Acrylic, metal, blue and a means of preparation: Imagining and living Black life beyond the surveillance state

  • Dr. Simone Browne | Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Research Director of Critical Surveillance Inquiry with Good Systems, at the University of Texas at Austin
  • Race and Technology: A Research Lecture Series

This talk is a series of “small comments in no particular order” on the interventions and innovations made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of Black life, from policing to encryption, electronic waste, and artificial intelligence. The interventions under study trouble surveillance and its various methodologies, and are “a means of preparation” for imagining and living Black life beyond the surveillance state. (The quoted text is borrowed from Avery F. Gordon’s Hawthorn Archive).

Learning Materials

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Speaker Details

Simone Browne is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Research Director of Critical Surveillance Inquiry with Good Systems, at the University of Texas at Austin. 

She is currently writing her second book manuscript, Like the Mixture of Charcoal and Darkness, which examines the interventions made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of Black life, from policing, privacy, smart dust and the FBI’s COINTELPRO to encryption, electronic waste and artificial intelligence. Together, these essays explore the productive possibilities of creative innovation when it comes to troubling surveillance and its various tactics, and imagining Black life beyond the surveillance state. Simone is the author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. 

A longer version can be found here https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/aads/faculty/sb28889 (opens in new tab) 

Series: Race and Technology: A Research Lecture Series