Published in May 2022 (Order Here)
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“The first step in dismantling unjust systems is knowing exactly how they operate. In Geek Girls, France Winddance Twine peels back the screen to illuminate the mechanisms that produce and sustain inequality in Silicon Valley. Through innovative research, this book offers conceptual tools that illuminate the way racism, sexism, classism, and casteism stifle opportunity behind the veil of meritocracy. This book should be read by everyone who is committed to broadening opportunity in our deeply stratified world.”
-Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Strategies for the New Jim Code
About
I am a Professor of Sociology, an ethnographer, documentary filmmaker, a feminist race theorist and a visual artist. I am a research affiliate at Cambridge University where I collaborate with the Sociology of Reproduction research group. Before returning to UCSB, I was a Professor of Sociology at Duke University. My research sits at the intersections of feminist studies, science & technology studies, comparative race studies and justice studies. My research is engaged with debates in a number of disciplines and sub-fields in cultural and political sociology, gender and sexuality studies, comparative racial studies and critical technology studies. My research on social inequalities is intersectional, international and innovative. I am the author and editor of eleven books. I have conducted field research in Brazil, Britain, UK and Spain. Before the joining the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, my first academic appointments were in Women’s Studies and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle where I founded the Latin American Studies unit within the Jackson School of International Studies.
I introduced the concept of racial literacy in a 2014 article published in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies. In A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy (2010), I further developed this concept. Racial literacy is one of my theoretical contributions to critical race studies and refers to forms of intellectual labor, cultural practices and strategies employed to counter and respond to anti-Black racism.
In 2020, I was awarded the Distinguished Career Award from the Race, Gender and Class section of the American Sociological Association. In 2020, I was awarded a $225,000 grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation to program a year-long Sawyer Seminar on the theme “Race, Precarity & Privilege: Migration in a Global Context”, an interdisciplinary collaboration that was held during the 2021-22 academic year. During the Fall term, I co-developed and co-taught an interdisciplinary Sawyer Seminar with Professor Lisa Parks (Film & Media Studies and Professor Kim Yasuda (Art) on the theme of race, immigration and white supremacy in California.
In 2022, I founded the Technologies for Justice Lab at UCSB, housed at the Center for Feminist Futures, which is committed to intergenerational, intersectional, public-facing research. The Tech Justice Lab is a think space, a collaboratory and an interdisciplinary salon that brings graduate students from the arts, humanities, social sciences into dialogue and collaboration with engineering and computer science students. The Tech Justice Cafe will launch a speaker series in the Fall of 2022 and salon devoted to the intersections of justice studies, critical technology studies and comparative racial and ethnic studies.