My 30 Top Shelf Books (A List)

Readings in race, gender, and technology & society

Photo by Wells Lucas Santo. Please credit when reposting. My top shelf of books at the start of 2020.

After posting the above image of one of my bookshelves to Twitter, a few folks have asked me to list the book titles out along with links to where each can be purchased. In this post, I list 30 books that are currently on my top shelf, all of which I highly recommend. (Note that my selections below do not exactly match those in the image above.)

This is not a reading list, nor is it an exhaustive list of books in any one subject. While the majority of these books relate in topics of race, gender, education, and technology & society, I wouldn’t say these are the “core” texts that would make up any particular field or course syllabus. Nor would I say that these are my 30 “favorite” or “most recommended” books of all time. These are just books that happen to inform how I think and what I think about, in terms of the societal implications of tech work that I do, that all fit on the top shelf of my bookcase. For more fleshed out lists, do look at the Critical Race & Digital Studies syllabus, as well as the AI Now Law & Policy Reading List.

This post comes in two parts. The first is a list-at-a-glance, which includes for each book the title, author, a non-Amazon purchase link, and publication date. (For instance, if you see [MIT], it means you can purchase it directly from MIT Press by clicking on the link included.) The second part of the post is the same list, except with the official blurbs for each book included.

I decided not to include my own categorizations and reviews of each book in this post, nor my own comments on which books I would recommend for which readers. I’m hoping to write up a separate post to go through a selection of key texts in the “social implications of AI” or “algorithmic bias” topic area at a later time.

If there are any errors in the list below, please do let me know on Twitter (@WellsLucasSanto) or send me an e-mail at wells[at]nyu[dot]edu.

Ordered reverse chronologically:

1. Design Justice [Dr. Sasha Costanza-Chock][MIT][Mar 2020]
2. Data Feminism [Dr. Catherine D’Ignazio and Dr. Lauren F. Klein][MIT][Mar 2020]
3. Distributed Blackness [Dr. André Brock][NYU][Feb 2020]
4. The Charisma Machine [Dr. Morgan G. Ames][MIT][Nov 2019]
5. Intersectionality As Critical Social Theory [Dr. Patricia Hill Collins][Duke][Aug 2019]
6. Race After Technology [Dr. Ruha Benjamin][Wiley][Jul 2019]
7. Behind the Screen [Dr. Sarah T. Roberts][Yale][Jun 2019]
8. Brotopia [Emily Chang][Penguin][Mar 2019]
9. The Burden of Choice [Dr. Jonathan Cohn][IndieBound][Mar 2019]
10. Artificial Unintelligence [Meredith Broussard][MIT][Jan 2019]
11. Ghosts in the Schoolyard [Dr. Eve L. Ewing][UChicago][Oct 2018]
12. Algorithms of Oppression [Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble][NYU][Feb 2018]
13. So You Want To Talk About Race [Dr. Ijeoma Oluo][Seal][Jan 2018]
14. Automating Inequality [Dr. Virginia Eubanks][MacMillan][Jan 2018]
15. Technically Wrong [Sara Wachter-Boettcher][W.W. Norton][Oct 2017]
16. Robot Ethics 2.0 [collection edited by Dr. Patrick Lin, Keith Abney, and Dr. Ryan Jenkins][Oxford][Oct 2017]
17. Weapons of Math Destruction [Dr. Cathy O’Neil][Penguin][Sep 2017]
18. Reset [Ellen Pao][Penguin][Sep 2017]
19. Coding Literacy [Dr. Annette Vee][MIT][Jul 2017]
20. Twitter and Tear Gas [Dr. Zeynep Tufekci][Yale][May 2017]
21. Programmed Inequality [Dr. Mar Hicks][MIT][Jan 2017]
22. Technology and the Virtues [Dr. Shannon Vallor][Oxford][Sep 2016]
23. Women, Science, and Technology [collection edited by Dr. Mary Wyer, Dr. Mary Barbercheck, Dr. Donna Giesman, Dr. Hatice Orün Oztürk, and Dr. Marta Wayne][Routledge][Sep 2013]
24. Fatal Invention [Dr. Dorothy Roberts][The New Press][Sep 2012]
25. An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies [Dr. Sergio Sismondo][Wiley][Oct 2009]
26. Are Prisons Obsolete? [Dr. Angela Davis][Penguin][Aug 2003]
27. Studying Those Who Study Us [Dr. Diana E. Forsythe][SUP][Aug 2001]
28. The Racial Contract [Dr. Charles W. Mills][Cornell][Jun 1999]
29. Critical Race Theory [collection edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil T. Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas][The New Press][May 1996]
30. Teaching to Transgress [dr. bell hooks][Routledge][Sep 1994]

List with official blurbs included:

1. Design Justice

[Dr. Sasha Costanza-Chock][MIT][Mar 2020]

An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.

What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world.

This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people — specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism) — and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.

2. Data Feminism

[Dr. Catherine D’Ignazio and Dr. Lauren F. Klein][MIT Press][Mar 2020]

A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism.

Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics — one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought.

Illustrating data feminism in action, D’Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.”

Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn’t, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.

3. Distributed Blackness

[Dr. André Brock][NYU][Feb 2020]

An explanation of the digital practices of the black Internet

From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains.

As Brock demonstrates, there’s nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of black beliefs about technology. In explaining black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being black online now.

4. The Charisma Machine

[Dr. Morgan G. Ames][MIT][Nov 2019]

A fascinating examination of technological utopianism and its complicated consequences.

In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why — despite its failures — the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development.

Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop per Child promised to transform the lives of children across the Global South with a small, sturdy, and cheap laptop computer, powered by a hand crank. In reality, the project fell short in many ways — starting with the hand crank, which never materialized. Yet the project remained charismatic to many who were captivated by its claims of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach. Behind its promises, OLPC, like many technology projects that make similarly grand claims, had a fundamentally flawed vision of who the computer was made for and what role technology should play in learning.

Drawing on fifty years of history and a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, Ames reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for “technically precocious boys” — idealized younger versions of the developers themselves — rather than the children who were actually using them. The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.

5. Intersectionality As Critical Social Theory

[Dr. Patricia Hill Collins][Duke][Aug 2019]

In Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory Patricia Hill Collins offers a set of analytical tools for those wishing to develop intersectionality’s capability to theorize social inequality in ways that would facilitate social change. While intersectionality helps shed light on contemporary social issues, Collins notes that it has yet to reach its full potential as a critical social theory. She contends that for intersectionality to fully realize its power, its practitioners must critically reflect on its assumptions, epistemologies, and methods. She places intersectionality in dialog with several theoretical traditions — from the Frankfurt school to black feminist thought — to sharpen its definition and foreground its singular critical purchase, thereby providing a capacious interrogation into intersectionality’s potential to reshape the world.

6. Race After Technology

[Dr. Ruha Benjamin][Wiley][Jul 2019]

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.

Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.

This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.

7. Behind the Screen

[Dr. Sarah T. Roberts][Yale][Jun 2019]

An eye-opening look at the invisible workers who protect us from seeing humanity’s worst on today’s commercial internet

Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material — sometimes thousands of items per day.

Sarah T. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she contextualizes this hidden industry and examines the emotional toll it takes on its workers. This revealing investigation of the people “behind the screen” offers insights into not only the reality of our commercial internet but the future of globalized labor in the digital age.

8. Brotopia

[Emily Chang][Penguin][Mar 2019]

Silicon Valley is a modern utopia where anyone can change the world. Unless you’re a woman.

For women in tech, Silicon Valley is not a fantasyland of unicorns, virtual reality rainbows, and 3D-printed lollipops, where millions of dollars grow on trees. It’s a “Brotopia,” where men hold all the cards and make all the rules. Vastly outnumbered, women face toxic workplaces rife with discrimination and sexual harassment, where investors take meetings in hot tubs and network at sex parties.

In this powerful exposé, Bloomberg TV journalist Emily Chang reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures despite decades of companies claiming the moral high ground (Don’t Be Evil! Connect the World!)–and how women are finally starting to speak out and fight back.

Drawing on her deep network of Silicon Valley insiders, Chang opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao’s high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously said they “won’t lower their standards” just to hire women. Interviews with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and former Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer–who got their start at Google, where just one in five engineers is a woman–reveal just how hard it is to crack the Silicon Ceiling. And Chang shows how women such as former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, entrepreneur Niniane Wang, and game developer Brianna Wu, have risked their careers and sometimes their lives to pave a way for other women.

Silicon Valley’s aggressive, misogynistic, work-at-all costs culture has shut women out of the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world. It’s time to break up the boys’ club. Emily Chang shows us how to fix this toxic culture–to bring down Brotopia, once and for all.

9. The Burden of Choice

[Dr. Jonathan Cohn][IndieBound][Mar 2019]

The Burden of Choice examines how recommendations for products, media, news, romantic partners, and even cosmetic surgery operations are produced and experienced online. Fundamentally concerned with how the recommendation has come to serve as a form of control that frames a contemporary American as heteronormative, white, and well off, this book asserts that the industries that use these automated recommendations tend to ignore and obscure all other identities in the service of making the type of affluence they are selling appear commonplace. Focusing on the period from the mid-1990s to approximately 2010 (while this technology was still novel), Jonathan Cohn argues that automated recommendations and algorithms are far from natural, neutral, or benevolent. Instead, they shape and are shaped by changing conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and class. With its cultural studies and humanities-driven methodologies focused on close readings, historical research, and qualitative analysis, The Burden of Choice models a promising avenue for the study of algorithms and culture.

10. Artificial Unintelligence

[Meredith Broussard][MIT][Jan 2019]

A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right.

In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally — hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners — that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology — and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right.

Making a case against technochauvinism — the belief that technology is always the solution — Broussard argues that it’s just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can’t pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.

11. Ghosts in the Schoolyard

[Dr. Eve L. Ewing][UChicago][Oct 2018]

“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.”

That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt.

But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures — they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together.

Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike?

Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools — schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs — as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.

12. Algorithms of Oppression

[Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble][NYU][Feb 2018]

A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms

Run a Google search for “black girls” — what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.

In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance — operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond — understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.

An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.

13. So You Want To Talk About Race

[Ijeoma Oluo][Seal][Jan 2018]

In this New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America

Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy–from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans–has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair–and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?

In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to “model minorities” in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.

14. Automating Inequality

[Virginia Eubanks][MacMillan][Jan 2018]

A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination — and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity

The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years — because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.

Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems — rather than humans — control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.

In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.

The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.

This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.

15. Technically Wrong

[Sara Wachter-Boettcher][W.W. Norton][Oct 2017]

Buying groceries, tracking our health, finding a date: whatever we want to do, odds are that we can now do it online. But few of us realize just how many oversights, biases, and downright ethical nightmares are baked inside the tech products we use every day. It’s time we change that.

In Technically Wrong, Sara Wachter-Boettcher demystifies the tech industry, leaving those of us on the other side of the screen better prepared to make informed choices about the services we use — and to demand more from the companies behind them.

16. Robot Ethics 2.0

[collection edited by Dr. Patrick Lin, Keith Abney, and Dr. Ryan Jenkins][Oxford][Oct 2017]

The robot population is rising on Earth and other planets. (Mars is inhabited entirely by robots.) As robots slip into more domains of human life — from the operating room to the bedroom — they take on our morally important tasks and decisions, as well as create new risks from psychological to physical. This makes it all the more urgent to study their ethical, legal, and policy impacts.

To help the robotics industry and broader society, we need to not only press ahead on a wide range of issues, but also identify new ones emerging as quickly as the field is evolving. For instance, where military robots had received much attention in the past (and are still controversial today), this volume looks toward autonomous cars here as an important case study that cuts across diverse issues, from liability to psychology to trust and more. And because robotics feeds into and is fed by AI, the Internet of Things, and other cognate fields, robot ethics must also reach into those domains, too.

Expanding these discussions also means listening to new voices; robot ethics is no longer the concern of a handful of scholars. Experts from different academic disciplines and geographical areas are now playing vital roles in shaping ethical, legal, and policy discussions worldwide. So, for a more complete study, the editors of this volume look beyond the usual suspects for the latest thinking. Many of the views as represented in this cutting-edge volume are provocative — but also what we need to push forward in unfamiliar territory.

17. Weapons of Math Destruction

[Dr. Cathy O’Neil][Penguin][Sep 2017]

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives — where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance — are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.

But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination — propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.

18. Reset

[Ellen Pao][Penguin][Sep 2017]

In 2015, Ellen K. Pao sued a powerhouse Silicon Valley venture capital firm, calling out workplace discrimination and retaliation against women and other underrepresented groups. Her suit rocked the tech world — and exposed its toxic culture and its homogeneity. Her message overcame negative PR attacks that took aim at her professional conduct and her personal life, and she won widespread public support — Time hailed her as “the face of change.” Though Pao lost her suit, she revolutionized the conversation at tech offices, in the media, and around the world. In Reset, she tells her full story for the first time.

The daughter of immigrants, Pao was taught that through hard work she could achieve her dreams. She earned multiple Ivy League degrees, worked at top startups, and in 2005 was recruited by Kleiner Perkins, arguably the world’s leading venture capital firm at the time. In many ways, she did everything right, and yet she and other women and people of color were excluded from success — cut out of decisive meetings and email discussions, uninvited to CEO dinners and lavish networking trips, and had their work undercut or appropriated by male executives. It was time for a system reset.

After Kleiner, Pao became CEO of reddit, where she took forceful action to change the status quo for the company and its product. She banned revenge porn and unauthorized nude photos — an action other large media sites later followed — and shut down parts of reddit over online harassment. She and seven other women tech leaders formed Project Include, an award-winning nonprofit for accelerating diversity and inclusion in tech. In her book, Pao shines a light on troubling issues that plague today’s workplace and lays out practical, inspiring, and achievable goals for a better future.

Ellen K. Pao’s Reset is a rallying cry — the story of a whistleblower who aims to empower everyone struggling to be heard, in Silicon Valley and beyond.

19. Coding Literacy

[Dr. Annette Vee][MIT][Jul 2017]

How the theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming in its historical, social and conceptual contexts.

The message from educators, the tech community, and even politicians is clear: everyone should learn to code. To emphasize the universality and importance of computer programming, promoters of coding for everyone often invoke the concept of “literacy,” drawing parallels between reading and writing code and reading and writing text. In this book, Annette Vee examines the coding-as-literacy analogy and argues that it can be an apt rhetorical frame. The theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming beyond a technical level, and in its historical, social, and conceptual contexts. Viewing programming from the perspective of literacy and literacy from the perspective of programming, she argues, shifts our understandings of both. Computer programming becomes part of an array of communication skills important in everyday life, and literacy, augmented by programming, becomes more capacious.

Vee examines the ways that programming is linked with literacy in coding literacy campaigns, considering the ideologies that accompany this coupling, and she looks at how both writing and programming encode and distribute information. She explores historical parallels between writing and programming, using the evolution of mass textual literacy to shed light on the trajectory of code from military and government infrastructure to large-scale businesses to personal use. Writing and coding were institutionalized, domesticated, and then established as a basis for literacy. Just as societies demonstrated a “literate mentality” regardless of the literate status of individuals, Vee argues, a “computational mentality” is now emerging even though coding is still a specialized skill.

20. Twitter and Tear Gas

[Dr. Zeynep Tufekci][Yale][May 2017]

A firsthand account and incisive analysis of modern protest, revealing internet-fueled social movements’ greatest strengths and frequent challenges

To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti–Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today’s social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests — how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.

Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture — and offer essential insights into the future of governance.

21. Programmed Inequality

[Dr. Mar Hicks][MIT][Jan 2017]

How Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women.

In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age.

In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user — the civil service and sprawling public sector — to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole.

Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.

22. Technology and the Virtues

[Dr. Shannon Vallor][Oxford][Sep 2016]

The 21st century offers a dizzying array of new technological developments: robots smart enough to take white collar jobs, social media tools that manage our most important relationships, ordinary objects that track, record, analyze and share every detail of our daily lives, and biomedical techniques with the potential to transform and enhance human minds and bodies to an unprecedented degree.

Emerging technologies are reshaping our habits, practices, institutions, cultures and environments in increasingly rapid, complex and unpredictable ways that create profound risks and opportunities for human flourishing on a global scale. How can our future be protected in such challenging and uncertain conditions? How can we possibly improve the chances that the human family will not only live, but live well, into the 21st century and beyond?

This book locates a key to that future in the distant past: specifically, in the philosophical traditions of virtue ethics developed by classical thinkers from Aristotle and Confucius to the Buddha. Each developed a way of seeking the good life that equips human beings with the moral and intellectual character to flourish even in the most unpredictable, complex and unstable situations — precisely where we find ourselves today.

Through an examination of the many risks and opportunities presented by rapidly changing technosocial conditions, Vallor makes the case that if we are to have any real hope of securing a future worth wanting, then we will need more than just better technologies. We will also need better humans.

Technology and the Virtues develops a practical framework for seeking that goal by means of the deliberate cultivation of technomoral virtues: specific skills and strengths of character, adapted to the unique challenges of 21st century life, that offer the human family our best chance of learning to live wisely and well with emerging technologies.

23. Women, Science, and Technology

[collection edited by Dr. Mary Wyer, Dr. Mary Barbercheck, Dr. Donna Giesman, Dr. Hatice Orün Oztürk, and Dr. Marta Wayne][Routledge][Sep 2013]

Women, Science, and Technology is an ideal reader for courses in feminist science studies. This third edition fully updates its predecessor with a new introduction and twenty-eight new readings that explore social constructions mediated by technologies, expand the scope of feminist technoscience studies, and move beyond the nature/culture paradigm.

24. Fatal Invention

[Dr. Dorothy Roberts][The New Press][Sep 2012]

This groundbreaking book by the acclaimed Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of biological concept of race — revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases — continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention offers a timely and “provocative analysis” (Nature) of race, science, and politics by one of the nation’s leading legal scholars and social critics.

25. An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies

[Dr. Sergio Sismondo][Wiley][Oct 2009]

An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, Second Edition reflects the latest advances in the field while continuing to provide students with a road map to the complex interdisciplinary terrain of science and technology studies.

• Distinctive in its attention to both the underlying philosophical and sociological aspects of science and technology
• Explores core topics such as realism and social construction, discourse and rhetoric, objectivity, and the public understanding of science
• Includes numerous empirical studies and illustrative examples to elucidate the topics discussed
• Now includes new material on political economies of scientific and technological knowledge, and democratizing technical decisions
• Other features of the new edition include improved readability, updated references, chapter reorganization, and more material on medicine and technology

26. Are Prisons Obsolete?

[Dr. Angela Davis][Penguin][Aug 2003]

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.

In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for “decarceration”, and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

27. Studying Those Who Study Us

[Dr. Diana E. Forsythe][SUP][Aug 2001]

Diana E. Forsythe was a leading anthropologist of science, technology, and work, and especially of the field of artificial intelligence. This volume collects her best-known essays, along with other major works that remained unpublished upon her death in 1997.

The essays proceed as a series of developing variations on the key questions that still confront science and technology studies today. What assumptions do expert systems designers make about users, and about knowledge more broadly, when they build software? How should humans interact with computers, and how do they, really? Why do computing firms hire anthropologists to study human-computer interaction, and what do anthropologists find once they are hired? And how and why are traditional power asymmetries between men and women produced and maintained in engineering firms and laboratories?

The book is not only a significant anthropological study of artificial intelligence and informatics, but is also an exemplar of how reflexive ethnography should be done. Among several pioneering strands of thought, it investigates the roles of gender and power in computer engineering, looking at the cultural mechanisms that support the persistent male domination of engineering, and analyzing the laboratory as a fictive kin group that reproduces gender asymmetries.

28. The Racial Contract

[Dr. Charles W. Mills][Cornell][Jun 1999]

The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged “contract” has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence “whites” and “non-whites,” full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state.

Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this provocative book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the “separate but equal” system of segregation in the twentieth-century United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against non-whites, from David Hume’s and Immanuel Kant’s claims that blacks had inferior cognitive power, to the Holocaust, to the kind of imperialism in Asia that was demonstrated by the Vietnam War.

Mills suggests that the ghettoization of philosophical work on race is no accident. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy’s invisible white male bias, Mills’s explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.

29. Critical Race Theory

[collection edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil T. Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas][The New Press][May 1996]

In the past few years, a new generation of progressive intellectuals has dramatically transformed how law, race, and racial power are understood and discussed in America. Questioning the old assumptions of both liberals and conservatives with respect to the goals and the means of traditional civil rights reform, critical race theorists have presented new paradigms for understanding racial injustice and new ways of seeing the links between race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. This reader, edited by the principal founders and leading theoreticians of the critical race theory movement, gathers together for the first time the movement’s most important essays.

30. Teaching to Transgress

[dr. bell hooks][Routledge][Sep 1994]

In Teaching to Transgress,bell hooks — writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual — writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to “transgress” against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher’s most important goal.

bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?

Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.

“To educate is the practice of freedom,” writes bell hooks, “is a way of teaching anyone can learn.” Teaching to Transgress is the record of one gifted teacher’s struggle to make classrooms work.

Wells Lucas Santo is a queer, Southeast Asian educator on the societal implications of artificial intelligence. He cares about issues of critical race and digital studies, equity, and representation, and is currently looking for full-time employment. He received his Master’s in Computer Science from New York University with a focus on Science, Technology, and Society studies and currently resides in Oakland, CA.