Introducing DISCO 2.0: Digital Optimism for the Public Good
by Lisa Nakamura and Cherice Chan
The DISCO Network is very proud to announce that we are continuing our work to envision an anti-racist and anti-ableist digital future as a refreshed and re-booted version of ourselves.
The world has changed since 2021, the year that we received our initial funding from the Mellon Foundation’s Higher Education grant program. In 2021, the “ISCO” in DISCO – Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism – all seemed in short supply. We were laboring under a pandemic that kept us separate from each other and vulnerable. Anti-Black, anti-Asian, and ableist violence were abiding and amplified. We created the DISCO Network to build a collaborative of scholars dedicated to producing optimistic research about the future of the digital world.
During our first three years, we launched six labs that became gathering spaces and refuges for faculty, junior scholars, students, and staff. Within these labs, we trained a cohort of nine postdoctoral fellows and artists and over 25 graduate scholars working on justice, race, ability, and technology. We published a co-authored book, Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal, forthcoming from Stanford University Press in February 2025, and published a series of field reviews about emerging configurations of technology, difference, and power in collaboration with Just Tech. Across our six labs, we hosted over 100 events and workshops on cutting edge digital topics and taught 30 courses about the history of race, gender, disability, and technological exclusion. In celebration of our third year, we hosted the DISCO Summit, a two-day interdisciplinary summer symposium about digital social inequalities.
It’s now 2024, and the technology that surrounds us is rapidly changing. For example, A.I. is transforming education, industry, and labor in ways that disproportionately affect us as people of color and disabled people. How do we analyze the impact of these emerging technologies on those communities who are often disregarded and invisible in these spaces?
We are thankful to the Mellon Foundation for continuing to fund the DISCO Network from 2024-2027. In keeping with Williams, Miceli, and Gebru’s call for scholars and scientists to “show the general public why they should care about the data annotator in Syria or the hypersurveilled Amazon delivery driver in the U.S.,” we will spend the next three years focusing our writing, thinking, and gathering towards more public audiences.
To bridge the gap between traditional academic research and public discourse about identity and technology, we will launch a series of new initiatives among our four labs, including my newly launched Digital Afterworlds Lab, Rayvon Fouche’s Humanity and Technoscience (HAT) Lab, Remi Yergeau’s Digital Accessible Futures (DAF) Lab, and Catherine Knight Steele’s Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab. We will host public-facing programming about current digital topics (e.g., our Search Engines programming series), provide opportunities for junior scholars to join our collaborative research though our new DISCO CO(LAB) program, publish rapid-response writing on public-facing platforms with our new DISCO JAMS project, and develop open-access pedagogical resources with our new DISCO TECH initiative. In line with our commitment to provide mentoring and networking opportunities for the next generation of BIPOC and disabled scholars, we will be expanding our DISCO graduate scholars program to accept applications from graduate students nationwide and launching a new mentorship program for undergraduate students within our labs.
Anyone interested in exploring how digital technology perpetuates inequality and in creating new interventions is invited to join our collective. We welcome you to sign up to receive our quarterly DISCO newsletter to stay up to date on upcoming events, mentorship opportunities, and project updates, apply for DISCO Network affiliation, and stay connected with our social media. We’re excited to continue this work, and thank you so much for your support.
