ABOUT WE BE IMAGINING
We Be Imagining is transitioning into a public interest technology project this year. Pivoting on the-diverse in every way- community we've fostered around our current project streams, we seek to evolve into a set of activity structures and social processes that enable social scientists, technologists, artists and activists to co-create liberatory alternatives to enterprise driven sociotechnical systems. We believe that bringing together typically siloed disciplines and activists through our project streams will provide the basis to ethically develop public interest technology. Within this structure, *community* does not merely provide research oversight, but is an integral part of the process from ideation to development and dissemination.
MEET THE WBI TEAM
J. Khadijah Abdurahman (she/her)
Khadijah is a child welfare system abolitionist and an independent researcher whose focus is predictive analytics in the child welfare system. She is the co-founder of Word2RI, an oral history archive of racial justice and gentrification on Roosevelt Island, Director of We Be Imagining, a series of digital programming examining race and technology through infusing academic discourse with the performance arts in partnership with community based organizations in collaboration with Columbia University’s INCITE Center and The American Assembly’s Democracy and Trust Program, and is a visiting researcher and lecturer at Cornell Tech in the Milstein Program.
Twitter @UpFromTheCracks
Advocate of Wordz
Advocate of Wordz is an award-winning performing poet, certified breeder of mythical creatures, and an educator who teaches his students how to talk their way out of detention. He is a resident artist out of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and Poet in Residence at Bank Street School for Children. His work has been featured/covered by the LA Times, CNN, Univision, PBS, and more.
IG & Twitter : @advocateofwordz
Amiri Tulloch
Amiri Tulloch is a student journalist from New Jersey. He is currently a junior at Columbia University studying African-American Studies and Education Studies, with an interest in art education, community study, and journalism.
Maurice Ivy Dowell
Maurice Ivy Dowell is the Project Coordinator at INCITE. He graduated from Duke University with a major in Literature (Critical Theory), a minor in Dance, and a certificate in Film in 2016. He works in New York as a freelance artist and company dancer with Seán Curran Company. Maurice came to INCITE in 2017 as a project consultant and joined the team full-time as a Project Coordinator in 2019.
Alt-text: black and white photo of male dancer jumping into mid-air shape casting a shadow onto white background
Stanley Muñoz
Stanley Muñoz, co-host of the We Be Imagining podcast, is a professional dancer and choreographer based in Los Angeles. His interests lie in the intersections of race, queerness, and public health as they inform movement in surveillance and artificial intelligence technologies. His work grapples with past and present systemic inequities propagated by the tech industry while simultaneously manifesting a queer, afro-centric vision for the future.
Ilan Mandel
Ilan is a PhD student at Cornell Tech in the Future Autonomous Research (FAR) LAB working with professor Wendy Ju.
Kevin Benoit
Kevin Benoit, MBA, is the founder and editor of Parlé Magazine, a NYC based urban entertainment magazine. In addition to being a journalist and an editor, Benoit is an educator, currently working as a career and college readiness manager at a Charter School in Brooklyn. A Brooklyn native, Benoit has used media and literacy to share knowledge in the community through nonprofit organizations for well over 15 years.
Kevin currently hosts a Friday evening edition of Black Siren Radio titled the #CovidBars edition.
Dayanni Bhagwandin
Dayanni Bhagwandin is a Guyanese Chemistry PhD Candidate at UCLA. Her research focuses on synthesizing organic materials for electronic applications. She is a passionate science advocate and communicator. Aside from her research, she works on STEM education curriculum development. Dayanni is creating a video series to help highlight the lack of diversity in STEM and educate the public about science research.
Drew Lewis
Drew Lewis is a performer, choreographer and composer originally from Chicago, IL. He graduated magna cum laude from Cornish College of the Arts in 2016, where he was the Merce Cunningham Endowed Scholar. He toured extensively with Sidra Bell Dance New York from 2016-2019, and has performed with Lydia Shamoun’s C-LS, Project 44 and Attack Theatre. As a choreographer, he has participated in residencies at Skidmore College, The Pittsburgh Opera, and OPRFHS. As a composer, he has created scores for projects by Sidra Bell, Kensaku Shinohara, and Cesar Broderman, among many others. Drew is thrilled to be involved with We Be Imagining, composing themes for the WBI Podcast and Black Siren Radio, and contributing with visual media creation.
Mir Suhail
Mir Suhail is a political cartoonist and illustrator based in New York City. He is from Indian-occupied Kashmir, where he grew up and started his political cartooning career drawing for a local daily at the age of fourteen. He has since drawn cartoons for leading print and digital news media, magazines, publishers and non-profit organizations in the Indian sub-continent and internationally including for CNN-News 18, The Caravan Magazine, Amnesty International, Action Aid and Save the Children. His work has been profiled in the Raiot, BBC and Al-Jazeera English amongst other publications.
Michelle Bolt
Michelle is an administrative intern for We Be Imagining. She is a recent graduate of Columbia University, where she studied Political Science and African-American Studies with a regional focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. Her areas of interest include the construction of racial identities in both regions, urban violence in Brazil, and neocolonialism in the Caribbean.
WE BE IMAGINING BOARD OF ADVISORS
Tranae’ Moran
Tranae’ Moran is a resin artist, administrative consultant and merchandising professional. She’s a graduate of Brooklyn College with a Bachelors in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing. As a member of the Atlantic Plaza Towers Tenants Association, she has been on the frontlines organizing and educating with her neighbors, speaking out against the use of Facial Recognition technology in the two 24-story apartment buildings in Ocean Hill, Brownsville and has made positive strides in pushing back against building management while creating awareness around the realities of facial recognition and the collection of biometric data in residential spaces.
Mimi Ọnụọha
Mimi Ọnụọha is a Nigerian-American artist and researcher whose work highlights the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection. Her multimedia practice uses print, code, installation and video to call attention to the ways in which those in the margins are differently abstracted, represented, and missed by sociotechnical systems. Ọnụọha has been in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art & Technology, Studio XX, Data & Society Research Institute, Columbia University, and the Royal College of Art. She earned her MPS from NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. In 2018-19 she served as Creative-in-Residence at Olin College for Engineering. She is a Visiting Arts Professor at NYU Tisch.
Seda Gurses
Seda Gurses is a FWO post-doctoral fellow at COSIC/ESAT in the Department of Electrical Engineering at KU Leuven, Belgium and a research associate at the Center for Information Technology and Policy at Princeton University. She studies conceptions of privacy and surveillance in online social networks, requirements engineering, privacy enhancing technologies and identity management systems. Recently, she has started two new research projects. The first focuses on the implications of current cybersecurity research and development on technical solutions for privacy. The second looks at paradigmatic changes in software engineering practices with the shift from shrink wrap software to services and agile programming.
Andre Brock
Andre Brock joins the School of Literature, Media, and Communication as an associate professor. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with an M.A. in English and Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His scholarship includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as groundbreaking research on Black Twitter. His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter, in particular, continues to evolve.
Lauren A. Rhue PhD
Lauren A. Rhue PhD is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Decision, Operations and Information Technologies at the Smith School. Her research uses empirical and econometric methods to explore the economic and social implications of technology. Believing in technology as a force for positive economic change, she is interested in investigating the economic implications of technology platforms for traditionally disadvantaged populations. She earned her PhD in Information Systems from New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Tao Leigh Goffe
Tao Leigh Goffe is a writer and a sound designer specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, technology, and abolition. Tao is an assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history at Cornell University. She has appointments in Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, in addition she is affiliated with the Departments of English and American Studies. Tao is Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an advisory consortium with the mission of designing and theorizing African and Asian diasporic infrastructure into the future. Her interdisciplinary research and practice examines the unfolding relationship between ecology, infrastructure, and the human sensorium. DJ’ing is an important part of her pedagogy and research. Film production, sound design, digital cartography, and oral history are also integral to her praxis.
Joyce McMillan
Joyce McMillan is a thought leader, advocate, activist, community organizer, and educator. Her mission is to remove systemic barriers in communities of color by bringing awareness to the racial disparities in systems where people of color are disproportionately affected. Joyce believes before change occurs the conversation about systemic oppression that creates poverty, and feeds people of color into systems must happen on all levels consistently. She completed a restorative certificate program at the New School and says change will not happen independently of healing. Her ultimate goal is to abolish systems of harm while creating concrete community resources.
Sheri Robinson
Sheri Robinson is an experienced technology professional with over 17 years of deep experience in integration, application development and data-related initiatives. She is a specialist in data architecture, data warehousing and data governance. Sheri has strong competencies in program management, data architecture and data migration and has managed multiple risk regulatory-driven projects.She is currently a Senior Manager/Data and AI Lead with Microsoft Business Advisory Transformation at Accenture.
Ellen Goodman
Ellen P. Goodman specializes in information policy law: free speech, media policy, privacy, data ethics, advertising, and digital platform power. She is co-director and co-founder of the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law and contributes to The Guardian and Slate. Her research on algorithmic ethics in government has led to foundation consultations and grants on increasing public access to data. Professor Goodman received a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Grant to produce newsgathering law tools for digital journalists and Ford Foundation grants for work on public media policy.
ABOUT THE WE BE IMAGINING WEBSITE
The We Be Imagining web presence was designed in 2020 to be a break from the traditional academic websites and to allow you to interact with our content in non-chronological ways, finding connections across ideas and fields that you may not have seen before. Explore all of our project streams and dive into the broad array of topics we discuss and engage with. If you have any questions, comments or feedback for us, reach out at: WeBeImagining@gmail.com.