Ep61. Data Justice, A.I., & Reimagining Our Future Part 2

[00:00:00] Liz: I think one of the underlying reasons why schools are turning to the surveillance technology is, in general, an unfortunate sort of mind frame around safety as equating safety with punishment and police and the way you get safety is through that. And it’s not just in our schools. I think it’s in our society more broadly, so it plays out in schools. And I think, you know, there’s this sort of knee jerk reaction that if you punish or remove a child, they’ll learn a lesson and then they’ll come back different. But that’s not really the case. You punish a child, they disengage more. Once you’ve been suspended, you’re more likely to get suspended again because you’re not actually addressing the root cause of the behavior.

[00:00:36] Liz: What we found in research, but also in working with parents and students and teachers who live this in schools is that if you focus on creating a caring community, where there are adults that young people trust that they can go to if they’re having a problem, that’s how you create real safety.

[00:00:58] Helen: Welcome to Creativity Squared, discover how creatives are collaborating with artificial intelligence in your inbox, on YouTube, and on your preferred podcast platform. Hi, I’m Helen Todd, your host, and I’m so excited to have you join the weekly conversations I’m having with amazing pioneers in the space.

[00:01:16] Helen: The intention of these conversations is to ignite our collective imagination at the intersection of AI and creativity to envision a world where artists thrive.

[00:01:33] Helen: For the 61st episode, Creativity Squared has partnered with TCIA, the Twin Cities Innovation Alliance for a special three part data justice series. The intention of these conversations is to invite the audience to reimagine our relationship with the future. TCIA is a coalition of cross sector stakeholders building and developing problem solving ecosystems in collaboration with communities.

[00:02:04] Helen: These interviews feature the distinguished speakers from TCIA’s 2024 conference, D4PG, Data 4 Public Good. D4PG taps into the collective power of community based change making through technology, democracy, and justice. The timely and important themes from these interviews include co-powering, digital justice, data privacy, AI, and education, Afrofuturism, and the power of narrative for social change. Today’s episode guests in part two include:
[00:02:43] Walter: My name is Walter David Grayson.

[00:02:45] Ruth: My name is Ruth Idakola.

[00:02:46] Liz: My name is Liz Sullivan-Yuknis.

[00:02:49] Tanya: My name is Tanya Clark.

[00:02:51] Dr. Eric: My name is Dr. Eric Solomon.

[00:02:54] Helen: For more information on these speakers and the topics they discuss and to support their organizations, visit CreativitySquared.com for the blog post accompanying this episode. Also, mark your calendars for July 15th through 20th, 2025, when the D4PG conference will return to Macalester College in the Twin Cities. With that, the mic is in the hands of our guests and their thought provoking interviews. Enjoy.

[00:03:29] Walter: My name is Walter David Grayson. I am a distinguished professor of history here at Macalester college. And I have been doing work related to the topics at this conference for more than 30 years. So in my mind, I’m still 25, but now the calendar keeps telling me something different. The core of my work as a historian has evolved from focusing on suburbanization and civil rights to the global economy and the way that we’ve designed paths for people to make money and to generate wealth.

[00:04:05] Walter: And most recently, and the reason I’m involved with the conference is that I am one of the most widely cited and engaged thinkers and writers about Afrofuturism and the notion of, how do we escape the traps that have evolved from enslavement and industrializatio; segregation over the last five centuries?

[00:04:26] Walter: I am here to speak about, today and tomorrow, the concept of Afrofuturist indigenous design and my work grows out of urban planning. How do we build cities? How do we create road networks and energy systems? And what do we do to create a more sustainable planet? And so, those are the things that the participants will get to do as a part of the workshop tomorrow.

[00:04:51] Walter: This topic is so important to me, because we’re living in the midst of global climate change, and some three to four billion people will face displacement, starvation, various kinds of disease over the next two generations. And so coming up with solutions right now that are empowered with all of the resources that we can provide, this is a matter of human survival.

[00:05:18] Walter: The key message from my two presentations focus on human ingenuity and creativity. So much of the Data 4 Public Good event focuses on questions of artificial intelligence. And before I ever became a historian, I was a software engineer. I spent more than a decade learning to code and to design games like Assassin’s Creed, things that are these immersive, interactive platforms.

[00:05:48] Walter: And that led to me working with Marvel comics from 2001 to 2008, where I got to create the blueprint for Wakanda that showed up in the Black Panther movies. And so that kind of work, as fun as it was for me, is now vital for everybody to reimagine what their communities look like, what kind of houses they live in, what kind of transportation they use, how do we begin to imagine our food and our energy systems more creatively in a world that is insecure.

[00:06:25] Walter: So, the key takeaways are that people don’t assume that everything that exists around them has to be the way that it is. That’s the practice that’s going to come from the conversation tomorrow, that you don’t have to sit in your car for whatever amount of time you need every day to commute from place to place.

[00:06:45] Walter: You don’t need to rely on electricity. You don’t have to have lots of single family houses that carry 30 and 40 year mortgages on them in order to have a good life. And so letting people have a new sense of mobility, a sense of, what my colleague, Sam Shabazz calls co-powering the way that we work together to maximize our strengths.

[00:07:08] Walter: Those are the reasons I’m so honored to be here and to be able to share this conversation with the amazing people that are at all the sessions. So one of the areas that I spend a lot of time presenting on and discussing focuses on the most important pieces of this moment. And that’s what we’re really focused on is too often we feel like change is over the horizon or we have to wait for some opportunity to come. And as I leave the session I was just in, it’s no, we can no longer wait. We must take action right now. And for me, the skill set comes out of what I call critical media studies and media ecology in particular. Media ecology, is derived from Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, to a lesser extent, Stuart Hall.

[00:08:01] Walter: And it’s a way of decoding all of the disinformation, the misinformation that we’re presented with in a world that’s swallowed by all kinds of data around us. And so, that process I talk a lot about is, the start of the 21st century really flowing out of the matrix films and then manifesting in the Howard Harry Potter series, it’s called convergence.

[00:08:28] Walter: A lot of folks who do media theory talk about convergence media and how we go from a broadcast media system into a cable media system, and then how does that lay the foundation for what we now have is streaming. Harry Potter is a great example of literature converted to film that gets turned into Disney architecture that Hogwarts is now a real place you can visit in multiple places around the world.

[00:08:54] Walter: That’s the premise that I engaged with and studied in great detail. And what we’re in right now, what Data 4 Public Good is addressing is what I call counter convergence. And so whether it’s Elon Musk or Donald Trump, or the people who are looking at Brexit, they have seen the multiplying voices and content that come out of the convergence moment, and they want to contract that window of opportunity.

[00:09:23] Walter: They want to limit who has say and can dictate the kinds of outcomes that will emerge. So it’s not just Tesla. It’s not just Facebook. It’s not just Google. They have all opened up lots of new platforms for expression, but now we’re in the moment where those with great wealth and political power can reduce the opportunities to express yourself as an individual and they want to condition it.

[00:09:49] Walter: And I would say this is really important. It reflects something that happened at the end of the 19th century into the early 20th century that a very famous historian is, Robert Weeby calls “the search for order.” And so if you can place yourself in the moment in the early 1880s, when particularly American industrialization is taking root, it’s hard for us to imagine today that Minnesota didn’t really exist in 1880. Like it was on the map. There were boundaries that you could see that people had put together, but certainly Minneapolis was not anything close to what it is today. It was a very small village. St. Paul was a moderate sized city, but the process of building commercial markets and creating a company like General Mills, which is the titan in this region, none of this had happened yet. And so it’s much more driven by water power, by animal power. There are no automobiles. There are barely any bicycles. Bicycles were a luxury item. And it’s in that moment that the search for orders taking place is a number of scholars talk about the 20th century as the first measured century that we start to figure out okay, how tall does this table have to be and how many of them can we manufacture? What happens to us when we decide to take still cameras and have a series of still images and run them very rapidly next to each other to create the illusion of motion? All of the things that we kind of take for granted 120, 130 years later, we’re being invented.

[00:11:31] Walter: And that’s what the search for order is. It’s a way of creating systems of understanding that people agree to, or then will follow and find to be productive. And so it’s why we see the growth of factories and steel mills. The way that we construct our world is happening right now. That’s what counter convergence is, to say we have all of this capacity;

[00:11:55] Walter: what are the most efficient ways to organize it? What can we control most effectively? And so we’ve had a couple of waves like this. There’s search for order at the end of the 19th century. We get a real fight over the search for order in the wake of the civil rights movement through the late 1960s and early 1970s.

[00:12:14] Walter: It’s why we get mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. It’s an attempt to impose on people. Who gets rewards, who gets punished, and why? And so that’s the moment we’re in right now, where whether it’s China or Russia or Brazil or Ukraine or the United States or Great Britain, there are just massive debates about what the ongoing reward structures are going to be.

[00:12:41] Walter: How do we have to exist within them? And then who do we punish for not behaving in the ways that we as authorities in shaping this, approve of? The path forward is hard. It is a difficult thing. There isn’t just one, and that’s one of the most difficult things for us to grapple with. This is where I open the conversation up to our participants during the workshop tomorrow, that we can’t look at simple solutions any longer. It’s a really amazing presentation by the Royal Society of Arts in London that featured Manuel Lima, who is an evolutionary biologist. And he talks about the history of knowledge where in most of literature, when we think about how information is organized, writers have used trees to try and explain, okay, well, there’s this root knowledge and then it spreads out into all these branches.

[00:13:37] Walter: And of course, colleges and universities are an example of this. We start with a general education curriculum that’s typically about English humanities, social sciences, basic math, basic scientific approaches, and then you get off into the branches of all the majors and all the different areas of inquiry.

[00:13:57] Walter: And that’s where you get more advanced and specialized and start to do things that you can take out into the world that have value. What Lima shows us for the Royal Society of Arts is that those are problems 20th century of organized simplicity. And as we solve those, what Einstein really does coming through the middle of the 20th century, and it’s not just Einstein.

[00:14:20] Walter: I mean, Edison lays foundations for this, but we start to ask questions about organized complexity. What are the things that are difficult for us to understand that don’t have easy solutions? And what happens once we get past IBM, the major broadcast networks like CBS, ABC, NBC is disorganized complexity or what looks to us like chaos, which is what we’re grappling with now.

[00:14:49] Walter: So your question goes to, how do we move forward in a world that appears to be chaotic to us? And the challenge that we’re meeting at this event is that we’re becoming smarter. We’re able to do more than one thing at once. People can talk about multitasking and neurologically, whether it makes sense or not, but we process things faster because we are more productive than our parents and our grandparents were.

[00:15:16] Walter: For me personally, what I understand is a year is a really long time. What I can do in a year now, when my career started, it might’ve taken me five or seven or 10 years to do just the level of production I’m capable of because of all the sociological technological changes is much larger. So that’s what we’re here to share is how do we grow that capacity, especially for young people, especially for people 8 to 35 years old. How do you grow your capacity to manage a really disorganized and complex system, so that you can provide multiple solutions moving forward that you’re not just doing one thing that is probably going to be obsolete within a year or two? My favorite example of this that I teach, is the way that people talk about information reproduction.

[00:16:07] Walter: It took 500 years from 1400 to 1900 to double the amount of information that’s written in human civilization. 500 years. We doubled that recorded information again in 100 years, actually about 70 years from 1900 to 1970. Now, because of digital technology, we double the amount of recorded human information, almost 22 days.

[00:16:33] Walter: It’s actually a little bit under 22 days. And so there’s just massive amounts of data for us to manage. And as we go forward and we look for solutions, it’s not just enough to work at one level. Almost all the stuff that I teach is about how do you work at an individual level? How do you work within yourself about your own self awareness about the different parts of who you are that you carry with you so that you can make good decisions for yourself?

[00:16:59] Walter: And then enlarging that scale to say, who are the people that are in your life daily? How do you connect and make the most of the time that you see frequently? Who are the people that you only see a few times a year? How do you maximize the time with them? If you have only 30 minutes once a year with someone that is really unusual to contact with, what do you do with those 30 minutes to make it have the deepest impact? How do you engage in self care across all those levels? So the multifaceted nature of the solutions are represented here at the conference. What I end up doing in the work I do with Afrofuturism and Indigenous design is to look back at the world that we’ve lost 500 years ago before Europe really colonized Western Hemisphere, Africa and Asia, and there are so many extraordinarily beautiful solutions to this kind of problem that if we move back in the direction in this region, it’s the Dakota and the Ojibwe, to a lesser extent, the enslaved, formerly enslaved migrants who come into the area, there is embedded knowledge and practice in what they brought to this area that we’ve ignored or suppressed for 150 years and more in the case of the indigenous. To embrace indigenous knowledge, African diasporic knowledge, frees us from bad assumptions that we’ve inherited primarily from Western Europe, not exclusively, but primarily.

[00:18:37] Walter: And that’s what I teach is how to be fuller, more complete human beings so that we have healthier and stronger, more stable and sustainable communities. That’s the widest frame of solution that I can share quickly. As we understand AI, how do we grow the influence of indigenous knowledge of diaspora knowledge?

[00:19:05] Walter: And so there are a few pieces to deal with there. I’ll start with a really basic one at the heart of this event is that, calling it artificial intelligence is a misnomer. It’s not really AI. They are large language models that are built on the premise of a series of chat bots that have been designed in the last 12 to 15 years.

[00:19:29] Walter: And those chat bots are then digital descendants of web crawlers that powered things like Google twenty to twenty five years ago, and so I’m a little strange as a historian because I spent a lot of time building web crawlers and chat bots and exploring how those things were changing the way that we put knowledge together and the solution that I found that I’ve come to trust the most in, response to the kind of critique you shared is from New Zealand and, the Maori population there has one, a kind of miraculous from an American perspective, victory in that from the first point of contact with the British empire, they secured a cultural space that Europeans had to learn Maori language.

[00:20:27] Walter: And so their school system teaches Maori tradition, Maori vocabulary from the first days of elementary education. And for all the students, no matter what their heritage is, they have an additional way of thinking that creates a different kind of creativity. And there are people who try to repress it and try to minimize it, but it’s really difficult once folks have learned to think differently at an early age to then remove that skill set from them. And so in the context of large language models and chat bots, what I found to be effective in the last few years is beginning indigenous language instruction at age two, three, four, and five, just so that the multilingual framework, and this has been true here in Minnesota for some time, that when you learn other languages, your mind is just more open and more creative.

[00:21:26] Walter: And I think that’s a really huge thing. My last piece of the answer, I gave keynote on artificial intelligence a couple of months ago, in New Jersey, and I built eight interdependent AI programs, not large language programs that were trained not on generally scraping all of the data available online, but very narrow sets of data that were bound by disciplinary research production.

[00:22:00] Walter: And so the first couple were based on religious studies scholarship, theological studies scholarship, and ethics philosophy scholarship. But each of the eight as they were designed and then began to learn from each other, accumulated skill and knowledge that was not general knowledge, but very specified detailed research knowledge. And it gave the final versions, versions six through eight, a kind of ethical guideline that made it value human life and human creativity. It gave the models a sense of humility and restraint. about what could be said, what couldn’t be said, what was appropriate to say in different contexts.

[00:22:45] Walter: And so being more thoughtful about the way we do digital design, and I’m eager to get to the place with some of my research partners that we can do it across multiple language structures, I think if we are not so much in a rush to just produce the thing that makes the most money, we can produce digital tools that actually amplify and dignify the massive amounts of human intelligence work that we’ve done for thousands of years. So the two questions are really focused on immediate decision making. What, is a good choice? And then what a potential outcome, might be for making better choices. The initial step for me, I advise everybody to be really thoughtful about how they engage online.

[00:23:39] Walter: So I started a number of years ago, recommending people restrict the amount of television they watch and restrict the amount of time that they listen to whatever digital media they encounter, being thoughtful about what you choose as entertainment and how you engage with it and really just connecting to the other people in your life.

[00:23:57] Walter: More giving more face to people is a huge deal. And I would definitely recommend that. In terms of outcomes, what I see, what I work towards with great determination and forethought, and a good colleague of mine, Rashida Phillips, has an amazing new book out on this topic, is to escape the way that authority shapes our time.

[00:24:22] Walter: And so when time constrains us, when we let the bells of work and school shape where we’re doing something and why we’re doing something, we give away most of our freedom. And so I am very determined to get to the place where we have a three day work week and a four day weekend at minimum. And I think that’s a really conservative goal.

[00:24:47] Walter: I think we can get to the place where on a daily basis, we work for four or five hours a day doing something we really enjoy. And then the rest of the time is us for our recreation to spend time with people we care about, to enjoy the things that we want to enjoy. That’s the world that my work points us towards is individual and community freedoms being maximized.

[00:25:11] Walter: The amazing new resource, with my, dear friend, Tim Fielder, and also my sister, Christina Lamatina, my amazing graphic designer, Rupa Dasgupta is TheGraphicHistoryOfHipHop.com or the Graphic History Company. It’s been number one on Amazon for almost three months. We’ve just come from the National Museum of African American History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

[00:25:41] Walter: We’re going to Comic Con next week. It is less than 100 pages, but it is a life changing experience to sit and experience the history of hip hop that way. And so that’s where you’ll find me.

[00:26:00] Ruth: My name is Ruth Idakola. I am director for the Dunedin Schools Campaign, which is a national coalition of grassroots organizers who do work around the school to prison pipeline. I am a speaker at the Data 4 Public Good conference, and I hail from New Orleans, Louisiana.

[00:26:17] Liz: My name is Liz Sullivan-Yuknis. I’m the co-executive director at Partners for Dignity and Rights.

[00:26:23] Liz: We’re the anchor organization for the National Dignity in Schools campaign. I’m a speaker at Data 4 Public Good and I come from New York City.

[00:26:31] Ruth: I am here at the Data 4 Public Goods conference to talk about a research project that we’ve been working on for a couple of years now, and it’s research around COVID and technology in public schools and how that impacts children in public schools discipline wise.

[00:26:49] Liz: So for many years, As a coalition that works on the school to prison pipeline, we had been talking about the ways that technology can contribute to the school to prison pipeline. How data sharing agreements, data algorithms, surveillance technology can be used to criminalize students and push them out of school.

[00:27:06] Liz: And during the COVID-19 pandemic. When more new technology was introduced, when students were given devices to take home, when people were using remote learning technology, there was growing concern among the youth and parents in our coalition about the ways that technology could impact students, their education, and whether it could be used to punish and criminalize children.

[00:27:27] Liz: So we decided to start this project with the Twin Cities Innovation Alliance. We used a community participatory action research approach where the students and parents that are in our coalition designed the research project themselves. They came up with the questions, they did the interviews, they collected the surveys, and we felt that was important because we believe that young people and parents, as the ones most impacted by our education system, are the ones that can understand the problems they’re facing in their schools and come up with the solutions. So it was important for us, for them to be driving the research.

[00:27:58] Ruth: I think the most important thing that came out of the research is [that] the way that technology has been used in schools, has for the most part been harmful to children. So it’s contributed to pushouts for children being suspended and expelled from schools. We found that, you know, it’s also impacted what the research shows. It impacts students and children mentally in terms of, you know, the way that they’re being tracked, surveilled information passed to people that we don’t know, entities that we don’t know about. And so those are the ways that I feel like, you know, it’s impacted them negatively rather than positively. Yeah. Anything else come up for you?

[00:28:39] Liz: One of the findings of the research was that when we asked most students and parents, what whether anyone explained that what the technology was or how it would be gathering their information or how it would share their personal information,

[00:28:51] Liz: people didn’t know they weren’t informed about that. And so I think an important recommendation going forward is to make sure that if new technologies are introduced, that there’s an opportunity for the community to understand how it’s going to be used, decide whether they’re comfortable with it.

[00:29:04] Liz: And then whenever an individual student or parent is given a device or asked to sign on to a new platform that they understand is my information going to be shared with other people? Are they going to be tracking what I’m doing online so that people are fully informed and have transparency about how the programs are going to be used?

[00:29:20] Liz: Because in our surveys and our interviews, almost across the board, people said, no, we never given any kind of information. We don’t know how it’s being used. We didn’t get a training on how to use it. We just had to sign on and figure it out. And now we’re using it every day and we don’t know where the information is going.

[00:29:36] Ruth: It wasn’t necessarily a surprising thing, but one of the things that came out is that we just have more questions. Right? So, you know, we were able to peel back a layer and get some information, but there’s just a lot of stuff going out there in terms of data and technology that we just really don’t know about and the parents don’t know about, you know, and the time that they don’t have to be able to kind of research and find out for themselves.

[00:30:01] Ruth: You know what the day-to-day of their child is in schools. You know, like Liz said, you know, they pretty much was handed a piece of paper and say, sign, and you wanna trust your school, right? That they’re doing the best that they can for your child to thrive. But unfortunately, in too many cases, it’s not the case.

[00:30:19] Liz: I think also during some of the focus groups, ’cause that was part of the research, to have parents in a room together hearing from each other, some parents were really surprised to learn that other students, that other parents’ children were getting in trouble for something that was seen on behind them on their screen when they were on zoom or for a search or something that their children were doing online.

[00:30:39] Liz: I think some of the parents had no idea that was happening. Others had it happened to them. But so I think it was surprising to some people and then an education and awareness moment for more people to understand this is happening. It happened to my child. It may be happening to my child and I don’t even know.

[00:30:53] Ruth: I came into this work where the entry point for me was navigating the school system in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Three of my children, well I have three, and all three were in public schools at the time. And being somebody who is educated and resourceful and understands how to navigate systems, it was so hard for me.

[00:31:11] Ruth: And so, you know, I began to imagine, you know, parents with less time and less resources, you know, trying to do the same. And so it got me slowly into advocacy, my personal belief in the reason why I do this work. And it’s one of the values of dignity in schools is that our membership has, they have the information, they know what they need, and it’s just about, you know, making sure that there’s room for them to be able to speak out and share, and that they are listened to.

[00:31:40] Ruth: That’s why this work was important. That’s why the general work is important for us.

[00:31:45] Liz: It’s important to me because I have two young nephews who are in New York City public schools and elementary school and were remote learning during COVID and are still using a lot of those online platforms to submit their homework and do other things in their schools.

[00:31:58] Liz: And so I want to make sure that them and other children like them and their families understand where the information is going and make sure that it’s not being used to track or monitor or label them in any negative ways, and then I think more broadly, you know, the Dignity In Schools Campaign has been around for almost 20 years.

[00:32:15] Liz: It started in 2006. And over the years, we’ve had a lot of victories in different parts of the country. We’ve been able to reduce the use of suspensions for minor infractions in the classroom in some places. We’ve been able to remove police from schools and I think the new wave of introducing new technologies, especially when it’s being used as part of a surveillance and monitoring program, is a way that we’re going to roll back a lot of those victories around school discipline. Our goal is to promote more positive caring approaches to discipline through things like restorative justice, through social emotional learning.

[00:32:50] Liz: And if information technology is being used to track kids, to feed information to police departments, it’s really undermining all of that. So I think broadly for the education justice movement, it’s important that we’re really careful about what technology is being used in schools and how the information that’s gathered is used.

[00:33:07] Ruth: Yeah. It’s almost like they replaced the police presence with the technology, right? So you don’t actually need the bodies in, in the physical space anymore. You can use other methods.

[00:33:19] Liz: I think one of the underlying reasons why schools are turning to the surveillance technology is in general, an unfortunate sort of mind frame around safety as equating safety with punishment and police.

[00:33:32] Liz: And the way you get safety is through that. And it’s not just in our schools. I think it’s in our society more broadly. So it plays out in schools. And I think, you know, there’s this sort of knee jerk reaction that if you punish or remove a child, they’ll learn a lesson and then they’ll come back different, but that’s not really the case.

[00:33:47] Liz: You punish a child, they disengage more. Once you’ve been suspended, you’re more likely to get suspended again because you’re not actually addressing the root cause of the behavior. What we found in research, but also in working with parents and students and teachers who live this in schools, is that if you focus on creating a caring community where there are adults that young people trust, that they can go to if they’re having a problem, that’s how you create real safety. That’s how you prevent misbehavior from happening in the first place. But also if conflict or problems come up, you’re able to address them by talking about what’s going on. And so what we promote instead of things like surveillance technology or policing or high suspension rates is training students, parents, families, teachers, other staff in the school in using things like restorative justice and social emotional learning so that you’re building skills to deal with conflict and that you have trained adults to help resolve things when they come up in school.

[00:34:42] Liz: Peer to peer restorative justice and mediation is also really powerful, especially in high school. So a lot of places around the country, there are young people being trained as restorative circle keepers to work with their peers when a student might not feel comfortable going to a teacher, but they know there’s a team in the school of other young people they can go to.

[00:34:58] Liz: And then in some places like Chicago, there’s also parents who help run the peace centers in schools and who lead circles with kids. So, those things are more effective, more positive and they help keep kids engaged in school instead of, processes that are just going to disengage them and, get them kicked out.

[00:35:16] Ruth: It seems like as a country and as a society, we are investing less and less in just public goods generally. And so, you know, I guess, and part of the call, call to action would be that, you know, we really need to put more money back in services for families in general, but particularly in schools where children spend pretty much most of their lives, right, to put back and invest into social services, mental health, train teachers to be able to create an environment where children can actually, you know, enjoy being in and can thrive. Right. And to make sure that, you know, they’re getting the education that we say that we have public schools for, rights? Because if they’re not in schools and they’re not learning.

[00:35:59] Ruth: And so, you know, we’ve just over the years just seeing the amount of Children that are entering into juvenile justice system who are ending up in prisons or being locked up. And, you know, we’re trying to prevent that and mitigate that. And, you know, just shout from the rooftops that there are better ways to educate our Children.

[00:36:19] Ruth: It’s not that, like, you know, we know the research, we know what works. So why aren’t we doing it and invest in that instead of technology that’s using, you know, that’s being used to pretty much criminalize children.

[00:36:30] Liz: Yeah, and I think there’s this, like trend and excitement in some districts for leaders to invest in this new technology.

[00:36:39] Liz: I’ll use an example from New York City where I’m based. This year, the mayor, proposed huge cuts to the public education system. People fought to prevent the cuts. But one thing that was never on the table to be cut and in fact had 75 million new dollars invested in it was auto locking doors and camera technology.

[00:36:57] Liz: At the same time we had to fight to keep only 17 million dollars for restorative justice. So, it’s like the priorities are so off to try to move towards what seems like, you know, some sexy new technological advancement when what you actually really need is people in schools to work with children directly and build those relationships, not, you know, auto locking doors or surveillance cameras.

[00:37:19] Liz: So, I think in this moment, when people say money is tight and they’re trying to cut things, there’s always money for these other fancy surveillance related technology and not enough for the human side of education. Folks watching can go to their school districts and ask what kind of programs and information technology is being used in the schools.

[00:37:41] Liz: Ask what are the contracts? How much is it costing? Ask. how the information that’s being gathered through those programs is being used to try to push for that transparency and get as much information as you can and then you can reach out to other organizations in your community if you feel like they’re doing something that isn’t right to figure out how to help organize and push back against what’s happening and change it.

[00:38:01] Ruth: You can find us online dignity in schools campaign. We are open to talking to anybody about what’s going on, no matter where in the country you are. And, yeah, we’re online, dignity in schools campaign is our website and you can find, Liz’s information out there, my information, also our phone number.

[00:38:19] Ruth: So you can also call. We’re willing to talk to anybody, anytime. So, we want to offer as much support as we can offer.

[00:38:26] Liz: Stay tuned because every year in October, we have a national week of action against school pushout, where there might already be an event in your local community that you could participate in, but you could also sign up and host an event.

[00:38:37] Liz: So check out our website at DignityInSchools.org.

[00:38:43] Tanya: My name is Tanya Clark, and I am an assistant professor of English at Morehouse college in Atlanta, Georgia, which is one of the six HBCUs, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, in the Atlanta University Center. And I’m here at the conference, D4PG, to talk about visionary literature and Afrofuturism.

[00:39:10] Tanya: So I have a plenary in the morning about, I’m going to be walking the audience through, like, the timeline. the literary timeline of, visionary fiction and talking about how it creates this historical arc for using literature as a way to envision a better future. And then, that conversation is also steeped in, Afrofuturism.

[00:39:41] Tanya: That’s the lens that I use to kind of read this quest, you know, for having a better future. And then I have a workshop it’s called “On Imagination” and it is where I get to pay homage to Phyllis Wheatley and talk about the ways in which she is thinking about imagination and the power of creativity and then we’re going to use that as a segue into thinking about what imagination looks like in our contemporary moment and then doing some fun, interactive activities. So what I like to teach in my classroom is visionary literature. I didn’t come up with that term. That term is from Adrienne Marie Brown, and she’s a

[00:40:26] Tanya: co-editor of an anthology of short stories called Octavia’s Brood. And in the foreword and the afterwords, she calls for writers and thinkers of visionary literature, which she defines as speculative fiction. So we’re talking science fiction, fantasy, Afrofuturism, horror. So she’s calling on these authors to use though, their imagination to envision

[00:40:55] Tanya: a world that is better in the future, particularly for minority cultures. Whether that culture is based on ethnicity and race, gender, sexuality, but the primary component of visionary literature is that it leads right into social change and social justice. So, it’s visionary because it rethinks the current world we are in and it is practical because it gives us a set of, strategies in which we can operationalize in our work, in our personal growth. So, I use her definition of visionary literature. It’s not new. It’s, kind of stemmed from, I think W.E.B. Du Bois call for the role or his discussion of the role of, Negro art and the criteria of Negro art where it should all be didactic, it should all be propaganda, right, to kind of advance the racial, question in the racial debate.

[00:42:07] Tanya: So I think it, so it comes out of that history. And, it’s important to me because being at a historically black college like Morehouse, which is, for all males, and then also being a boy mom, you know, it lets me, I live in an everyday existence where as my children get older, I have twins. Twin boys who are 11.

[00:42:33] Tanya: So as they get older, they get more and more vulnerable to the ways in which the world views them just because of who they are. And so visionary fiction, Afrofuturist thinking and fiction, it allows me to kind of help them see themselves in a way that fights against the status quo about who black males are.

[00:43:02] Tanya: And so it allows me to indulge my love of literature, but also think about it in a way that has social justice implications and practical strategies and uses. So key takeaways of my message is really just us remembering the power of our imaginations, because we’re so inundated with technology that can do our thinking for us and can do our writing for us.

[00:43:37] Tanya: And we’ve kind of gotten away from relying on our own senses, on our own experiences, and deferring that to computer programming; experiencing that through gaming. And not that those things don’t have a place and in our world, but at the moment, it feels like those things are becoming a young people’s kind of go to.

[00:44:08] Tanya: So I want people to remember their own cognitive, creative abilities, and to understand that’s where they should start. So start there instead of giving away, you know, your power over to a language model and that the more you do that, then the more your own voice gets silenced. And so I want people to understand that no matter where you are in terms of your thinking or your age or your geographical location or your ancestry, right, that everyone has a story.

[00:44:52] Tanya: And that if we think about the importance of that story, then perhaps it can help someone else. And perhaps it can help your own personal development. And then perhaps it can help community. So it gets kind of larger and larger. So why it’s important in particular right now is because there’s a crisis in the humanities, really.

[00:45:15] Tanya: I mean, I teach at a liberal arts college, but as an English professor, our numbers are down more and more. We are, getting away from the lessons that the humanities can teach us. And it seems to be this narrative about if you don’t have the fastest, most advanced technology that you’re going to be left behind.

[00:45:39] Tanya: And so students are pushed more and more to kind of amplify their thinking strategies, their workload, in and outside of school and balancing their, personal responsibilities. And so we have become this culture that is about quickness, I think over sometimes at the detriment of quality. And so it’s important because relying on our own and developing our own critical thinking skills will help us, be able to problem solve and, problem solve for practical real life everyday issues. So we’re seeing. And we’re [in] an election year and there’s the crises that are going on in other countries. And so we have all these issues that are in bombarding us all at once. And it’s a lot that’s going on in our minds and in our thinking.

[00:46:49] Tanya: So when we focus on what is possible, it forces us to slow down, which I think is something that unfortunately we have kind of gotten away from on college campuses, but we need to slow down and kind of be able to walk systematically through steps for improvement and empowerment and betterment. So the humanities are important because the humanities gives us the blueprint for how to stay connected as human beings, right?

[00:47:24] Tanya: So the basis of any of those isms, racism, sexism, is this inability to see the other as human. And when we learn about sociological systems, When we learn about the culture of, other groups, when we read the stories of other groups, then it makes them, more like us, right? So that we begin to see the connections between [them].

[00:47:56] Tanya: So if we can recognize one another’s humanity, right? Which is what is the basis of a liberal arts education, the basis of the field of humanities itself, then we can begin to kind of be open to collective voices and collective experiences. So that’s why the humanities are important because we can then take those lessons and apply them in the STEM fields and the math fields and all the other technical stuff, which I don’t do.

[00:48:34] Tanya: So for people who are listening, who are interested in visionary literature, with literature being the key word there, they have to read. So another thing that the humanities teaches us, right, is to – And I see it in my kids. It’s like the attention span of younger people is getting shorter and shorter, but when you have to work your way through a 300 page novel, and think about the arc of that story, how it begins, how the tension begins to build, what the conflict is, the climax, and then the resolution and how things end and close, that takes a process of critical thinking, that takes a process of logical thinking as well. So, what a person can do who’s interested in what is visionary fiction or what is, speculative fiction or Afrofuturism is that they can read the, greats, right? So in modern times, we’re talking Samuel Delaney, we’re talking Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Annette Akorfor, but when we think about it historically, kind of before these academic labels were created, people of color were writing speculative fiction. I mean, you can think about what I think about, slave narratives as being a form of speculative fiction because you had enslaved people who were writing about the possibility and the right to be free. Right? And the plan that they took in order to make that happen. Right. So they created a better future for themselves. So we can think of Frederick Douglass. We can, think of Harriet Jacobs, but then also there are thinkers and philosophers like W.E.B. Du Bois, that you need to read also.

[00:50:33] Tanya: So there’s genres from across time that I would say that people who are interested in seeing how fiction can be instituted as a social justice strategy is to read other fiction, is to read literature. So a better future for me, looks like inclusion, right? It looks like collaboration; what we would say here at D4PG is what I’m learning from last year is “co-powering,” right?

[00:51:06] Tanya: So all sitting together at the table and offering our stories. But then taking those stories and seeing, okay, where are the similarities, where are the differences and how can we put them into effect for the future? So I’m thinking about it through the lens of being a mother, through the lens of being a professor and an educator, through the lens of being a black woman.

[00:51:36] Tanya: So a better world for me is one where people can bring their intersecting identities to the table, and not have to apologize for those, not have to justify them, not have to explain them, but just offer them up. And that those voices and identities are heard and that they’re supported. So yeah, a better future is one that is diverse.

[00:52:01] Tanya: It’s one that is collaborative and it is one that is, yeah, all inclusive. If people want to learn more with the, TCIA folks, we have, we’re going to be starting a book club through Amazon Books. And so we’re going to be curating a book list, a reading list, and I would start there. So when that link and website is all built out, we will share those things and we will have regular discussions and because it’s digital, there’ll be kind of ongoing discussions and you enter where you are and they will have those foundational books across genres.

[00:52:46] Tanya: Because, you know, as a professor, I’m teaching students from all kinds of majors. So we’re not just kind of thinking about fiction and literature, but also where these narratives are coming up in other genres and other fields. So I would say start with our book club, and hopefully we’re also going to be launching a podcast about ways in which we can use Afrofuturism in our practical everyday lives.

[00:53:22] Dr. Eric: My name is Dr. Eric Solomon, and I’m here at the Data 4 Public Good conference to talk about what it means to mitigate burnout in the world today, along with my colleague, Heather. In my normal life, I run a company called the Human Operating System, where my mission is to put humanity at the center of everything, including business.

[00:53:42] Dr. Eric: I’ve been running that for about five years out of my office in New York City. This topic is really important to me because as much as there are all of the internal factors that we deal with whatever we’re doing in any organization that contribute to burnout, the external factors of the political landscape we’re in, and then of course, emerging technology and everything that’s causing in terms of anxiety seeps into our systems.

[00:54:13] Dr. Eric: And for many of us, we sweep it under the rug without realizing that it’s chipping away at our wellbeing. And so it’s really important to focus on what it is that’s creating balance in our lives today and how that might contribute to potential burnout so we can stop it before we get there. Really the key message, that we want people to walk away with is that people have agency and control over this.

[00:54:36] Dr. Eric: And we call it, the kind of this idea, if you think of – we think about low hanging fruit all the time. Well, we take it a step further and we call it making the jam. It’s the stuff that’s on the ground that’s easy to pick up that you can do tomorrow to help mitigate that burnout. So we want people to really understand that it’s within their control to take small atomic little actions to help with the burnout today.

[00:54:58] Dr. Eric: So, you know, the actions really revolve around what we call our wellness wheel, and we’ll go into a lot more of that, but we want people to take away specific actions. Like one thing that’s so easy to do is to take a look at your calendar, your busy calendar, and eliminate one meeting a week from that calendar that you absolutely don’t need to have.

[00:55:17] Dr. Eric: And that helps mitigate feeling like you have control over your time. Another really simple thing to do, and it sounds so silly, but we forget to do this in our always-on virtual worlds, is to take 20 minutes and have coffee with somebody in real life. Get outside, have face to face interactions with people in a way that doesn’t feel forced, but in a way that feels natural and organic to who we are.

[00:55:41] Dr. Eric: This topic is really important in this moment in time because we’ve, you know, really for the last almost two years now have been at the dawn of the new AI explosion and everything’s coming at us. It’s everything all at once, all of the time at this point. And it’s hard to keep up with everything that’s going on because we know that we have to implement and do something with this, but it’s causing unforeseen, unintended outcomes on our wellbeing and our behaviors.

[00:56:08] Dr. Eric: So it’s a critically important now because Moore’s law used to say, we’re going to innovate every two years. Well, now it’s every two months soon. It’s going to be every two weeks, then it’s going to be every two seconds. And then. We’re really going to be in it. So we’ve really got to take a look at what’s going on now and take a step back and mitigate this burnout.

[00:56:26] Dr. Eric: Staying optimistic and hopeful and curious in this time, it really, and we’ll talk about this when we give our talk, but it, for me, it really is thinking about what I think of is this line of humility and this line across a page. And at any given time, we’re either above or below this line. And it sucks when we’re below this line, because that’s when we’re committed to being right and we’re closed and we’re defensive and we think we’re right. And you know, that doesn’t work very well in personal relationships. It doesn’t work very well in business relationships. So we try to be above that line instead of saying that we’re committed to being right. We’re committed to learning.

[00:57:04] Dr. Eric: We’re not closed, but we’re open and we’re not defensive, but we’re curious. So I think for me, maintaining that daily of how do I get above that line to keep that curiosity going, helps me keep optimistic even when things look dark and sometimes they do. A better future for me really requires, and this comes off of just listening to a panel around this, but I’m not exactly sure that we have many functioning institutions in this country from education, to politics, to health care, to business, and I think a hopeful future means reimagining what these institutions can look like because all institutions are how we cooperate to get things done that we can’t get done on our own and right now they’re failing us and so I really hope for, not a dismantling, but a reinvention of the institutions in this world today.

[00:57:55] Dr. Eric: I’ll focus on the institution of business and I will not stop until I change this institution. Yeah, there’s one additional thing I’ve just been thinking a lot about in terms of, you know, you think about where we are in terms of population saturation, we’re almost 8.4 billion people on this planet, all of us emitting just an ungodly number of signals out in the world all the time, and I think this is really, you know, especially at the face of dealing with anything with gen AI and all the stuff that’s coming at us, we’re losing a sense of who we really are.

[00:58:28] Dr. Eric: And so one of the things that I’m most passionate about that I’m working on is what it means to be out of sync and what it means to navigate identity in a world that loves labels. So here we are at a time where it’s more important what flag you fly and what you post, than it is to figure out who you really are.

[00:58:43] Dr. Eric: And so I think this really ties into the wave of technology is so easy to get lost in the tech. So easy to get lost in the hope and the details of that, but we need to return back to who we actually are. And that relates to the work that I do with the human operating system. You’ve got to build your human operating system.

[00:59:01] Dr. Eric: You’ve got to install it. And of course you’ve got to update it when it goes out of fashion. So for me, this is one of the most central things that’s facing us in our time today is figuring out who we are in the midst of things that are facing us to tell us that we don’t know who we are. Another reason why this work is so important to me is based on the career that I had.

[00:59:20] Dr. Eric: So when I first started, I co-founded a team at YouTube back in 2010 and the internet in 2010 was everything. It was Nyan cat. Charlie bit my finger. Double rainbow is pretty clandestine, amazing place. Fast forward to the time when I ran global marketing for Instagram and I had already destroyed democracy and done other things like,
you know, cause a tremendous amount of social addiction among teens where we’ve got some teens spending up to 18 hours a day on TikTok. I’m not even up 18 hours a day. And this is where we’re at. We’ve got a political system where 70 percent of voters feel like they can’t even have a conversation with somebody that’s on the other side, and we’re at a point of time where one out of four men in this country claim to have no close friends.

[01:00:11] Dr. Eric: So I see all of these unintended outcomes. I didn’t set out at YouTube. I worked at Spotify, Google, Instagram to cause these problems, but these are the unintended human consequences of these things. And I’m very concerned if we don’t have our eye on those consequences in the age of AI, those consequences could end up being worse than the ones that I helped instigate in the first round of social media.

[01:00:36] Dr. Eric: So one of the other things that’s really central to this idea is a spectrum that I thought about, not just with my own life, but within the pursuit of business overall, which is if you just think of things on a unidimensional spectrum, there’s on one hand more in business. This is ROI productivity and efficiency in my own life.

[01:00:58] Dr. Eric: It was different things, but it was this kind of thoughtless pursuit of more, more, more. And I think, you know, those are the lifeblood of business and that’s a lot of what our life [is], but it comes at the cost of the other end, which is better. Better human outcomes for our life and better human outcomes for people.

[01:01:14] Dr. Eric: So in my own life, I pursued more at the cost of better outcomes. I see business pursuing more at the cost of better outcomes. So my whole platform around the human OS, to put humanity at the center is just simply to shift some of that spotlight from more to better.

[01:01:34] Helen: Thank you for spending some time with us today. We’re just getting started and would love your support. Subscribe to Creativity Squared on your preferred podcast platform and leave a review. It really helps. And I’d love to hear your feedback. What topics are you thinking about and want to dive into more?

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[01:02:36] Helen: I really appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. This show is produced and made possible by the team at Play Audio Agency. Until next week, keep creating.