Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Safiya Noble

Dr. Safiya Noble is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award, and author of the highly acclaimed book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press). She is an internet studies scholar and Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she serves as the Faculty Director of the Center on Race & Digital Justice and as the Co-Director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech & Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2).

 Dr. Noble and her work have been featured in Time, The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, Wired, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone, among many others. Her talks and research focus on the ways that digital media impacts our lives and intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, and technology.

The SFU community can read Safiya Noble's books by borrowing them from SFU Library. Her books can also be found at public libraries and local independent bookstores. For more information on this Speaker, please visit Pande Lecture Management.

Stephanie Dick will be moderating this event. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She is a historian of science by training who focuses on the history of mathematics, computing, and artificial intelligence in particular. Her first book project, Making Up Minds, explores early attempts to reproduce human mathematical intelligence in computers and Stephanie tells this as a story about men who looked at computers and saw themselves – and the many histories that made that confounding recognition possible. In her second project, she is exploring the development and implementation of early law enforcement databanks in the 1960s, especially the New York State Identification and Intelligence System. She is now embarking on a large-scale collaborative research program called “Ritual and Algorithm” that explores entanglements between mathematical, psychological, and spiritual theories of the human mind in the 20th century.

Stephanie is co-editor, with Janet Abbate, of Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society, published with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2022. She is a co-investigator on Wendy Chun’s Data Fluencies Mellon Grant at the Digital Democracies Institute, and co-edits the “Mining the Past” column at the Harvard Data Science Review. She received her PhD in History of Science from Harvard University, and prior to joining the faculty at SFU, Stephanie was an Assistant Professor in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and she was a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows.