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In Geek Girls, France Winddance Twine focuses on first-hand accounts of these issues in the tech world. The book draws on over 100 interviews with male and female tech workers of diverse racial, ethnic, and educational backgrounds who are currently employed at tech firms such as Apple, Google, 4Square, and Twitter or at various start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area. Twine finds that many potential tech employees from privileged backgrounds have social networks-friendship ties, former classmates, neighbors, relatives--that they rely on to get priority in hiring and in gaining access to jobs in the tech industry. As a consequence of these practices, she argues, those who do not share either racial, cultural, or class backgrounds as well as educational affiliations of current tech company employees are not given the opportunity to compete. While there may not be overt racism or sexism in the tech industry it is clear that there are forms of residential and educational segregation at work as well as recruitment and cultural practices that marginalize women and non-Asian minorities. Importantly, virtually all tech firms espouse opposition to discrimination in the workplace, yet the author argues that workers describe routine practices that embrace just that kind of supposedly "outlawed" thinking. In this way, the culture of gender-blindness and color-blindness makes it difficult for individuals to name the forms of discrimination and or micro-aggressions that they are experiencing. Ultimately, the author suggests that these patterns can be changed and offers concrete insight into how the tech industry might go about putting these policies into place.
Latinas on the Line provides a compelling analysis and historical and theoretical grounding of the oral histories, never before seen, of Latina information workers in the Bell System from their entrance in 1973 to their retirements by 2015. Author Melissa Villa-Nicholas demonstrates the importance of Latinas of the field of telecommunications through their own words and uses supporting archival research to provide an overview of how Latinas engage and remember a critical analysis of their work place, information technologies, and the larger globalized economy and shifting borderlands through their intersectional identities as information workers. The book offers a rich and engaging portrait of the critical history of Latinas in telecommunications, from their manual to automated to digitized labor.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the inadequacies of the world's collective approach to data. The inability, and sometimes unwillingness, to share and use data to combat COVID-19 or to protect against predatory uses of data has negatively impacted individuals, private enterprise, research institutions and governments around the globe. A lack of trust combined with asymmetric economic interests are slowing progress -- especially in the cross-border context. The explosion of ransomware and software supply chain attack in 2021 exposed the vulnerability of the centralized data storage within enterprises, big and small. The current crisis illustrates that without proper technology, protocols and governance, society risks creating either a world in which access to data is overly restricted and impedes human progress and innovation, or one in which data-sharing solutions are created without properly respecting the rights of the individual parties involved, including businesses. A balanced combination of hard science and real-world case studies, The Blockchain Internet is a comprehensive and accessible guide to both the present and the future of blockchain technology and how it empowers the future internet, providing a timely, in-depth analysis of this rapid-developing blockchain world for wide audiences.
A concise overview of the ethical issues that are likely to emerge as robots become more social and more integrated into human life.
Requests for the removal, relocation, and restriction of books -- also known as challenges -- occur with some frequency in the United States. Book Banning in 21st Century America, based on fifteen contemporary book challenges cases in schools and public libraries across the United States, argues that understanding contemporary reading practices, especially interpretive strategies, is vital to understanding why people attempt to censor books in schools and public libraries. Focusing on the why of censorship, Knox posits that many censorship attempts are intimately tied to how one understands the practice of reading and its effects on character development and behavior.
An insider account of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens working to change minds, bridge divisions, and save democracy.
The Doctor who wasn't there traces the long arc of enthusiasm for-and skepticism of-electronic media for health and medicine, showing that the same challenges now facing telehealth and the use of electronic medical records can be found in the medical reception of the telephone in the late nineteenth century and the radio, television, and mainframe computer across the twentieth. Wielding a rich trove of archival materials, physician/historian Jeremy Greene explores the role that new electronic media play, for better and for worse, in the past, present, and future of American health.
The following bibliographies are an alphabetical listing by author of all Wilkes University graduate theses dissertations, separated by degree, cataloged by the E.S. Farley Library, and held in University Archives. Contact a librarian at the Reference Desk on the first floor to gain access to these titles. New theses and dissertations are automatically added to this list as they are received and cataloged by the Library.
