Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks
The University at Albany’s Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy will be hosting its inaugural Rockefeller Reads Book Club this summer with Associate Professor Virginia Eubanks' Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. The award-winning book has garnered national media attention for its investigative look at data-based discrimination.
Members of the Rockefeller College community are encouraged to read Automated Inequality and join a virtual discussion of the book facilitated by Dr. Eubanks on Thursday, July 23rd at 7 p.m.
ABOUT AUTOMATING INEQUALITY
Today, automated systems 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 analytics, 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. Deeply researched and passionately written, Automating Inequality could not be more timely.
WINNER: 2019 Lillian Smith Book Award
WINNER: 2018 The McGannon Center Book Prize
SHORTLIST: 2018 Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice
“This book is downright scary — but with its striking research and moving, indelible portraits of life in the ‘digital poorhouse,’ you will emerge smarter and more empowered to demand justice.” ― Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything
“Riveting … Its argument should be widely circulated, to poor people, social service workers and policymakers, but also throughout the professional classes. Everyone needs to understand that technology is no substitute for justice.” ― The New York Times Book Review
Hardcover, paperback, audio, and electronic editions of the book are available on Bookshop and Amazon.
