Race ↝ Embodied Pedagogy

In her book Race After Technology, sociologist Ruha Benjamin observes that the assumption that technology is race-neutral ensures that “whiteness becomes the default setting in tech development”¹. As the product of a society structured by “interlocking forms of domination”, racial bias is encoded into technical systems in ways that are both overt and subtle: resisting this default requires active anti-racist work (Benjamin, 2019).

Teaching programming and electronics in an anti-racist manner involves both working to foster an inclusive learning environment, and equipping students with the critical faculty to re-envision the technologies they encounter. Although ‘technical questions’ are often seen as separate from more conceptual aspects of student projects, I take inspiration from bell hooks’ insistence on combining theory and practice in ’embodied pedagogy’ (hooks, 1994). One strategy I use in technical tutorials is to ask open-ended questions about the students’ references, and how their values are reflected in a project’s materiality. This allows me to learn more before making recommendations, and also engages students in thinking together about the politics of the technologies they are using.

Sensitivity and clarity is needed when raising critiques of technology in a classroom environment. As a white teacher, lecturing black, Muslim and immigrant students most often subject to algorithmic violence (Ọnụọha, 2018) on their own oppression can flatten the excitement and interest that has brought them to the CCI in the first place. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney observe, academic critique risks “[being] against… without touching one’s own condition of possibility” (Harney and Moten, 2013). I find it helpful to ground political discussions both in a curiosity around students’ own experiences of technology, and to consider my role not as a separate ‘awareness-raiser’, but as someone who teaches from a common commitment to equity and creativity.

Critiques of technology are most useful when they empower students to ask more interesting questions of systems that they encounter, and when this is seen as the responsibility of everyone, not just those racialised by tech. For example, in a class that I teach about databases, we discuss a variety of examples, including the MET Police Gangs Matrix (Amnesty, 2018), Mimi Ọnụọha’s Library of Missing Datasets (Ọnụọha, 2016), and engage practically in querying personal browser history databases. Instead of a system for deciding whether databases are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (Benjamin, 2019) students leave with a set of questions to ask, and technical tools with which to ask them.

It is also important not to trace just one (convenient) history of technology. Imagining technology otherwise involves taking seriously alternatives as they exist today, and disrupting the fiction of ‘linear progress’ that feeds a sense of inevitability (Ochigame, 2020). A core example I use in teaching radio electronics is Fanon’s account of radio in the Algerian Revolution, which demonstrates how a revolutionary movement appropriated a colonial technology to radical ends (Fanon, 1967). Similarly, historical (Haeyoung, 2020) and contemporary (Ziadah, 2026) accounts of industrial action at tech companies reject a common narrative that tech companies’ contributions to warfare and imperialism are not met with serious opposition from their employees.

Ultimately I believe strongly in teaching and learning technical skills, as our society is increasingly saturated in discriminatory, exploitative and mystified computer systems. To have a role in changing this, students of all backgrounds require support both to confront the idea that contemporary technical systems are made oppressive by choice rather than necessity, and to develop a genuine enthusiasm and curiosity for the medium on their own terms.

1. A local example: in my text editor, the name “Ruha” is highlighted red, implying a spelling mistake. “Benjamin” is not. ↩︎

References

Benjamin, R. (2019), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Polity Press, ISBN: 9781509526437

Fanon, F., trans. Chevalier, H. (1967), A Dying Colonialism (translation of the original published 1959), ISBN: 9780802150271

Graeber, D. (2015), The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, United Kingdom: Melville House

Haeyoung, A. (2020), The Activist Legacy of the IBM Black Workers Alliance, Wired Magazine, Accessed: https://www.wired.com/story/tech-organizing-labor-ibm-history/

hooks, b., (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-90807-8

Harney, S., Moten, F. (2013), The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, United Kingdom: Minor Compositions

Ochigame, R. (2020), Informatics of the Oppressed, Logic Magazine, Issue 11: Care, Accessed: https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/

Ọnụọha, M. (2016), The Library of Missing Datasets, (artwork) Accessed: https://mimi-onuoha-9s0o.squarespace.com/the-library-of-missing-datasets

Ọnụọha, M. (2018), Notes on Algorithmic Violence, Accessed: https://github.com/MimiOnuoha/On-Algorithmic-Violence

Ziadah, R. Henderson, C., Jabary Salamanca, O., Plonski, S., Chua, C., Al Sanah, R., & El Khazen, E. (2026) Disruptive Geographies and the War on Gaza: Infrastructure and Global Solidarity, Geopolitics, 31(1), pp. 453–491. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2025.2510319