Happening This Week!The First Annual Civics of Technology Conference, Visioning Just Futures
We can’t believe it’s almost conference time! Our first annual Civics of Technology Conference, Visioning Just Futures, is happening this Thursday and Friday, 8/4 and 8/5, from 11:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. EST. If you haven’t already done so, please pause reading this post and register now!
For years, Dan and I, as well as many of our educator friends, have imagined what we would want in an education and technology conference. We envisioned a conference which incorporated critical approaches to educational technologies and challenged our scholarship and pedagogy. The sessions would be interactive and encourage participants to, well, participate, and there would be space for an unconference. To close out each day, we imagined keynotes featuring scholars whose ideas challenge and inspire some of the boldest work in technology and education.
After spending so much time imagining, we decided to make a space for our dream conference to become a reality. Honestly, I still have trouble believing that this many thoughtful and critical educators volunteered their time, brains, energy, and labor to share at the Civics of Technology, Visioning Just Futures Conference. But I am SO EXCITED and appreciative that they are.
When we dreamed, we imagined opportunities to engage in the application of critical lessons about technology, and at the conference we get to participate in Autumm Caines’ session, Playing with the Zoom Gaze and Ryan Smits’ session, Unfolding a Smartphone. We longed for sessions which interrogated technologies and challenged our thinking about just futures through technologies the way the presentations from the Tech Freedom School on immigration, education, environmental justice, and health justice do. We wanted to find a space rich with critical approaches like Dr. Tiera Chantè Tanksley’s session, Consequences of Algorithmic Oppression on Students of Color. And you could knock us over with a feather when Dr. Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab and author of three books, Viral Justice, Race After Technology, and People’s Science, and Dr. Sepehr Vakil, assistant professor of Learning Sciences in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University and oversees the Young People’s Race Power and Technology project (YPRPT), agreed to keynote.
There are so many more amazing sessions, and you can see them all on our Conference Page. Please remember to register so that you receive the login information for the virtual conference, and use our contact form if you have any questions. SEE YOU THURSDAY!!