Data and Automation (with Arthur Gwagwa and Deb Raji) Annie Galvin (AG): Hello, and welcome back to Public Books 101, a podcast that turns a scholarly eye to a world worth studying. I’m Annie Galvin, an editor and producer at Public

A lot of the systems we think about at the Algorithmic Justice League are systems that try to take representations of people through data and make decisions about those people's lives, so the connection between the information about the person and the person behind that information for me is very clear. [...] But when you actually talk to the students, a lot of the protests were around a lack of appeals, a lack of access to appeals, a lack of information around the fact that this was happening and a lack of participation in being able to determine whether or not this should happen. [...] What this basically means is that I think some of the decisions may not actually protect the interest of Africans, and then finally, related to data again, the ongoing debate about genetic sequencing data and the future of agriculture, you know, agriculture is the backbone of African economies, so companies like Bayer, Monsanto, and John Deere have a monopoly on the seed and pesticide industries,. [...] NK: I think an interesting parallel between both of your answers is Deb was talking about how even in the research community, some of the harms that they assume aren't necessarily the harms or the solutions of the community itself is thinking about, and here you are talking about that on a major scale, right, where decisions are being made in the global north about people in the global south, like. [...] So that is the work that we are doing and we're hoping that it can lead to the design of a system that can actually serve as this portal or this resource for people that are being hurt, and don’t understand how to talk about it, don't understand how to report it and how to get the harm that they feel result in some kind of justice for themselves.