Virginia Eubanks on 'Digital Dead End' - February 12th

Time Tested Books

 is proud to welcome 

Virginia Eubanks 

on Tuesday, February 12th

at 7:00pm 
Reading & Discussing her book

Digital Dead End:

Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age

A rising tide will lift all boats.
 
That’s what grassroots activist Virginia Eubanks thought as she tried to bring technology to poor and working-­‐class communities. However, she discovered that providing access to technology was just repeating existing social patterns.  Creating technology for people would take a different kind of work.  

Virginia Eubanks has worked for nearly two decades to use technology as a tool for progressive community change. Her experiences with three grassroots community organizations—the Popular Technology Workshops; Our Knowledge, Our Power; and Women at the YWCA Making Social Movement—revolutionized her thinking about the relationship between technology and social justice, made her question her basic assumptions about technology and poverty, and inspired hope that it is possible to create a workable agenda for social and economic equity in the information age.

In Digital Dead End, Eubanks argues that access to technology is not a miraculous cure-­‐all that will pave the road to prosperity. In fact, she finds that poor and working women do not lack experience with technology, but often experience it as a instrument of surveillance and oppression rather than a tool of economic and political liberation. Their stories challenged her preconceptions, shattering the familiar illusion that low-­‐income people are somehow information or technology poor. Their insights forced Eubanks to reach beyond the most common models of technological justice in the United States—universal access and the digital divide—to explore the relationship among technology, politics, citizenship, and social change. In Digital Dead End, Eubanks tells the real story of information technology in low- ‐wage employment, the social service system, regional economic development schemes, and struggling communities.
 
But more importantly, she offers a high-­‐ tech equity agenda that can liberate us all.

Here is a link to brief talk Virginia gave at the Chicago Humanities Festival last year:




Virginia Eubanks is the cofounder of Our Knowledge, Our Power (OKOP), a grassroots anti-poverty and welfare rights organization, and is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY.

This event is FREE and everyone is invited.