In keeping with this year’s conference theme – Revolutions – this Fishbowl seeks to name and examine one of the dominant power structures against which revolutions of all types have been waged: whiteness. White racial grievance has played a central role in global resurgence of fascism (Felbab-Brown et al 2022). This makes interrogating technology’s role in the reproduction and maintenance of whiteness one of the most pressing intellectual tasks for contemporary internet research. This Fishbowl brings together internationally recognized scholars of race and technology to facilitate a discussion about how whiteness – in its various global iterations – intersects with the research agendas of AoIR members.

Whiteness is a contingent and ever-shifting set of social locations, discursive formations, practices, and epistemes that are irrevocably imbricated with capitalism and a constellation of interlocking oppressions along axes of gender, sexuality, and class (Robinson 1983; Hartman 1997; Spillers 1987; Lugones 2007). Globally, whiteness serves as an axis of power and identity and functions as an “index of the traces of colonial legacies that yet lie latent (but not dormant) in the postcolonial world” (López 2005; Rasmussen et al. 2007). This “deep and malleable global whiteness” produces varied and contextually specific iterations of whiteness that range from the “terribly ordinary” to the violently extremist (Christian 2019; Hill 1997).

From the centrality of social media and messaging platforms to global white supremacist extremism ways that algorithms, database structures, and AI reinforce white normativity and epistemologies, whiteness looms large across internet studies (Katz 2020; Noble 2018; Stevens, Hoffmann, and Florini 2021). This Fishbowl will 1) focus on generating productive ways for AoIR members to engage with whiteness in their research and 2) draw on the collective knowledge of the AoIR community to identify future research trajectories related to whiteness and technology.