UIS Speaker Series explores whether technology can serve social justice

WHAT: The University of Illinois Springfield Engaged Citizenship Common Experience (ECCE) Speakers Series presents “Can Technology Serve Social Justice?” featuring scholar and activist Virginia Eubanks.

WHEN: Wednesday, April 10, 2013 at 7 p.m. (Please note date change)

WHERE: UIS Brookens Auditorium, located on the lower level of Brookens Library

DETAILS: Despite widespread celebrations of Twitter Revolutions and social media activism, the relationship between new technology and the social justice goals of peace, freedom, equality and dignity for all people is deeply contradictory. In this talk, Virginia Eubanks will reflect on fifteen years of efforts with three grassroots organizations--Our Knowledge, Our Power: Surviving Welfare, the Popular Technology Workshops, and Women at the YWCA Making Social Movement-- to make technology serve the needs of oppressed and exploited people in the United States.

Virginia Eubanks is the author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, and the cofounder of a number of grassroots community organizations focused on making technology serve social and economic justice. She teaches in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. In past lives, she edited the cyberfeminist ‘zine Brillo and was active in the community technology center movements in the San Francisco Bay Area and Troy, NY. She received her Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

This event is co-sponsored by the UIS Women & Gender Studies and Computer Science departments.

For a list of other upcoming ECCE Speakers Series events and more information, visit http://illinois.edu/goto/speakerseries. All events are free and open to the public.