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One of the biggest challenges of antiracist education is moving beyond critique to transformative practices, policies and discourses against racism (Dei, 2006). In light of the rise of ubiquitous digital mobile technologies and digital learning (Liu, 2012) there is a need for antiracist advocates and educators to find new methodologies for understanding and combating racisms and engaging antiracism practices. I propose looking at the methodological opportunity of these very digital social technologies for antiracist education. Specifically, I suggest the methodological possibilities of mobile app (application) technologies as they interact, interconnect and interrupt social life in the everyday. Drawing on Stanley’s (2011; 2014) framework for understanding racisms and antiracisms, I engage how this framework can articulate with the methodologies of app technologies through flagging (Billig, 1995), revealing the organization of spaces and the inclusion of excluded narratives and knowledges. I reflect on the opening of such a methodological dialogue for furthering antiracist education in the age of the internet, smartphones, and the prominence of the digital in everyday life.
Mobile apps for antiracism have become valuable pedagogical and activist tools for their real-time and mapping capabilities, their portability and intimate bodily presence, which enables a reaction exactly when an act of racism occurs. In this article, five mobile apps aimed at producing antiracism education or intervention outcomes from the United Kingdom, Australia and France are the focus of an interrogation of the ways in which racism and antiracism are framed and the strengths and weaknesses of these initiatives for countering dominant forms of everyday racism. We identify a number of different approaches to racism and antiracism in our inquiry, which lead to particular sets of aims, features and uses: the app as a tool for capturing, reporting and responding to racist acts; as a way of reinforcing a wider sense of community identity and solidarity; to demonstrate racism, especially Islamophobia, and make its forms visible, and as a means for challenging racism through raising awareness and encouraging bystanders to oppose it. We argue that while these apps are well disposed to exposing and manifesting isolated incidents of racism in everyday life, we question their potential for transformative societal outcomes beyond the level of unilateral action in the context of events experienced as unique incidents.
2019 •
Smartphone apps for anti-racism education and intervention are being devel- oped by organisations in various countries. The ubiquity of smartphone use and app methodology, as Grant argues, have the potential to disrupt racial knowl- edges and facilitate anti-racist action. I use Nicholas Mirzoeff’s ‘zones of appear- ance and non-appearance’ and Derek Hook’s discussion of ‘racialising embodiment’ to discuss the potential of one such app, Everyday Racism, to challenge and disrupt white supremacy. The Australian-based app uses gamifica- tion to encourage users to participate in ‘bystander anti-racism’. However, by failing to question the neutrality of the default white bystander, the app risks reproducing hegemonic constellations of white agency versus racialized inaction. I argue that, in the zone of appearance, it is not enough to make racism apparent. It is necessary to appear. To appear first requires exposing nonappearance including the role even of the well-intentioned in maintaining it.
English Teaching: Practice and Critique
"We're changing the system with this one": Black students using critical race algorithmic literacies to subvert and survive AI-mediated racism in school2024 •
Purpose-This paper aims to center the experiences of three cohorts of Black high school students who participated in a critical race technology course that exposed anti-blackness as the organizing logic and default setting of digital and artificially intelligent technology. This paper centers the voices, experiences and technological innovations of the students, and in doing so, introduces a new type of digital literacy: critical race algorithmic literacy. Design/methodology/approach-Data for this study include student interviews (called "talk backs"), journal reflections and final technology presentations. Findings-Broadly, the data suggests that critical race algorithmic literacies prepare Black students to critically read the algorithmic word (e.g. data, code, machine learning models, etc.) so that they can not only resist and survive, but also rebuild and reimagine the algorithmic world.
Theory into Practice
On the Material Consequences of (Digital) Literacy: Digital Writing With, For, and Against Racial Capitalism2020 •
This article argues that digital writing pedagogy needs to prepare students to deal with underlying oppressive realities within the range of everyday digital writing practices as opposed to simply focusing ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 2 on affordances as unfettered opportunities. In particular, digital writing is increasingly mediated through digital apps and other interactive platforms whose designs enroll us into the social arrangements of racial capitalism, including through corporate interests, societal and language ideologies, social control, and other oppressive factors. As researchers and educators, we should especially be mindful of the participation of complex software such as algorithms. Machines are our coauthors, and machines are not neutral. Digital writing experiences, shaped as they are by design around idealized users and hegemonic social forces, are differentiated along intersectional lines. I discuss pedagogic implications for this as the context for understanding writing under contemporary racial technocapitalism, arguing for critical design literacy as a way forward.
Decolonial Subversions
Disrupt the Discourse: An eLearning Course and Digital Toolkit to aid the Development of an Anti-Racist Pedagogy2023 •
Kevin J. Brazant presents Disrupt the Discourse, a digital tool kit of resources and content inspired by Critical Race Theory, values of social justice and anti-racism practice. This toolkit incorporates a web-based eLearning course builder that allows the development of online courses for any device. This toolkit has been purposefully designed and developed, cognisant of the challenges of digital poverty (i.e. lack of access to laptops and the adoption of mobile learning, such as using smartphones and smaller devices and navigating intermittent and unstable internet connections). It serves as a reference point and guide for educators seeking to facilitate courageous conversations relating to both staff and students who identify as Black Indigenous People of colour (BIPOC) and their lived experiences as they navigate colonial and white spaces both figuratively and physically. Users of the toolkit
Mobile Media & Communication
The transnationality of mobile media and contemporary racisms: A future research agenda2022 •
2022 •
The #BlackLivesMatter movement, which rose to prominence following the state-sanctioned murders of several unarmed Black Americans, shed light on the power of social media to serve as a platform for transformative resistance and digital counter-storytelling for minoritized youth. With some of the highest rates of social media use to date, it is not altogether surprising that Black college-age youth, particularly young Black women, were the primary curators of the politicized social media storm that captured the nation's attention and spurred a viral hashtag into a historical movement. Qualitative interviews with 17 Black undergraduate women showcased the ability of social media to provide young Black women with a sense of safety, visibility, and community that is not regularly available in offline settings. In addition to the benefits of digital resistance, this study also illuminated a spectrum of unintended mental health impacts of countering anti-Black violence online, including anxiety, depression and fatigue as a result of witnessing viral Black death and dying. Participants' experience with racial battle fatigue inevitably caused academic hardships, including inability to study, focus, attend lectures, or participate in class discussions. By submerging these findings into a rich body of Black feminist technology scholarship, this study sheds light on the obscure inner-workings of algorithmic racism and the commodification of Black death online. By showcasing how the internet traffics in Black death and dying, this work begins to disrupt normative constructions of technology and information systems as post-racial, ungendered and inherently liberatory platforms for student activism.
Race Ethnicity and Education
Rethinking race and racism as technologies of affect: theorizing the implications for anti-racist politics and practice in educationThis article draws on the concept of race and racism as “technologies of affect” to think with some of the interventions and arguments of critical affect studies. The author suggests that critical affect theories enable the theorization of race and racism as affective modes of being that recognize the historically specific assemblages which are practiced in schools and the society. It is also argued that rethinking race and racism as technologies of affect, a vision of anti-racist politics and practice in education can be formed in ways that go beyond recognition or resistance, but rather attend to the production of pedagogical spaces and practices that create ways of living differently. The education implications of this idea are discussed in relation to how teachers and teacher educators can begin not only to analyze the affective mobilizations of race and racism, but also to engage in political struggles that harness the affective forces of anti-racist action in everyday life.
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