A Semester of Growth: Spring 2025 in the BCaT Lab
As April showers roll in and May flowers hopefully follow suit, the Black Communication & Technology (BCaT) Lab reflects on a semester rich in collaborative research, skills-building workshops, meaningful discussions, and a commitment to cultivating communities across several generations of scholars in Black digital humanities studies.
This semester, we have begun our newest DISCO COLAB: Automating Black Joy. Led by Lab Director Dr. Catherine Knight-Steele and BCaT Fellow Nisa Asgarali-Hoffman, Automating Black Joy centers a critical lens toward the future of AI. The project seeks to explore automation and AI through the lens of Black feminist inquiry, with a goal of liberation and joy. In our Book Club, we have been centering voices that critically analyze how AI tools are being used to oppress Black and other historically disempowered communities. We further discuss and speculate upon how AI tools may be used to empower these same communities. So far, we have engaged with a rich mix of texts and visual artifacts steeped in Black life and technology. One such example is the contemporary analysis of AI: Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini, where-in Buolamwini outlines the ingrained biases coded into facial recognition systems. We have also read speculative fictions that reimagine our material realities, such as selected excerpts from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and N.K. Jemisin’s The Trojan Girl. It has been very exciting to watch this project bloom throughout Spring 2025, and I am looking forward to how this collaborative project will intervene in how AI tools are created.
The Black Homeplaces DISCO COLAB has also flourished this semester, sprouting an on-going series of workshops surrounding the reimagination of Black Homeplaces through several digitized and tactile projects. We were able to award microgrants to 32 different recipients across 18 different thrilling projects. Our workshops have aimed to facilitate the development of these projects, and we are looking forward to seeing what our Black Homeplaces cohort has in store for us this year!
On February 19th, Paula Akpan and Dr. Jade Bentil joined us for our first workshop on Oral Histories and Black counter-narratives. They shared their own experiences as scholars of oral histories and Black lived experiences, reflecting on how their interests in counter-narratives flourished. Scholars were introduced to practices of collecting and narrativizing oral histories, and were asked what kinds of oral histories they may be interested in exploring. One theme I took away from our conversations was the necessity to be vigilant in attending to, preserving, and narrativizing oral histories. In other words, disregarding notions that there may be a “right time” to ever do so. Our Oral Histories workshop was followed by BCaT Applies, an Association of Internet Researchers applications clinic. Scholars were encouraged to explore the conference's theme of Ruptures, exploring alternative histories and theories perspectives overshadowed by Western ideation and determinism surrounding “Big Tech.”
On February 26th, we invited keondra bills freemyn to discuss their experiences with Archives and the Black Tradition. Co-executive Director of Black Lunch Table, a radical digital archiving effort focusing on Black visual artists, keondra incorporated their first-hand experiences as we discussed the significance of archives in (re)defining historical legacies.Ownership was on thread our discussions pulled out, questioning what narratives are privileged based on who owns an archive. As founder of the Black Women Writers Project, keondra also drew from their experiences promoting narratives of control and agency, discussing how archives may expand hegemonically-rooted beliefs surrounding memory, places, and what is considered “true.” That night, BCaT Eats ran in tandem with the DISCO networks launch of Technoskepticism. Technoskepticism explores the possibilities created by, and how to refuse oppressions sustained by, emerging forms of technology within disempowered communities. During the launch, members of the UMD community had the opportunity to ask authors, including the Labs Dr. Catherine Knight-Steele and Dr. Rianna Walcott, direct questions about Technoskepticism.
On March 10th, Dr. Allie Martin hosted a workshop on Black Soundscapes, where she shared strategies for engaging with soundscape recordings through a Black critical lens. Drawing from her project Sampling Black Life: Soundscapes and Critical Intention, Dr. Martin introduced tools such as Audacity and other audio editing software to show how sound sampling, as a practice from the hip hop genre, can be reimagined as a method for archival and cultural practice. She demonstrated how archival audio from the Library of Congress, specifically collections like the Voices of Remembering can be used intentionally to encourage critical reflection and reimagine the uses of sounds. The workshop expanded my understanding of how sound, memory, and Black life work concurrently as a means of knowledge production and how audio editing tools can be used critically and creatively in scholarly and community-based work.
On March 26th, Associate Director Dr. Rianna Walcott hosted a BCaT Applies Workshop: Social Media Scraping for the Tech-Hesitant. This workshop offered an introduction to Zeeschuimer, a data-collection tool geared at pulling information from TikTok, Instagram, X, and beyond. In this workshop, we walked community members through the installation process of Zeeschuimer, allowing researchers to collect information while scrolling through their social media feeds. Since Zeeschuimer utilizes an “over-the-shoulder” collection method, users can control what kind of information is being collected by refining their feeds. I think this workshop was very valuable for the community! As platform affordances remain shifting amidst ownership changes (explored more in our Black Digital Migration project,) developing toolkits divorced from platform APIs for processing and analyzing data is essential.
The BCaT lab has also been following our roots across different avenues in the UMD community. On April 1st, Dr. Safiya Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism for a Maryland’s spring Distinguished Scholar Lecture held by the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute. In the following fireside chat, Noble was joined by Dr. Catherine Knight-Steele and Dr. Patricia Hill Collins, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Black Feminist thinker. All three scholars, temporally situated across different moments in the academic proliferation of Black Feminist thought and technologies of oppression and liberation, offered fascinating provocations as the audience gasped and laughed alongside them. An emergent thread was the necessity of building generational bridges, drawing forth the knowledge and expertise of prior generations as those that follow navigate an ever-shifting landscape of technological innovations that oppress and liberate.
As we look ahead, we have several exciting events in the forecast for the rest of our Spring semester! In our immediate future, we will be hosting a 2-day seminar focusing on Building Interactive XR Exhibits: From Concept to Creation. On April 9th and April 23rd, the community will be in conversation with Christopher Derrell, an award-winning software developer focusing on creating practical and aesthetically pleasing UX interfaces.
As we continue to water our gardens and cultivate our larger BCaT community, we hope everybody is keeping safe and enjoying the gentle sunshine.
Written by Andrew Lowe and Alisa Hardy
