I am a scholar practitioner and community activist, focused on the ways mass media, digital technologies and pedagogical practice combine in education (and other) systems to create American ideas of Blackness. In my 20 year teaching career I have been active in bringing cultural critique to curricular reform, based on my understanding of the classroom as a site where theoretical frameworks produce power. At the University of Detroit Mercy I played a central role in creating the e-crit department, founded to emphasize cultural criticism as the essential context for digital studies. I was also a founder of the Black Studies Program at UDM. While at UDM, I also worked with Black STEM students at the middle and high school level.
Now, my current work emphasizes class, privacy, digital redlining, and the re-inventions of discriminatory practices through data mining and algorithmic decision-making. I am currently developing a project that looks at how popular misunderstandings of mathematical concepts create the illusions of fairness and objectivity in student analytics, predictive policing, and hiring practices.