From electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms to workplace surveillance systems, technologies originally developed for policing and prisons have rapidly expanded into nonjuridical domains, including hospitals, schools, banking, social services, shopping malls, and digital life. Rooted in the logics of racial disparity and subjugation, these purportedly unbiased technologies not only extend prison spaces into the public sphere but also deepen racial hierarchies and engender new systems for social control. The contributors to Captivating Technology examine how carceral technologies are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be resisted and reimagined for more liberatory ends. Moving from traditional sites of imprisonment to the arenas of everyday life being reshaped by carceral technoscience, this volume culminates in a sustained focus on justice-oriented approaches to science and technology that blends historical, speculative, and biographical methods to envision new futures made possible.
Contributors. Ruha Benjamin, Troy Duster, Ron Eglash, Nettrice Gaskins, Anthony Ryan Hatch, Andrea Miller, Alondra Nelson, Tamara K. Nopper, Christopher Perreira, Winifred R. Poster, Dorothy E. Roberts, Lorna Roth, Britt Rusert, R. Joshua Scannell, Mitali Thakor, Madison Van Oort
Foreword / Troy Duster xi
Acknowledgments / Ruha Benjamin xv
Part I. Carceral Techniques from Plantation to Prison
1. Naturalizing Coercion: The Tuskegee Experiments and the Laboratory Life of the Plantation / Britt Rusert 25
2. Consumed by Disease: Medical Archives, Latino Fictions, and Carceral Health Imaginaries / Christopher Perreira 50
3. Billions Served: Prison Food Regimes, Nutritional Punishment, and Gastronomical Resistance / Anthony Ryan Hatch 67
4. Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible Preemption / Andrea Miller 85
5. This Is Not Minority Report: Predictive Policing and Population Racism / R. Joshua Scannell 107
Part II. Surveillance Systems from Facebook to Fast Fashion
6. Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Service Economy / Winifred Poster 133
7. Digital Character in "The Scored Society": FICO, Social Networks, and the Competing Measurements of Creditworthimess / Tamara K. Nopper 170
8. Deception by Design: Digital Skin, Racial Matter, and the New Policing of Child Sexual Exploitation / Mitali Thakor 188
9. Employing the Carceral Imaginary: An Ethnography of Worker Surveillance in the Retail Industry / Madison Van Oort 209
Part III. Retooling Liberation from Abolitionists to Afrofuturists
10. Anti-Racist Technoscience: A Generative Tradition / Ron Eglash 227
11. Techo-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation across the African Diaspora and Global South / Nettrice R. Gaskins 252
12. Making Skin Visible through Liberatory Design / Lorna Roth 275
13. Scratch a Theory, You Find a Biography: A Conversation with Troy Duster 308
14. Reimagining Race, Resistance, and Technoscience: A Conversation with Dorothy Roberts 328
Bibliography 349
Contributors 389
Index 393
