The Technology and Structural Inequality speaker series will focus on the impact of technology on marginalized communities. The series will bring together leading academics and activists whose work is influencing how we think about and how we fight against the harms that technology is causing. The speakers will examine how technology is being used to increase the surveillance and policing of marginalized communities and how many of these technologies are inherently biased and discriminatory.
Please join us for a roundtable discussion on policing and technology on March 17, 2021 at 12 p.m. This discussion will feature:
- Samuel Sinyangwe, Co-founder of Campaign Zero
- Cynthia Khoo, lawyer and Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto
- Cierra Robson, Doctoral Student in Sociology & Social Policy, Harvard University
Moderated by Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Associate Professor of Sociology, Brown University.
Free and open to the public. Please register to attend.
Presented by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) in partnership with the Department of Computer Science’s Computing for the People Project.
Samuel Sinyangwe is a policy analyst and data scientist focused on ending racism and police violence in America. Sam has supported movement activists across the country to collect and use data as a tool for fighting police violence by building Mapping Police Violence, the nation’s most comprehensive database of killings by police. Sam also co-founded Campaign Zero, a national research and advocacy organization that partners with local organizers to enact legislation to end police violence. Previously, Sam worked at PolicyLink to support communities in building cradle-to-career systems of support for low-income families. He graduated from Stanford University in 2012.
Cynthia Khoo is a research fellow at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and a technology and human rights lawyer. She holds an LL.M. with a concentration in law and technology from the University of Ottawa, where she worked on interventions before the Supreme Court of Canada as junior counsel at the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC). Her paper on platform liability for emergent systemic harm to historically marginalized groups received the inaugural Ian R. Kerr Robotnik Memorial Award for the Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar at We Robot 2020 and she is currently authoring a report on platform regulation and technology-facilitated gender-based violence for the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF). Cynthia is the principal lawyer at Tekhnos Law, and obtained her J.D. from the University of Victoria. Her work and expertise span across key areas of technology and human rights law and policy, including privacy and surveillance, equality and freedom from discrimination, online censorship and freedom of expression, intermediary liability, and algorithmic decision-making systems.
Cierra Robson is the associate director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab at Princeton University where she guides research teams in partnership with community organizations to explore how data can be retooled for racial justice. Additionally, Cierra is a doctoral student in the sociology and social policy program at Harvard University where she is a Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Ph.D. Research Fellow in Poverty and Justice. Broadly, her research explores the ways in which technological advancements both reinforce and revolutionize racial inequality in the United States, particularly within the criminal justice system. She holds a B.A. in African American studies from Princeton University, where she specialized in studies of race and public policy and pursued a minor in technology and society.