Over time, I’ll be using this space as a publicly-accessible collection for all my written scholarship, catching up to my more recent works which are already available open-access.
Tech-washing policing: Obfuscation, misdirection, and retrenchment is a conceptual analysis of how the institution of policing protects itself by deploying technologies that enable them to claim transformative change while intensifying historic and structural harms. Through agency laundering, spotlighting technology, and increasing lock-in, the public is excluded from meaningfully changing the practice of policing with technology. Tactics of resistance and refusal exist, especially within abolitionist thinking, and include communities reframing the problem definition and/or reconstructing systems in opposition.
The technological drama of AI : From private power to player engagement with AlphaGo builds from a multi-narrative analysis of the go-playing AI system AlphaGo. Tracing both the developer and mainstream discourse, the novel introduction of go players’ own experiences, reflections, and analysis is included here to illuminate the system and its consequences from a new perspective. The basic points: it’s important to consider impacted constituencies when studying AI systems; communities have their own valid knowledge systems which they employ when engaging with a system; engagement is an active process which goes beyond simply being astonished or scared about a new technology.
Navigating Dialectal Bias and Ethical Complexities in Levantine Arabic Hate Speech Detection was conceptualized and led by Ahmed Haj Ahmed, currently an undergraduate student at Haverford College, and co-authored with Rui-Jie Yew, myself, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian. Emphasizes the need for culturally and contextually informed natural language processing (NLP) tools, illustrated through an analysis of hate speech detection of Levantine Arabic. Unable to grasp the dialectical variation and biases in their own datasets and models, popular social media sites like Facebook are stifling local conversations while also elevating other forms of hate speech.
Online Consumer Activism: Challenging Companies with Change.org integrates consumer culture theory and political communication studies in order to articulate how actions considered ‘slacktivism’ can be effective tactics to challenge company behaviour. Building on two case studies from the online petition site Change.org, this work shows i) how the aggregation of consumer discourse crafts alternative narratives and pressure, which ii) propels media coverage, that iii) companies are then forced to respond to in order to manage their public image and lifestyle brand status.
Predictable Policing: New technology, old bias, and future resistance in big data surveillance was co-conceptualized and co-authored with Liam Randall. Responding to AI hype around ‘predictive’ policing at the time, we explore how communities long subject to police surveillance present resistive patterns that are still applicable with the newest technologies. Employing a local-historic study of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we show the persistence of social inequalities in AI-based policing practices and highlight ways community-based abolitionist practices respond to and address these structural issues, representing alternatives to the increasing surveillance across the city.