Dr. Virginia Eubanks
This episode is the first of two with Dr. Virginia Eubanks. In it she discusses her work in understanding technology in the lives of low-income communities as well as how technology is used to manage the poor. She highlights an attempt to use technology to change the eligibility and case management processes for financial assistance as an example of why this topic is an important social justice issue.
Virginia Eubanks is the author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age (MIT Press 2011) and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building With Barbara Smith (SUNY Press 2014). She is currently at work on a new book about digital surveillance in poor and working-class neighborhoods in the United States. Eubanks is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, and a Ford Academic Fellow at New America in Washington, DC. She writes regularly for The American Prospect and Equal Future and works for economic justice with two organizations, the Popular Technology Workshops and Our Knowledge, Our Power. She lives in Troy, NY, and you can follow her at @PopTechWorks.
Interviewer: Kathleen Kost, PhD
