ICS News Archive

Professor Crooks to Discuss Education Technology in Working Class Communities of Color

On Monday, Oct. 19, from 4 to 5:30 p.m., UCI Humanities Center is hosting an event, The Black Liberation Movement and Radical Community Education. The panel discussion, which will take place on Zoom, will feature the following speakers:

• Ericka Huggins, an educator, Black Panther Party member, former political prisoner, human rights advocate, and poet;
• Angela LeBlanc-Ernest, an independent scholar and filmmaker, director of the Oakland Community School Documentary Project, and cofounder of the Intersectional Black Panther Party History Project; 
• Damien Sojoyner, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCI; and
• Roderic Crooks, an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS).

On the surface, Crooks might seem like an unlikely panelist at this event, but his research aligns well, as he has spent years examining how the use of digital technology by public institutions extracts resources from minoritized and racialized communities. His current project explores how community organizers based in working-class Black and Latinx communities use data for activist projects, even as they dispute the proliferation of data-intensive technologies in education, law enforcement, financial services and other vital sites of public life.

As a panelist, Crooks will discuss education technology in working class communities of color and how the Black Panther approach to education relates to the present. This will complement talks by the other speakers: Huggins on radical community education, LeBlanc-Ernest on how systematic education has been elusive and Black people have had to “figure it out,” and Sojoyner on how education as a construct is circumvented by the whims and desires of particular classes.

This will be a 60-minute discussion followed by a Q&A session, so be sure to register today!

— Shani Murray