Delivering our keynote address on Friday, May 20, will be Dr. Charlton Mcllwain.

Author of the recent book, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter, Dr. Charlton McIlwain is Vice Provost for Faculty Development & Engagement at New York University, and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. He works at the intersections of computing technology, race, inequality, and racial justice activism. He has served as an expert witness in landmark U.S. Federal Court cases on reverse redlining/racial targeting in mortgage lending, and recently testified before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services about the impacts of automation and artificial intelligence on the financial services sector. He writes regularly for outlets such as The Guardian, Slate’s Future Tense, MIT Technology Review, and other outlets about the intersection of race and technology.

Dr. McIlwain is the founder of the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies, heads NYU’s Alliance for Public Interest Technology, is NYU’s Designee to the Public Interest Technology University Network, is a board member at Data & Society Research Institute and chairs the board of the Washington Center for Technology Policy Inclusion.

Antonio Byrd (he/him) is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he teaches courses in Black/African American literacies, professional and technical writing, multimodal composition, and digital rhetoric. His research focuses on computer programming as a literacy and how Black communities access, learn, and use computer programming to address racial inequality and achieve upward social mobility. His work has appeared in College Composition and Communication and Literacy in Composition Studies and received the 2021 Richard Braddock Award for Best Research Article in CCC. He is currently writing a book manuscript called The Literacy Pivot: How Black Adults Learn Computer Programming in a Racist World.

Wilfredo Flores (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University and a co-founder of Queering Medicine, a grassroots health advocacy group based in Lansing, MI.His work constellates across technical and professional communication, digital cultural rhetorics, and health and medical rhetorics. Wilfredo researches how queer and trans people of color use various platforms to engage with their sexual health, and he works as a community organizer to use these findings to attend to issues of medical racism, sexual health justice, and inequitable clinical experiences. At the center of his work is building a better world for queer and trans people.

Constance (she/her) is a fourth-year PhD candidate at Michigan State University. Her work lies at the intersection of Black feminism, digital rhetoric, and technical communication. Motivated by the protection and well-being of Black people both physically and digitally, Constance’s research merges Black feminist thought with conversations around digital research ethics, demonstrating the importance of pairing digital methods, procedures, and ethical guidelines with the unique lived experience(s), values, and embodied knowledges that Black women carry. Constance is a co-author of CCCC’s “Black Technical and Professional Position Statement with Resource Guide.” Other recent publications include “‘I Do This For Us’: Thinking Through Reciprocity and Researcher-Community Relationships” (DRC) and “Welcomeness and Identity in Campus Partnerships” (WLN).

V. Jo Hsu (They/Them) is an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Most of their work uses narrative to explore how rhetorics of race, gender, and disability operate in harm and healing. Their book, Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics will be published by Ohio State University Press in Fall 2022. Their recent work includes “Toward QTPOC Community: A Theory in the Flesh, an Open Letter, a Closing Wound” and “Irreducible Damage: The Affective Drift of Race, Gender, and Disability in Anti-Trans Rhetorics.” You can access more of their work and contact them via www.vjohsu.com.

Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq (she/her) is a tribal member of the Noorvik Native Community in NW Alaska and is an assistant professor of professional and technical writing at Virginia Tech. Her research addresses how mainstream modes of academic practice often perpetuates the marginalization of underrepresented scholars and communities and consequentially interferes with equity. Her research combines her academic background in both the digital humanities and physical sciences and currently centers on creating accessible online databases of Inuit knowledges and developing natural language processing techniques to extract climate change data from Inuit narratives. She is an author on the upcoming National Climate Assessment 5, Alaska Chapter. Recent work has appeared in Communication Design Quarterly, Technical Communication Quarterly, and Rhetoric Review, and she has also shared her work through public-facing digital spaces like podcasts “Tell Me More” and “The Curiosity Hour.”

Dr. McKinley Green (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University, where he studies queer rhetorics, technical communication, and sexual health risk communication around HIV/AIDS. His current research project investigates how young people living with HIV communicate about infectious disease risk. McKinley works from a premise that people living with HIV have developed extensive rhetorical expertise to communicate about health risk, and that this situated expertise offers a model for public health institutions contending with the HIV epidemic. His research has been published in Technical Communication Quarterly and Computers and Composition, and his work will appear in The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric and upcoming issues of Rhetoric Review and Rhetoric of Health and Medicine.