Description:

Throughout the academic year, the Center for Latinx Digital Media invites you to a series of weekly seminars held over Zoom on Thursdays. You can now register (click here) for the upcoming seminar for the Fall 2022 quarter, happening on October 20, at 12-1 PM US CT.

Melissa Villa-Nicholas will give a presentation entitled "Data Borders: How we are all Intimately Entwined in Detention and Deportation."

Abstract: The emerging state of borderland technology brings all people into an intimate place of surveillance where data resides and defines inclusion and exclusion to citizenship. With multimedia, government documents, and qualitative interviews Villa-Nicholas shows how Latinx immigrants are the focus and driving force for surveillance and technology design by Silicon Valley’s emerging industry within defense technology manufacturing and pushes for immigrant and citizen privacy information rights along the border and throughout the United States.

Melissa Villa-Nicholas is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Her work focuses on the Latinx histories and practices of information and technology, immigrant information rights, and critical approaches to information science. She is the author of Latinas on the Line: Invisible Labor in Telecommunications.

This event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the Department of Communication Studies, the Latina and Latino Studies Program, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.