Can technology be racist? This is a question I ask students to grapple with. Many of my students think that this question is absurd. Technologies cannot be racist, only people can. This is what I hear from many students at the beginning of the term. To these students, enrolled in an undergraduate technical communication class called “Power, Privilege, and Bias in Technology Design,” racism is something that is based on the intent and actions of a few bad or ill-informed individuals, not something encoded and embedded in something as seemingly neutral as technology. This is where we start the term,…
Author: Stephen Quigley
Emma Rose
Stephen Quigley teaches technical communications and digital media production at the University of Pittsburgh. His work has been published in Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, Ulmer's Textshop Experiments, The Writer's Chronicle, and New Writing.