The contributors to Captivating Technology examine how carceral technologies such as electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be appropriated and reimagined for more liberatory ends.
Ruha Benjamin is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the author of People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier.
Foreword / Troy Duster xi Acknowledgments / Ruha Benjamin xv Part I. Carceral Techniques from Plantation to Prison 1. Naturalizing Coercion: The Tuskegee Experiments and the Laboratory Life of the Plantation / Britt Rusert 25 2. Consumed by Disease: Medical Archives, Latino Fictions, and Carceral Health Imaginaries / Christopher Perreira 50 3. Billions Served: Prison Food Regimes, Nutritional Punishment, and Gastronomical Resistance / Anthony Ryan Hatch 67 4. Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible Preemption / Andrea Miller 85 5. This Is Not Minority Report: Predictive Policing and Population Racism / R. Joshua Scannell 107 Part II. Surveillance Systems from Facebook to Fast Fashion 6. Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Service Economy / Winifred Poster 133 7. Digital Character in "The Scored Society": FICO, Social Networks, and the Competing Measurements of Creditworthimess / Tamara K. Nopper 170 8. Deception by Design: Digital Skin, Racial Matter, and the New Policing of Child Sexual Exploitation / Mitali Thakor 188 9. Employing the Carceral Imaginary: An Ethnography of Worker Surveillance in the Retail Industry / Madison Van Oort 209 Part III. Retooling Liberation from Abolitionists to Afrofuturists 10. Anti-Racist Technoscience: A Generative Tradition / Ron Eglash 227 11. Techo-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation across the African Diaspora and Global South / Nettrice R. Gaskins 252 12. Making Skin Visible through Liberatory Design / Lorna Roth 275 13. Scratch a Theory, You Find a Biography: A Conversation with Troy Duster 308 14. Reimagining Race, Resistance, and Technoscience: A Conversation with Dorothy Roberts 328 Bibliography 349 Contributors 389 Index 393
"The book comes at a timely moment, contributing to pressing contemporary conversations about predictive algorithms, bias in AI, new modes of surveillance, and the myriad ways our increasingly technologically mediated lives are experienced unequally along lines of race, class, and gender. . . . Captivating Technology offers a meaningful contribution to public and scholarly discussions of technological (in)justice." - Naomi Zucker (Somatosphere) "Benjamin presents a rich and original contribution to critical studies of race and technoscience." - Clara Hick (Ethnic and Racial Studies) "Captivating Technology is a powerful and deeply creative text that excavates suppressed histories just as much as it works towards building new futures." - Susila Gurusami (Surveillance & Society) "Captivating Technology...is an excellent collection that is compelling both in rich individual chapters and in the synthetic whole.... One of the strengths of this collective volume is its deliberate use of literary technologies." - Vivette Garcia-Deister and Anne Pollock (BioSocieties) "[Captivating Technology] is an ideal in action; unfettered by carceral imaginations, scholars can invent different worlds that replace-and not merely, through reform, extend-the discriminatory societies we have made together." - David Theodore (Technology and Culture) "Benjamin's edited volume Captivating Technology is bursting at the seams with exciting work from leading scholars on race and technoscience." - Courtney Tabor (Journal of Race and Policy)
