technofuturos: chicanxs/latinxs in society & the future (Critical latinx media & technology studies)

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“Part of the challenge of understanding algorithmic oppression is to understand that the mathematical formulations which drive automated decisions are made by human beings.”  (Safiya Noble, 2018, 1)

“Show me your papers” | Sin papeles | Undocumented

How is it that documentation – and datafication more broadly – (or lack thereof) came to be a central modality through which Latinx immigrant life is experienced? What are the social, political and epistemic consequences of knowing Latinxs/migrants through such regimes of documentation and (in)visibility? This course will explore the racial, colonial, and gendered logics underpinning modern data regimes, focusing on how Latinx and other marginalized communities are shaped, surveilled, and contested through statistical, biometric, and algorithmic ways of knowing. Drawing from critical data studies, science and technology studies, and Latinx theory, the course examines how tools like passports, biometrics, predictive policing and the census enforce social norms, national borders, and racial classifications. Through foundational and cutting-edge texts, students interrogate the political work of data systems in the lives of Latinx and other marginalized people. Case studies on the U.S. census, Silicon Valley’s datafication of migration, and surveillance exports will anchor discussions on data imperialism, border technologies, and the struggle for visibility, self-representation and data justice. Ultimately, the course offers students a critical lens to understand how data functions not just as neutral information but as a site of contested power.

• DATA BODERS

  • Villa-Nicholas, Melissa, “Chapter 1: The Physical Borderlands, the Data Borderlands” In Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants, UC Press, 2023.

  • Chaar Lopez, Ivan. “Sensing Intruders: Race and the Automation of Border Control.”

• DATA BODIES

  • Torpey, John C. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State.Cambridge University Press, 1999.

  • Magnet, Soshana Amielle. When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

  • Villa-Nicholas, Melissa, “Chapter 2: Latinx Data Bodies” In Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants, Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 2023.

  • Kertzer, D. I., & Arel, D. (2002). Censuses, Identity Formation, and the Struggle for Political Power. In D. I. Kertzer & D. Arel (Eds.), Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (pp. 1–42). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

  • Our Data Bodies: https://www.odbproject.org/tools/

• ESTABLISHING RACIAL DIFFERENCE

  • Brown, Simone. “Chapter 1: Notes on Surveillance Studies: Through the Door of No Return” Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

  • Peggler Gordon, Anna. In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009.

• UNDOCUMENTED (THE POLITICS OF VISIBILITY)

  • Schreiber, Rebecca M. The Undocumented Everyday: Migrant Lives and the Politics of Visibility, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

  • Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement. MIT Press. 2014.

• AVATARS AND INTERFACES

  • Amaya Schaeffer, Felicity. “Flexible Technologies of Subjectivity: Mobility Across the Americas.” In Technofuturos, 2007.

  • Sweeney, Miriam E. and Melissa Villa-Nicholas. “Digitizing the ‘Ideal’ Latina Information Worker.” American Quarterly Vol. 74, No. 1.

  • Miranda, Magally. “Familiar Interfaces: Coded Norms of Racialized, Gendered Domesticity on Digital Care Work Platforms.” Anthropology of Work (Forthcoming).

  • Kelly, Carlos. “Building Empathy in Video Games Through Digital Mestizaje in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.”

• HI TECH RACE-MAKING

  • Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, UK: Polity Press, 2019.

  • Noble, Safiya Umoja. “Chapter 2: Searching for Black Girls” Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2018.

Memory work as a method

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This course explores the concept of memory work as a critical method at the intersection of media studies and Ethnic studies, focusing on how marginalized communities engage in self-documentation, digital storytelling, and ephemeral media practices to preserve lived experience. Drawing from foundational research on memory work and archiving and contemporary scholarship and practice, students will analyze how informal, everyday acts of media-making function as alternative archives that challenge dominant narratives and institutional exclusions. We will examine methodological innovations that can trace often invisibilized people, places, things and relations as meaningful cultural practices. The course emphasizes building research approaches that honor the liberatory potential of grassroots memory work while resisting the extractive logics of traditional archival systems.

• ARCHIVAL ABSENCE & PRESENCE

  • Diana Taylor. The Archive and the Repertoire.

  • Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez, “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Affective Impact of Community Archives,” The American Archivist 79 (Spring/ Summer 2016): 56–81.

• INTRO TO MEMORY WORK

  • Michelle Caswell. “Imagining Liberatory Memory Work,” In Urgent Archives.

  • Marika Cifor, “Affecting Relations: Introducing Affect Studies to Archival Discourse,” Archival Science 16(1) (2016): 7–31.

  • Jamie A.cLee, “Be/Longing in the Archival Body: Eros and the ‘Endearing’ Value of Material Lives,” Archival Science 16(1) (2016): 33–51. 

  • Gould, Chandre and Verne Harris. “Memory for Justice.” Nelson Mandela Foundation (2014),

    https://www .nelsonmandela.org/uploads/files/MEMORY_FOR_JUSTICE_2014v2.pdf.

• MAKING SPACE FOR MARGINALIZED MEMORIES

  • Jennifer Douglas, Alex Alisasuskas, and Devon Mordell, “‘Treat Them With the Reverence of Archivists:’ Records Work, Grief Work and Relationship Work in the Archives,” Archivaria 88 (Fall 2019): 84–120; 

  • Tonia Sutherland, “Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1(2) (2017), https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/cjclis/article/view/42