2025 Transit Talk Master Class: Simone Browne, University of Texas at Austin
- Annenberg School, Room 500
Join Transit Talk Speaker Simone Browne for a class based on her talk, "On Doorbells, MTurks, and Algorithmic Landscapes”
About the Talk and Class
Simone Browne's Transit Talk—“On Doorbells, MTurks, and Algorithmic Landscapes” — uses doorbell cameras, the apps that accompany home monitoring systems, and recent porch piracy laws as an entry into a larger discussion about the impact prison data collection technologies have on consolidating state, policing and corporate powers. She will also examine visual artist Danielle Dean’s installation "Amazon" (2022) and her creative interrogation of the human labor that underwrites artificial intelligence by way of Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing marketplace allowing businesses to outsource talks to a global workforce.
She will deliver a masterclass based on the talk in Room 500 on Friday, April 25 at 11:00 a.m. - open to Penn, Temple and Villanova University students. A breakfast reception will be held before the class at 10:30 a.m.
About Simone Browne
Simone Browne is an associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Browne is an author and scholar exploring the intersections of surveillance, Black life, and technology. She is currently working on her second book, Like the Mixture of Charcoal and Darkness, which examines artistic interventions in surveillance, from policing and AI to encryption and electronic waste. Her first book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, received multiple awards, including the Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize.
You can purchase Dr. Browne's book Dark Matters and save 30% with the coupon code SAVE30 by clicking here.
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