Access is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial Inequality

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). 


Access is Capture 


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:
Amazon listing for Access Is CaptureUniversity of California
Press page for Access Is CaptureAuthor's personal websiteTalks and
events from Civics of Technology featuring Roderic N. CrooksArticle
co-authored by Crooks discussing intersectional themes in feminist
formations







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