Everything you need to know about the 3rd Annual Civics of Technology conference!
Civics of Tech Announcements
3rd Annual Conference Announcement: Our third annual Civics of Technology conference will be held online on August 1st, from 11-4 pm EST and on August 2nd, 2024 from 11-3pm! Our featured keynotes will be Dr. Tiera Tanksley and Mr. Brian Merchant. Even though the conference is free, you must register and we must be able to verify your identity to attend. You can find the conference schedule and more on our 2024 conference page.
Monthly Tech Talk on Tuesday, 08/06/24. Join our monthly tech talks to discuss current events, articles, books, podcast, or whatever we choose related to technology and education. There is no agenda or schedule. Our next Tech Talk will be on Tuesday, August 6th, 2024 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
September Book Club: For our next book club we will read Ashley Shew’s 2023 book, Against Technoableism Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. We will meet at 8pm EDT on Thursday, September 12th, 2024. You can register on our events page.
Conference Preview
We are humbled and honored that so many critical technology partners are joining us for the 3rd annual Civics of Technology conference this Thursday from 11am EST to 4:00pm EST and on Friday from 11am to 3:00 EST. We want to start with our opening message to set the tone for our theme of Tech Imaginaries:
The third annual conference theme is Tech Imaginaries. Our themes the last two years have been Visioning Just Futures (Year 1) and Liberatory Tech Actions (Year 2), and this year we'd like to turn toward surfacing, confronting, and playing with how imagination works to create tech futures. This theme builds on our project motto, “Technologies are not neutral and neither are the societies into which they are introduced.”
We were inspired, as we often are, by Dr. Ruha Benjamin’s new book, Imagination: A Manifesto. We just read her book for our April Book Club and were struck by the ways she frames imaginaries. Playing with the notion of imaginaries, she writes:
I want more than anything for your imagination to run wild. In that spirit, my use of the word is undisciplined, promiscuous, and porous. … I go back and forth between imagination and imaginaries--conceptual kin, related but not identical. Although a bit jargony as a noun, imaginary refers to collective projections of a desirable and feasible future. I find myself invoking imaginaries when I want to cast a critical light on the imposition of a dominant imagination that presents itself as appealing and universal. You’ll see, too, that I refer to imagination interchangeable with dreams and dreaming, ideas and ideologies. I invoke stories and speculation as surrogates, playing and poetry as proxies, and myths, visions, and narratives all as riffs on the imagination.
In most cases, I am implying the idea of a collective imagination, as when we imagine different worlds together, writing shared stories and plotting futures in which we can all flourish. But this “collecting” of our imaginations is not always a good thing, as when the powers that be endeavor to download their dreams from on high. We must learn to protest our imaginations.(pp. ix-x)
In her book, Dr. Benjamin shows how the imaginations of Silicon Valley CEOs often create worlds we don’t want to live in, and thus emphasizes the importance of imagining the just futures we desire. Similarly, our keynote speakers have invested their time and thinking in imagining alternate technological futures, and we hope it will also inspire your submissions to our conference!
We welcome your critical thoughts, critiques, resources in the comments so we might highlight them during the conference.
The conference opens with a keynote from Mr. Brian Merchant, a tech journalist and award winning and best selling author of Blood in the Machine and The One Device. His work examines technology, work, climate change, utopian dreams and dystopian realities and the things that lie in between. On the second day, the conference opens with a keynote from Dr. Tiera Tanksley, an Op Ed Public Voices Fellow for Technology in the Public Interest with the MacArthur Foundation and Post-doctoral Fellow for Youth, Technology, and Public Policy at UCLA. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist and rewrite racially biased technologies.
There are too many sessions to list here, so visit our Conference Page for more details, but here are few to give a taste of the good work of the presenters.
Superheros and Villians of Learning Design: A Disasterclass
Smart Campus Imaginaries and Surveillance
Writing (Auto)Correctly: Thinking Technoskeptically about AI-Powered Writing Tools
Resisting as Part of our Tech Imaginaries
AI is Anti-Black. What can Educators do about this
We hope you find opportunities in these sessions to engage with our theme of Tech Imaginaries, in whatever ways, small and large.
Register now, so that you can join us in learning from these thoughtful educators!
Conference Logistics
In order to attend the conference, you MUST register. Registration is free! In an effort to avoid Zoom bombing, we ask that you use your institutional email address or provide a way of authenticating your identity (e.g. a link to your institutional web page or LinkedIn).
To access the conference:
Access the CoT Conference page (https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/2024conference)
The page will be password protected beginning Wednesday, July 31, at noon EST.
By Wednesday evening, you will receive an email with the password. Please take a moment to be sure you can access the website via the password.
Live Zoom links will be posted on the page the morning of the conference, August 1st.