Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Keynote Address: “Digital Sociology”
Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Her current research examines how we learn for work in the new economy. That includes thinking about academic capitalism, labor market correspondence, for-profit and online credentials, and media interactions. Currently, she is a contributing editor with Dissent and a contributing writer with The Atlantic. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume Digital Sociologies (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and author of the forthcoming Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (The New Press, 2017).
Dr. Safiya Noble (UCLA)
Keynote Address: “Power, Privilege, and the Imperative to Act in the Digital Age”
Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. Her research on the design and use of applications on the Internet is at the intersection of race, gender, culture, and technology. She is currently working on a monograph on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in search engines like Google. She serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and is the co-editor of two books: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online (Peter Lang, Digital Formations, 2016), and Emotions, Technology & Design (Elsevier, 2015).