Virginia Eubanks

I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY and the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor; Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age; and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. My writing about technology and social justice has appeared in Scientific American, The Nation, Harper’s, and Wired. For two decades, I worked in community technology and economic justice movements. I was a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a 2016-2017 Fellow at New America. I live in Troy, NY. Until 2015, I was an economic justice organizer. I cofounded and led two community organizations for two decades. The first, Our Knowledge, Our Power (OKOP), was an grassroots economic justice and welfare rights organization. The second, the Popular Technology Workshops, helped community organizations and social movements make the connection between technology and their other social justice goals. I've stepped back from these organizations for the time being to concentrate on my writing, but social justice and community-based participatory research remain central to all the work that I do. I draw people into my writing, research, teaching and movement work with insight and enthusiasm, sharing what I've learned and what I think we should do to help technology serve liberation. I do public talks targeted to hit audiences “where they're at,” and I've appeared in dozens of bookstores, universities, festivals, and community contexts. I am comfortable writing about your great economic justice activism for broad national audiences, training social movement leaders, and facilitating workshops on technology and social change.

At New America, I pursued a three-year research study into digital privacy, economic inequality and data-based discrimination with my colleagues, Seeta Peña Gangadharan (London School of Economics) and Joseph Turow (Penn). Funded by the Digital Trust Foundation, this project engages a team of grassroots organizations—The Center for Community Transitions (Charlotte, North Carolina), Allied Media Projects (Detroit, Michigan), and Los Angeles Community Action Network/Stop LAPD Spying Coalition (Los Angeles, California)—to examine and address the collection, storage, and sharing of personal data in poor and working-class neighborhoods across the U.S.

Our Knowledge, Our Power fights for the economic human rights of families on public assistance in upstate and western New York. We are a member of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. Our goal is to empower poor and working Americans to demand living wage jobs, adequate and de-stigmatized social services, high-quality education, safe affordable housing, and accessible effective healthcare.