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.
Roderic N. Crooks is Assistant Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.
"This superb book examines the reproduction of racial inequality by means of apparently benign educational technology, including student tablets. Broad in scope, Access Is Capture moves with grace between analysis, ethnography, and theory. Roderic Crooks will help you rethink race, the public sphere, and technology."—Geoffrey C. Bowker, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Irvine
"What happens after access? In this daring new book, Crooks argues that data capture transforms school life into a series of enclosures for minoritized students. With precision and passion, Access Is Capture shows how contemporary racial inequality runs through the tablets, dashboards, and spreadsheets that collect the fruits of technological outreach."—Daniel Greene, Assistant Professor of Information Studies, University of Maryland
269 pp.5.5 x 8.5Illus: 4 halftones, 1 table, 1 chart, 1 map
9780520393271$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Aug 2024