This Pride Month, Mozilla is hosting a discussion about the internet and the LGBTQIA+ community
Technology further codifies biases and categorizes personhood, not simply a reflection of the society that creates it but possibly an imperfect and flawed mirror of it. That has resulted in software and AI systems that are at odds with fluidity, that endanger the privacy and security of the LGBTQIA+ community, and often infer heteronormative assumptions and forces binary gender classifications.
How does the queer community change this technology landscape? And what does it mean to queer the landscape, co-opt these systems, and create safe, online spaces? And accordingly, how has technology made a global LGBTQIA+ movement possible?
In this panel, five luminaries from the LGBTQIA+ movement will unpack these questions, and others.
Viewers can watch the Tuesday, June 21 panel at 11am ET on Mozilla's Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and AirMozilla.
The 60-minute panel will feature:
Cassius Adair (@cassius_a) is an audio producer, writer, and researcher from Virginia. Beginning in Fall 2022, he will be an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. Previously, he has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. He is also a research fellow at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory at the University of Toronto and an outside member of the Precarity Lab at the University of Michigan. For the 2021-2022 academic year, he is a Fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) with an affiliation at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota.
Ina Fried (@inafried) is the chief technology correspondent at Axios. She authors the daily Axios Login newsletter and brings years of Silicon Valley experience to offer a smart take on tech.
Shakir Mohamed (@shakir_za) works on technical and sociotechnical questions in machine learning research, working on problems in machine learning principles, applied problems in healthcare and environment, and ethics and diversity. Shakir is a principal scientist at DeepMind in London, an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and a Honorary Professor of University College London. Shakir is also a founder and trustee of the Deep Learning Indaba, a grassroots organisation aiming to build pan-African capacity and leadership in AI. The queering of technical research fields opens up new opportunities for technology development, and Shakir aims to bring that approach into machine learning and AI.
Xin Xin is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and organizer currently making socially-engaged software that explores the possibilities of reshaping language and power relations. Through mediating, subverting, and innovating modes of social interaction in the digital space, Xin invites participants to relate to one another and experience togetherness in new and unfamiliar ways. Xin teaches at Parsons School of Design as an Assistant Professor of Interaction and Media Design.
and moderator J. Bob Alotta (@jbobalotta). J. Bob is VP, Global Programs at Mozilla, and a veteran movement builder and nonprofit executive working at the intersection of technology and communities.