IDeaS Center Fall 2025 Seminar Series
Tuesday, November 11, 2025, 4:00pm – 5:00pm US EST., Zoom Only
Rachel Kuo
Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies and Institute of Communications Research
Democracy and Technology Under the Shadow of Empire
Abstract: The U.S. export of freedom of speech and expression has long twined together imperial violence and freedom, securing liberal democracy by managing the terms and conditions in which these freedoms can be accessed and administered. Drawing from excerpts of Kuo’s new book Movement Media: In Pursuit of Solidarity as well as newer work bringing abolitionist feminist lenses of platform governance of harmful speech, this talk focuses on digital organizing and the ways digital technologies as infrastructures make possible and limit political work. Tracing state technology investment into counterterrorism and anti-immigration efforts, I discuss how social movement formations build digital infrastructures within a landscape where technological apparatuses reinforce practices of national security (which ‘secure’ democracy through racial violence).
Bio: Rachel Kuo writes, teaches, and researches on race, social movements, and digital technology. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of Movement Media: In Pursuit of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2025) and co-editor of We Are Each Other’s Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities (Haymarket Books). She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and also a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective. She was a 2021-23 Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
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The IDeaS Seminar series are held during Spring and Fall semesters.
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**Unless noted all seminars will be held virtually via Zoom. Additional talk details and registration links will be posted online prior to seminar dates. Email centerforideas@andrew.cmu.edu to be added to the mailing list.
Past Seminar Presenters
Victor Pickard
C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication Talk Title: The Present and Future of U.S. Journalism on 10/28/2025
Making correction visible: The value of observed correction to reduce misperceptions on social media
Computational and Design Approaches for Combating Problematic Online Information
Juliana Schroeder - The Psychology of Reading "Mind" During Conversation
Katie Harbath - Tech and elections - A brief history of how we got here and where we go next
Sam Gregory - Deepfakes: Critical questions on current problems and emerging ‘solutions'
Ananya Sen - Quantifying the User Value of Social Media Data
Daniyar Serikov - Distortions in the Kazakh Media Landscape
Jessica Dawson - The Surveillance App Economy and the National Security Risk
Joshua Tucker - The (Surprisingly?) Limited Impact of Russia's Election Interference on Twitter in the 2016 US Election
Yan Leng Ph.D. - Analysis of misinformation during the COVID-19 outbreak in China: cultural, social and political entanglements
