Share 
This event will be held on Zoom. The link to join will be emailed to the Annenberg community on the day of the event.
About the Talk
The civil rights revolution and the computing revolution were set on a collision course in the early 1960s. The aftermath of that collision narrowed, nullified and constrained the relationship between Black people and computing technology. From the very beginning Black people were imagined and defined as "the problem" that computing technology must solve. Our once imagined future has borne itself out in devastating consequences evident in our present. As we stand on the precipice of another technological revolution today, can we as a society right our relationship to technology so that we can both imagine, define, pursue, and control a different array of Black futures?
About the Speaker
Author of the new book Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter, Charlton McIlwain is Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement & Development at New York University and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication. His work focuses on the intersections of computing technology, race, inequality, and racial justice activism. In addition to Black Software, McIlwain has authored "Racial Formation, Inequality & the Political Economy of Web Traffic" in the journal Information, Communication & Society, and co-authored, with Deen Freelon and Meredith Clark, the recent report "Beyond the Hashtags: Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice." He recently testified before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services about the impacts of automation and artificial intelligence on the financial services sector.