The CSHE and the BSIEL presents The Power and Potentiality of Abolitionist Tech, part of the 2024-2025 Black Study in Education Lab Webinar Series.
This presentation examines how anti-Black racial logics are embedded in both analog and digital technologies, particularly within educational settings. Dr. Tanksley highlights how systems like school discipline protocols, surveillance tools, and AI technologies contribute to the dehumanization and control of Black youth. She also critiques the myth of technological neutrality and exposed how tools such as automated grading, predictive analytics, and educational AI platforms often perpetuate racial bias and historical inaccuracies. Dr. Tanksley proposes combatting racist technology and systems through abolitionist principles, such as dismantling harmful structures while collaboratively imagining and building new, just systems by cultivating socio-technical consciousness, resistance, and freedom dreaming among Black youth, empowering them to design technologies that center racial justice, community healing, and collective care.
Recorded Webinar
Featured Speaker
Dr. Tiera Tanksley
Dr. Tiera Tanksley’s scholarship, which theorizes a critical race technology theory (CRTT) in education, extends conventional education research to include socio-technical and techno-structural analyses of artificially intelligent (AI) technologies. Specifically, her research examines anti-Blackness as “the default setting” of AI and examines the socio-emotional, mental health and educational consequences of algorithmic racism in the lives and schooling experiences of Black youth. 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 to produce more just and joyous digital experiences for Communities of Color across the diaspora.
More from this series
On Mourning, Possibility, and Black Education in the Right Now
Dr. Chezare A. Warren
The Life, Death, and Afterlife of Apocalyptic Education
Dr. Kenjus Watson and Dr. Tiffani Marie
‘Go Slow, Now’: Black Patience, Anti-Black Violence, and the Radical Possibilities of Black Theatre
Dr. Julius B. Fleming, Jr.