University of Texas at Austin Professor Simone Browne To Give 2025 Transit Talk

On Thursday, April 24, Simone Browne, 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, will deliver the 2025 Transit Talk at Villanova University’s Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society (WFI).

Transit Talks is a marquee collaborative lecture series between WFI, Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communications, and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Browne's 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.

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.

The Transit Talks began in 2018 as a partnership between Villanova’s Waterhouse Institute and Temple’s Klein College, with Penn’s Annenberg School joining in 2025, to cultivate new conversations around the importance of communication, social change and social justice across the collaborating campus communities.

Browne’s talk at Villanova will take place in Driscoll Hall, Room 134, from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m on April 24. This event is free and open to the public.

Dr. Browne will present a class at the Annenberg School in Room 500 on Friday, April 25 at 11:00 a.m. The class is open to Penn, Temple and Villanova University students.

You can purchase Dr. Browne's book Dark Matters and save 30% with the coupon code SAVE30 by clicking here.