Seminar Series
Fall Quarter 2021

Friday, December 3, 2021

“Women of Color and the Digital Labor of Repair”

Seminar Cancelled

Lisa Nakamura
Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor, Department of American Cultures
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Abstract:
Women of color make our digital products. They assemble them in Asian factories and their cheap labor has made the tech industry’s innovation possible. This presentation focuses on their immaterial and knowledge work that contributes directly to the Internet’s usability. Women of color on social media and gaming platforms contribute unpaid labor to call out misogyny, violations of user agreements, and hateful behavior. They lead some of our most effective and important campaigns against racism from their keyboards.

This presentation will analyze three examples of young women of color’s work as digital documentarians of public racism on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram using a comparative critical race studies approach. Join Lisa Nakamura, founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and P.I. of the DISCO: Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism Network, a 3 year Mellon-funded 4.8 million dollar collaborative higher education grant, to discuss anti-racist platform building, maintenance, and repair.

Bio:
Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Digital Studies Institute and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books on race, gender, and the Internet, most recently Racist Zoombombing (Routledge, 2021, co-authored with Hanah Stiverson and Kyle Lindsey) and Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT, 2020, as Precarity Lab). She is the Lead P.I. for the Mellon Foundation funded DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism) Network #DISCOnetwork.

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