Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal

Panelists: Rianna Walcott (University of Maryland), Catherine Knight Steele (University of Maryland), Aaron Dial (Colgate University), David Adelman (University of Michigan), and Kevin Winstead (University of Florida)

Our relationship with technology is often transactional, extractive, and exploitative, and this is especially true for marginalised users. On this roundtable we question our position as co-producers – those who make with technologies – as opposed to as fungible, exploited in the production of technology. In our discussion of large language models (LLMs), we challenge the deracination of A.I. and question its ability to authentically reproduce—and co-produce—Black vernacular styles as both cause for concern and a site of possibility. We think through the making of home(pages) in our engagement with the internet, and the production of nostalgia and ephemera as acts of refusal. We consider technology and/as care, through clinical fixations with fixing errant bodyminds through the use of high-capacity digital tools, and counterdiagnostic impulses wherein crip, BIPOC, and trans users refashion what it means to have a wayward body in the age of social media and biocertification. Refusal is an especially precious space of possibility, particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no. People of color and disabled people have long navigated this space between possibility and refusal of the newest technologies in ways that can empower and energize our awareness of the potential technoskepticism can offer.

Finally, we reconfigure even the process of making academic knowledge, from writing as an individual towards a collective practice. Technoskepticism is a topical and timely multi-authored 50,000 word monograph written by an intergenerational group of 14 key researchers and artists (David Adelman, André Brock, Aaron Dial, Stephanie Dinkins, Rayvon Fouché, Huan He, Jeff Nagy, Lisa Nakamura, Catherine Knight Steele, Rianna Walcott, Kevin Winstead, Josie Williams, Remi Yergeau, and Lida Zeitlin-Wu) who comprise the DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism) Network, a Mellon-funded research group dedicated to analyzing race, gender, disability, and technology.

Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal is forthcoming from Stanford University Press, February 2025