"Access is Capture: EdTech, Datafication and Racial Capitalism"

Roderic Crooks, assistant professor of informatics, UC Irvine

For working class communities of color, public and philanthropic investment in educational technology (edtech) promises many benefits, including economic inclusion and an increased class mobility. These rewards are not only trumpeted by self-interested technologists and self-declared evangelists; they are also vigorously pursued by educators, students, and teachers in working-class communities of color. Why then has access to technology yet to reliably deliver any such benefits to its presumed beneficiaries? 

Dr. Crooks locates both the virtue of access to technology and the practices that unfold in its pursuit at the intersection of datafication and racial capitalism. From the perspective of these sociological framings, access to technology appears not as a distribution of needed goods, but as the configuration of a resource field, a field marked by extractions of capital from minoritized communities and the state to the tech sector. This talk demonstrates these extractions in the context of the racially segregated public schools of Los Angeles.