From September 2022 - January 2023, Black Oculars brought together researchers, artists, front-line practitioners, and community members to share and exchange knowledge. The forum advanced an interdisciplinary, community-oriented, and historically-grounded understanding of Black women and non-binary people’s experiences with policing and other institutions that function to both surveil and control their lives.
Importantly, the series emphasized the histories of policing and surveillance, technologies of surveillance in healthcare and public policy, and responses from Deaf, disabled, mad, queer, and trans Black people. It also revealed the ways in which these systems of control and containment are exerted in the everyday realities of public life.
The key takeaways:
An analysis of technology and technologies as more than hardware; they are ideas, attitudes, assessments, and engagements;
A recognition and assertion that technology and technologies aren’t inherently objective or safe, they can also be anti-Black, sexist, homophobic, classist, etc.; and
A more critical understanding of the anti-Black gendered impacts of police and institutional surveillance and practice as well as pathways to short-term and systemic change.
Learn more at the Black Oculars website.