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In recent months, the debate around policing of American citizens has reached fever pitch. How will new technologies like facial recognition and predictive sentencing algorithms affect racial and class inequality? What does it mean that the government and private companies are able to monitor your activity more closely than ever before? How will automation in child welfare, social services, and the justice system contribute to the criminalization of poverty in an already deeply divided America?

This month: Virginia Eubanks, writer, activist and author of the new book Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, as well as Punish the Poor; Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age will join Naomi Murakawa, political scientist and author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Join us on Thursday, 7/18 for a conversation about the future of policing in America. 

Doors 6:30pm, show 7:00pm.

Tickets $15.

21+

Hosted by Meehan Crist, writer-in-residence in Biological Sciences at Columbia University, Convergence brings together two people from vastly different fields to explore how emerging science and tech will affect culture, society, and politics in the near future. Together with a curious and often passionate audience, Meehan and her guests grapple with the questions we need to ask today to help shape the future we want tomorrow. Each event brings out themes and ideas missing when conversations stay siloed.

Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with focus on racial criminalization and the politics of carceral expansion. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford University Press), which won the Michael Harrington Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her research has been supported by Columbia Law School’s Center for the Study of Law and Culture, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Research Program, and CUNY Graduate Center’s Advanced Research Collaborative.

Virginia Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor; Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age; and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Her writing about technology and social justice has appeared in The American Prospect, The Nation, Harper’s and Wired. For two decades, Eubanks has worked in community technology and economic justice movements. Today, she is a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a Fellow at New America. She lives in Troy, NY.

Meehan Crist
is writer in residence in biological sciences at Columbia University. Previously, she was editor at large at Nautilus and reviews editor at The Believer. Her writing explores the intersection of science, culture, and politics: from sensory deprivation tanks and the KUBARK manual to cephalopod consciousness and climate change. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Tin House, Lapham’s Quarterly, London Review of Books, Scientific American, and Science. You can find her online at meehancrist.com or on Twitter @meehancrist.

REFUND POLICY: Tickets maybe be refunded up to 24 hours before the event. Within 24 hours we may take exchanges for other events at our discretion. No refunds after the event.

This event is mixed seated and standing room. Seats are first-come first-serve.