Tech developments are inevitable, but surveillance, surveillance capitalism, and intrusive tracking are not. We can live in–and even celebrate–a tech-driven world without submitting to the wills of power. It’s not “normal” for google to be able to track your every move, for Amazon to detect your accent and record your conversations when Alexa is supposedly “off”, or to step outside to a forest of cameras watching you, even if you “have nothing to hide.”

For this conversation, we’re so thrilled to be joined by a #dreamteam of some of our favorite scholars, activists, artists, and hackers fighting to keep us all safe at the intersections of surveillance, anti-Blackness, capitalism, the war on terror, and the carceral state.

Join us for a conversation with Simone Browne, scholar and author of Dark Matters; Assia Boundaoui, award-winning filmmaker and director of The Feeling of Being Watched; Freddy Martinez, Director of the Lucy Parsons Labs; and Sarah Hamid, activist with the Carceral Tech Resistance Network.

The past week, the United States has witnessed what Angela Davis has called a possibly unprecedented moment in demands being made globally for radical and systemic challenges to racism and legacies of slavery. This moment is exciting, inspiring, painful, intense, beautiful, shocking, brilliant, and messy. And we’re here for all of it. But immensely important in these moments is also grounding: spiritual/religious grounding, community grounding, and historical grounding. This moment is both new and a legacy of what was made possible by the freedom fighters before us; both visionary and historic; we are speaking new languages and articulating new demands crafted from the alphabets of James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Malcolm X, Ida B. Wells, and so many others. So let’s dive into their words.

We’re excited and honored that the brilliant poet, singer, and songwriter Jamila Woods will be joining us as our discussant for this unit!

In light of the ongoing and accelerating Indian military occupation of Kashmir, lack of media attention, and urgent calls for international solidarity, #BecauseWeveRead is honored to be partnering with Stand With Kashmir to host this ‘Emergency Read’ on Kashmir. Join the brilliant Sanjay Kak (filmmaker & writer), Hafsa Kanjwal (professor & writer), & Mohamad Junaid (professor & writer) in a conversation describing & contextualizing what is happening on the ground in Kashmir, right now.

Referred to in the New York Times as “India’s most impassioned critic of globalization and American influence,” Arundhati Roy stands as one of the most influential writers in the world today. Her writing includes the award-winning The God of Small Things, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, among other fiction and non-fiction work. But beyond her writing, her work also extends into the streets: Roy is an outspoken activist, frequently working on and discussing issues related to India’s illegal military occupation of Kashmir, anti-Zionism, political repression, caste and class, and a myriad of environmental and human rights issues — many of which are discussed in our February/March 2019 read, The End of Imagination. We love a principled, badass woman.

In light of ongoing massive protests in Sudan, their lack of coverage in mainstream media outlets, and the dire need to contextualize these protest within Sudan’s own particular political and historical contexts (which many non-Sudanese and non-African people seem to lack knowledge of), we’re calling for a #BecauseWeveRead ‘Emergency Read’ for the month of January to help us better understand what is happening in Sudan right now, and how we can support. We’re joined today with Nisrin Elamin, a Sudanese PhD student in Anthropology at Stanford University. Her doctoral research focuses broadly on the phenomenon of “foreign land grabs” in post-secession Sudan. It seeks to understand how the differential impact of state-driven land dispossession is being negotiated and contested in several communities in the agricultural Gezira region.