https://www.ucpress.edu/books/access-is-capture/paper

Zhenzhou “Andy” Tan: Your ethnography of experiments with technology in public education in urban Los Angeles not only convincingly rebuts the persistent and appealing trope that access to technology contributes to racial justice. It also presents clear and strong evidence that “data in all its forms…contributes powerfully to racial projects” (p. 11). Can you give CaMP Anthropology readers a sneak peek of one especially compelling ethnographic case from the book?

Roderic Crooks: Thank you very much for engaging with my book. I understand attention to be a form of care, one that makes scholarly life possible. I appreciate the care you have shown my work, as well as the care of the readers and maintainers of the CaMP Anthropology blog.

Access Is Capture describes three interrelated sites: a high school, a charter management organization that runs a portfolio of schools, and a series of meetings with community organizers. Across these sites, I am thinking about different articulations of the value of access to technology partly in conversation with what Safiya Noble (2016) calls Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies. From this vantage, the question of the value of access to technology looks less like a question of the equitable distribution of resources and more a question of how interrelated, socially consequential differences such as sex, race, geography, and citizenship determine who may benefit from technology and who must provide those benefits.

One scene that encapsulates my approach concerns a big meeting of researchers, health workers, and neighborhood people that happened right around the time I was starting my field work at a South Los Angeles high school. This meeting was not directly related to my project on edtech and was instead ostensibly about how neighborhood people could learn to record data about air pollution so that they could apply for public money for remediation. Most of the people talking at the meeting were academics, not-for-profit workers, and county officials. These experts presented a charming and highly plausible program explaining how community members could collect data with their phones. When the meeting broke into smaller groups, the vibe shifted. The community people present were mostly aunties—respected older women. They had sat patiently through this day of programming that presumed the audience needed training and instruction in order to document local air quality hazards, and they felt condescended to. The organizers of this meeting imagined they would be celebrated for finally paying attention to this community, but the aunties, it turned out, had their own agenda. They already knew where the pollution hazards in the neighborhood were and had spent years complaining to local officials about them. They used the meeting as an opportunity to ask these researchers and officials hard questions about why they had so long ignored delivery trucks idling, car exhaust from the freeways, and factories located too close to schools. To the aunties, all of this business about data and reporting and community-based research really distracted from what people in the community already knew and had been saying for years to anyone who would listen. More, they wanted the officials there to speak to larger questions about why zoning laws allow pollution to accumulate in working-class neighborhoods, but state funds to clean up the air never materialize. At the end of this episode, community members were left unsure if their participation would be rewarded, if they would end up getting anything in exchange for working with data as the county people and academics wanted them to. It is a pattern I saw again and again, but it took me some time to recognize it.

Zhenzhou “Andy” Tan: You offer the analytic term “datalogical enframing” to capture the ways the pursuit of access to technology and data-drivenness ideologically and materially supports racial projects in almost all your cases. Although the term is amply fleshed out ethnographically, I do not remember you explaining why you chose this specific term, especially the qualifier “datalogical.” Is this a reference to an intellectual tradition, or is it a neologism for your specific analytic purposes? By attaching the suffix “-logical” to “data”, are you gesturing towards data’s epistemological, representational, and ideological affordances?

Roderic Crooks: When I refer to the datalogical enframing, I am calling into question the representational capacities of data, not just whatever measurement, observation, or fact any given source of data is said to hold. I return frequently in this book to data, how it is captured and created, who can use it, and how it can stand as a proxy for things in the world. This is partly out of a Latourian commitment to “follow the actor” (Latour & Crawford, 1993), but is also because I think data is interesting and important. Thinking about data lets me question how power shapes what comes to be known, how we make choices about what kinds of things are in the world and what is at stake in such choices (Mol, 1999). This is how I use the term “datalogical,” as a way to draw into my analysis what data is imagined to be, what it is allowed to be, and what kind of knowledge and power people derive from association with data. As I say in the book, even if data is not everything it is hyped up to be, for the people and organizations who claim to make education data-driven, the power it confers is real.

I was also inspired by abolitionist writers who talk about enclosure, specifically Damien Sojoyner and Ruth Wilson Gillmore. Both Gilmore and Sojoyner use the term enclosure to talk about the whole complex of relations that structure life in minoritized communities in ways that perennially create less valuable, more exploitable subjects. I wanted to differentiate enclosure in the context of datafication as distinct from geographical, institutional, or legal forms of enclosure. In making this distinction, I am saying that there are many forms of enclosure that structure life in a working-class community: ironically, it is precisely the consequences of these structurally imposed enclosures that access to computing (data-intensive or otherwise) is supposed to fix. So datalogical enframing echoes the work of these scholars, showing how the very technologies that are supposed to offer us something contribute to the conditions that keep us unfree.

I hope others might make use of this term if it suits their projects, if they see places where appeals to data or data-drivenness are used to distract from material demands for education, clean air, food, or any of the other things that people need to live. As the revised version of the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program (Newton & Seale, 1972) states, “We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology.” So there can be a place for authentic community demands for technology or for data or for all kinds of things, as long as these demands derive their warrant from the lived conditions of the people themselves.

Zhenzhou “Andy” Tan: You center race in analyzing the complex relations between minoritized communities and technology. As most of your research participants are identified as belonging to or serving working-class Black and Latinx communities, to what extent does this book pertain to other types of oppression and minoritization that intersect with race in public education or urban United States in general?

Roderic Crooks: My focus on access to edtech is both professional and personal. It stems from my interest in the working-class and poor communities and my scholarly writing about race in public life. I did not set out to write a regional work, but in a way, that is what I have done. I was born here in Southern California and consider it an honor to work, teach, and raise a family in my home state. The ten years of fieldwork that form the basis for this book are also set in Southern California. The ideas I am talking about—the centrality of race in understanding public life and the turn to data-intensive computing—are playing out all over the world, but the atmosphere and people I describe in the book are very much specific to Southern California.

My interest in race and class was primarily determined by the field site. Like many schools in South Los Angeles, the school I studied first (and that really set this project in motion) was “doubly segregated” (Pfleger & Orfield, 2025), that is to say, segregated both by class and by race. During the time I was initially doing my fieldwork, a lot of public schools in South and East Los Angeles were experimenting with technology, which school administrators and funders believed could address the persistent economic inequality that shapes life chances for working-class Black and Latinx youth. Why such inequality exists in the first place seemed never to be explicitly named by school administrators but also completely understood by everyone, including students and parents. I very much wanted to honor what people knew about the way power determined how and where they could live, but I also wanted to be clear that talk about access to technology foreclosed discussion about race, segregation, class, and inequality. Talking about tech (or about data or about AI) takes all the air out of the room and does not leave space for people to talk about their authentic needs, desires, and hopes.

In my approach, race cannot exist without class, gender, geography, disability, native language, or citizenship because, as The Combahee River Collective (1977) told us fifty years ago, “the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” There are certainly many forms of difference I do not specifically analyze in the published book, but this is largely out of concern for space, not significance. For example, I gave short shrift to sex and gender differences, which are tremendously consequential, especially among the youth I spent time with. But I think with a little bit of assistance from a generous reader, my argument that talking about access to technology constrains our shared ability to demand more meaningful changes can function along those axes of difference as well.  

Zhenzhou “Andy” Tan: As far as I know, you received your PhD in Information Studies from UCLA and now you are teaching in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. While reading your book, I was also happily informed that your intellectual approach was firmly rooted in “a time-tested approach to social informatics” (p. 135). What is the significance of social informatics, or your specific approach to it, for technology-focused research in general? Or, what is the significance of an ethnographer like you teaching in a department of informatics?

Roderic Crooks: I first heard of social informatics as a graduate student at UCLA in the 2010s. When I found out that there was a field of research that concerned computing but was not based primarily on accepting boosterish, one-sided claims about the wonders of modern technology, I felt a sense of recognition. As it was originally proposed, social informatics was an umbrella for research in fields including computer science, anthropology, sociology, communication, psychology, and management that studied the uses of computer systems of all kinds and the broader consequences of the spread of computing. It was a research perspective that was both empirical and critical in that it eschewed tech sector hype and schematic systems descriptions in favor of looking at what actual people do using social scientific methods. Social informatics as an organized discipline (or maybe subdiscipline) goes back to the 1960s and the work of Rob Kling. This body of research was both older than I imagined and also surprisingly relevant to what was happening at the intersection of the tech sector and the public sphere.

Now I work at UC Irvine in the Department of Informatics, which was a home for social informatics research for many years. Many scholars who I admire and cite frequently also work or worked in informatics, including Paul Dourish, Geoffrey C. Bowker, and Bonnie Nardi. Works in the Irvine School of Social Informatics (King, 2004) exhibit a kind of ethnographic sensitivity that I admire, as well as a certain commitment to scholarly writing that tends toward the literary. I am very honored to continue that tradition, to contribute work that examines technical things with an interest in the social. Technology-focused scholarship has frequently ignored race, or actively obscured its workings with anodyne constructs like the user or the client. My take on this tradition has been to insist that an interest in the social, however articulated, is also necessarily an interest in the racial and, therefore, in every other form of socially consequential difference. I think I am honoring that tradition by studying new objects with classic approaches.   

References

King, J. L. (2004). Rob Kling and the Irvine School. The Information Society, 20(2), 97–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972240490422978

Latour, B., & Crawford, T. H. (Thomas H. (1993). An Interview with Bruno Latour. Configurations, 1(2), 247–268. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.1993.0012

Mol, A. (1999). Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions. The Sociological Review, 47(1_suppl), 74–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1999.tb03483.x

Newton, H., & Seale, B. (1972, May 13). The Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program. The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. https://hueypnewtonfoundation.org/advocacy

Noble, S. U. (2016). A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies. S&F Online, 13(3). http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/safiya-umoja-noble-a-future-for-intersectional-black-feminist-technology-studies/

Pfleger, R., & Orfield, G. (2025, September). Extreme segregation and policy inaction in California schools. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/39s231mn

Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. (2023, June 9). From academic complicity to academic rebellion: Universities and the police. https://stoplapdspying.org/academic-complicity/

The Combahee River Collective. (1977). Combahee River Colelctiev Statement. https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/