Roderic Crooks is an associate professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. His research examines how the use of digital technology by public institutions contributes to the minoritization of working-class communities of color. His current project explores how community organizers in working-class communities of color use data for activist projects, even as they dispute the proliferation of data-intensive technologies in education, law enforcement, financial services, and other vital sites of public life. He has published extensively in HCI, STS, and social science venues on topics including political theories of online participation, equity of access to information and media technologies, and document theory. He is the author Access Is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial Inequality, published in 2024 by the University of California Press (https://www.ucpress.edu/books/access-is-capture/paper).&nbsp;Access is Capture&nbsp;Racially and economically segregated schools across the United States have hosted many interventions from commercial digital education technology (edtech) companies who promise their products will rectify the failures of public education. Edtech's benefits are not only trumpeted by industry promoters and evangelists but also vigorously pursued by experts, educators, students, and teachers. Why, then, has edtech yet to make good on its promises? In Access Is Capture, Roderic N. Crooks investigates how edtech functions in Los Angeles public schools that exclusively serve Latinx and Black communities. These so-called urban schools are sites of intense, ongoing technological transformation, where the tantalizing possibilities of access to computing meet the realities of structural inequality. Crooks shows how data-intensive edtech delivers value to privileged individuals and commercial organizations but never to the communities that hope to share in the benefits. He persuasively argues that data-drivenness ultimately enjoins the public to participate in a racial project marked by the extraction of capital from minoritized communities to enrich the tech sector.Links:<ol><li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Access-Capture-Edtech-Reproduces-Inequality/dp/0520393287" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Amazon listing for Access Is Capture</a></li><li><a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520393288/access-is-capture" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of California Press page for Access Is Capture</a></li><li><a href="https://www.rncrooks.info/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Author's personal website</a></li><li><a href="https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/events" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Talks and events from Civics of Technology featuring Roderic N. Crooks</a></li><li><a href="https://www.utmb.edu/spph/about-us/news/article/news/2025/04/16/dr.-molldrem-and-collaborator-dr.-roderic-n.-crooks-publish-dialogue-in-feminist-formations-on-dr.-marika-cifor-s-book-viral-cultures" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Article co-authored by Crooks discussing intersectional themes in feminist formations</a></li></ol><hr> Hosted on Acast. See <a style='color:grey;' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer' href='https://acast.com/privacy'>acast.com/privacy</a> for more information.

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Access is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial Inequality

No Such Thing: Education in the Digital Age

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