About

Roderic Crooks is an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine. He is also the Director of the Evoke Lab and Studio. His research examines the use of digital technology in minoritized communities and the civic institutions that serve them. His current project explores the application of data analytics and associated computational techniques to the politically fraught realm of urban education.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Knowledge management
• Public relations
• Epistemology
• World Wide Web
• Psychology
• Business
• Engineering ethics
• Mathematics education
• Economics
• Engineering
• Public economics
• Law
• Data science
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• People’s Practices in the Face of Data Power

  Bristol University Press eBooks · 2024-08-29

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The shift towards big data-driven decision-making and algorithmic automation across many aspects of everyday life remains a contentious subject of debate and critique. Critical social scientists and media scholars assert that this shift alters the nexus and power relations between state, citizens, and industry. Individuals and communities have little control over how their data are collected and have little to no influence on the algorithmically informed decisions that govern their lives. This chapter addresses power asymmetries that are emerging at this contemporary juncture. The chapter points to possibilities to agency in the data practices, including consent practices, refusal practices, citizen participation (including citizen juries and citizen assemblies), as well as other forms of data activism. In doing so, we aim to contribute to reshaping data power from the bottom up and propose people-centred and radically contextualized approaches to imagining alternative data futures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Carceral State: Implications for Information and Technology Research and Practice

  Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2024-10-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT This systematic literature review synthesizes published sources from the ASIS&T Digital Library and the ACM Digital Library to develop a definition of the carceral state and to show how the term has been used in contemporary technology‐focused research. The carceral state concept has been adopted and applied widely in multiple areas of social scientific research to refer to the formal institutions of the criminal justice system proper and other social arrangements, ideologies, practices, and technologies that punish, surveil, and contain populations. Our review reveals a recent and increasing engagement with the carceral state in the collections surveyed. Encouraged by this increasing attention, this review is an attempt to introduce the carceral state as a guiding framework for tech‐society research and to consider implications for advancing responsibility, reflexivity, and care in the creation and evaluation of information systems, programs, and services.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• People’s Practices in the Face of Data Power

  Bristol University Press eBooks · 2024-09-03 · 4 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The shift towards big data-driven decision-making and algorithmic automation across many aspects of everyday life remains a contentious subject of debate and critique. Critical social scientists and media scholars assert that this shift alters the nexus and power relations between state, citizens, and industry. Individuals and communities have little control over how their data are collected and have little to no influence on the algorithmically informed decisions that govern their lives. This chapter addresses power asymmetries that are emerging at this contemporary juncture. The chapter points to possibilities to agency in the data practices, including consent practices, refusal practices, citizen participation (including citizen juries and citizen assemblies), as well as other forms of data activism. In doing so, we aim to contribute to reshaping data power from the bottom up and propose people-centred and radically contextualized approaches to imagining alternative data futures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• People’s Practices in the Face of Data Power

  Bristol University Press eBooks · 2024-08-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• "For Me, Data is Ammunition": Metaphors and Community Organizers' Data Imaginaries

  2024-11-11 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article bridges theories and insights from critical data scholarship by asking how community organizers from minoritized communities conceptualize data. Prior research has defined these socially and culturally constructed definitions about what data are and what data do as "data imaginaries." This study draws on 40 qualitative interviews with community organizers involved in issues like immigration, reproductive justice, education, and policing. Our study takes metaphors given to us by community organizers (i.e., ammunition, teeth, receipts, compass) to reveal their data imaginaries. Particularly, their data imaginaries define what data means to them and what purpose it serves in their organizing. We find that community organizers also shared critiques of the ways data has been used to oppress minoritized groups. Given these findings, we conclude by encouraging future work that explores how community organizers experience and articulate epistemic burdens.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Opportunity Cost: Using a Narrative Approach to Reframe Pro-equity Urban Informatics

  2023-10-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper is an exploration of storytelling in an urban data dashboard. We follow two frameworks to describe the narrative elements (characters, spatial dimension, sequentiality & temporality, and tellability) of the dashboard. This narrative analysis allows us to characterize the narrative work that urban dashboards do, enabling the interpretation that produces meaning from data. Given the duality of data and data visualization and their primacy in both directing and critiquing racialized state power, this poster argues that understanding narrative is vital to determining how, when, and why particular kinds of data visualizations might serve authentic community-defined political goals and when they do not. We aim to start a line of inquiry into how analytic attention to narrative in data visualization can support political change through agonistic data practices.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Grassroots Data Activism

  Journal of cinema and media studies · 2023-06-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Grassroots Data Activism Lucy Pei (bio) and Roderic Crooks (bio) M, a professional community organizer in the midwestern United States who works with undocumented youth, talks us through a typical day at work. Her role focuses on the creation, aggregation, and analysis of data using a commercial platform called EveryAction, but she chafes at questions about the procedures, formats, or outputs of data work. Our research team asks a series of questions that prompt respondents such as M to describe the qualities of the data they work with and what they do with it—questions we have used to study other kinds of data professionals, at city offices and in public school districts. After several prodding questions that turn again and again to the particulars of data in her work, M finally tells our interviewers bluntly, "What I've learned from many years, now at this point over ten years of organizing, mostly around immigrant rights, is that yes, maybe numbers and facts do cause a shock factor. But people are motivated and persuaded to change because of their feelings and how they feel about something. And you can use that data to help them feel in a particular way, but that's where the storytelling comes in."1 The ongoing public crises of the 2020s illustrate the accelerating datafication of contemporary government bodies at all levels. Public life is increasingly organized around engagements with data, especially data in visual form.2 Dashboards produced by national, county, state, and city bureaucracies displayed the grim, unrelenting number of COVID-19 deaths nation-wide, [End Page 188] but they also provided quick readouts of laws restricting movement (or restoring it), local hospital capacity, or color-coded masking rules. If, as Michele Murphy writes, dashboards are phantasmagrams, graphical objects charged with affective power, then visual artifacts produced by the state in all of their various instantiations are likewise inhabited by some palpable affective charge in excess of the dry quantitative practices for which they stand as proxy.3 It is this excess that grassroots organizers like M are after: a way to evoke feeling, inspire action, and ultimately build power in the communities in which they work. In particular, the way community organizers in working-class communities of color in the United States use data and data visualization shows us that critical information study and media study are happening outside the bureaucratic halls of the state and out of the purview of our academic disciplines. M's caution demands that when we consider political uses of data—including those oppositional or activist projects that seek to build grassroots power through community organizing—we take more seriously the role of narrative, particularly of public narrative. Public narratives are central to certain strains of contemporary community organizing. These public narratives are organizing tools that express a coherent worldview and articulate an actionable map of power: who has it, who needs it, and how it can be gained. Public narratives link individual, community, and action by illustrating why the individual is called to act, why others must join in that action, and why such action must be immediate.4 Community organizing is a technique and philosophy of political action, but it is also, increasingly, a job—one undertaken by skilled and educated workers dedicated to movement goals and employed by overtly political organizations, including many not-for-profit organizations in the public sector. As community organizers train, they practice creating public narratives: personal and compelling stories that inspire the listener to see a problem, to invest emotionally in the redress of that problem, and to join collective actions. Like so many other forms of work, community organizing has become datafied, executed via the commercial tools and platforms used for all kinds of professional work. But for community organizers, data work is not just about data: it is a multifaceted form of knowledge production and, simultaneously, a strategy aimed at changing the world, largely through crafting public narratives that will motivate others to action. In our research with community organizers based in working-class communities of color, we have found that much of the day-in and day-out work of grassroots organizing involves reusing, recontextualizing, or...

  PublisherDOI

• Cultural Studies and AIDS Activists' Archives: Considering Cifor's Viral Cultures

  Feminist formations · 2023-12-01

  articleSenior author

  Cultural Studies and AIDS Activists' Archives:Considering Cifor's Viral Cultures Stephen Molldrem (bio) and Roderic N. Crooks (bio) Introduction In Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS, Marika Cifor (2022), Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, examines how artists, activists, and archivists have created, used, and recontextualized AIDS archives to fight a viral disease "embedded in colonialism, imperialism, racism, heteropatriarchy and socioeconomic inequality" (15). AIDS archives—collections of digital and analog records produced over time, collected and cared for by both professional archivists and amateur custodians—serve as the focus for a multi-sited archival ethnography that nimbly weaves together close reading of documents, interviews with survivors, maps, social media posts, excerpts of zines, film, visual arts, and a creative assortment of other source material. Viral Cultures candidly revisits intra-community disputes over activism, remembrance, and media strategy. Cifor situates these struggles within unresolved conflicts over the enduring meanings of HIV/AIDS activism forged in the 1980s and 90s, and in relation to the needs of people in the present regarding both the right to mediatic autonomy and medical self-determination. Cifor shows how records of the past are enrolled in conflicts over the future of AIDS activism and how systems of power shape the conditions of possibility for collective memory. Throughout, she combines the archivist's obvious delight in the materiality of AIDS records with a wry wit, using loaded terms like care, cure, and undetectable to build highly nuanced analysis that weaves together lexical idioms from critical theory and biomedicine to develop an analytical apparatus suited to her project. In this contribution to the Feminist Formations dossier roundtable on Viral Cultures, Roderic N. Crooks (Assistant Professor, [End Page 195] Informatics, University of California, Irvine) and Stephen Molldrem (Assistant Professor, Bioethics and Health Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch) discuss their perspective on Professor Cifor's book. Molldrem and Crooks are both queer ethnographers, with the former being situated in social studies of infectious disease and the latter in critical studies of information. By drawing on their respective institutional locations, political commitments, and scholarly interests, they describe their different experiences of Viral Cultures, reflecting together on what the book accomplishes for a variety of academic audiences and other constituencies. Stephen Molldrem (SM): Marika Cifor's Viral Cultures is polyphonic in its dialogue with numerous critical traditions in archive studies, cultural studies, and critical studies of HIV/AIDS. However, the book is primarily about the conditions in which HIV/AIDS archivists have had to work from the beginning of the epidemic in 1981 to the present. Because its central preoccupation is the production and maintenance of archives—infrastructures that are inherently scholarly—the book is also about the conditions of possibility for producing non-biomedical forms of knowledge about HIV and AIDS. The HIV/AIDS crisis began in the context of what Stuart Hall (1988) characterized as a "historical conjuncture" dominated by the ascendance of a "New Right" in the form of the Thatcher government in the UK and Reagan administration in the US (passim). The AIDS epidemic thus also coincided with the decimation of systems of social welfare, higher education, and public goods such as libraries and archives. One can't help but wish, as they make their way through Cifor's book, that the conditions in which her subjects were working were more abundant than they were. However, their stories are not ones of abundance, nor does abundance structure almost any aspect of the history of AIDS. As ever, "history is what hurts," as Fredric Jameson (1981) reminds us (88). The same is true here. As enjoyable as Viral Cultures was to read, it hurt. I associate academic feminism and Feminist Formations with these sorts of questions: ones related to the material conditions that structure scholarly knowledge-production. The last time I was invited to write something for this journal was in 2016, when I was still a graduate student developing intense interests in how scholarly infrastructures facilitate different forms of knowing. In a roundtable format, a group of us discussed these questions for a special issue curated by Jennifer C. Nash and Emily A. Owens on the question of...

  PublisherDOI

• Seeking Liberation: Surveillance, Datafication, and Race

  Surveillance & Society · 2022-12-16 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Critical data studies, a body of emergent research that draws on surveillance studies and other fields, investigates datafication, the increasing mediation of many forms of sociality by data-intensive, networked computation. Such research draws on well-trodden criticisms of the representational capacities of data and has recently offered the term “data justice” to direct this scholarly formation toward the harms of datafication. By failing to explicitly foreground the way that the capture and consultation of data constitutes a tactic by which the state sorts, controls, and limits the freedom of minoritized peoples, critical data studies substitutes an interest in describing forms of injustice for a commitment toward its undoing. I use McKittrick’s (2021) term “seeking liberation” to orient both surveillance studies and critical data studies scholarship away from mere description of the practices of data-intensive computation and surveillance and toward a shared project of justice for minoritized peoples.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Narrativity, Audience, Legitimacy: Data Practices of Community Organizers

  CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts · 2022-04-27 · 22 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Community organizers build grassroots power and collective voice in communities that are structurally marginalized in representative democracy, particularly in minoritized communities. Our project explores how self-identified community organizers use the narrative potentials of data to navigate the promises of data activism and the simultaneous risks posed to working-class communities of color by data-intensive technologies. Our nine respondents consistently named the material, financial, intellectual, and affective demands of data work, as well as the provisional, tenuous possibility of accomplishing movement work via narratives bolstered by data. Our early results identified two important factors in community organizers’ assessment of the efficacy and political potential of narratives built with data: audience and legitimacy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lucy Pei

  University of California, Irvine

  9 shared

• Benedict Salazar Olgado

  University of California, Irvine

  5 shared

• Catherine D’Ignazio

  3 shared

• Juliane Jarke

  3 shared

• Fieke Jansen

  3 shared

• Anne Kaun

  3 shared

• Jonathan A. Obar

  Michigan State University

  3 shared

• Ana Pop Stefanija

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Informations Studies

  UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

  2016

• MLIS, Information Studies

  UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

  2011

• MFA, Writers' Workshop

  University of Iowa

  2005

• BFA, Illustration

  School of Visual Arts

  2000