In the final episode of our season, “Becoming Data,” scholars Sareeta Amrute and Emiliano Treré join our host, Natalie Kerby, to discuss the concept and lived reality of racial capitalism. The episode explores how data-centric systems perpetuate racial capitalism, and how different communities, particularly in the Global South, have resisted this datafication.
Episode 5: Data & Racial Capitalism
Sareeta Amrute & Emiliano Treré

Becoming Data
Co-produced with
Public Books
About the Guests
Sareeta Amrute (@SareetaAmrute of @datasociety) is an anthropologist, associate professor at the University of Washington, and Director of Research at Data & Society.
Emiliano Treré (@EmilianoTrere of @cardiffJomec, @DataJusticeLab) is a senior lecturer in Media Ecologies and Social Transformation and co-director of the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University.
Resources
- Amrute, Sareeta. (2016). Encoding Race, Encoding Class: an Ethnography of Indian IT Workers in Berlin. Durham: Duke University Press.
- Amrute, Sareeta. (2020). Immigrant Sensibilities in Tech Worlds: Sensing Hate, Capturing Dissensus. Cultural Anthropology. 35(5):374-403.
- Amrute, Sareeta and Luis-Felipe Murillo. (2020). Computing in/from the South. Special Section. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6(2).
- Appadurai, Arjun. (1993) Number in the Colonial Imagination, Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament. C.A. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer (eds.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Beer, David. (2018). The Data Gaze Capitalism, Power and Perception. Sage Publishing.
- Browne, Simone. (2015). Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press.
- Estes, Nick. (2019). Our History Is the Future Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Verso Books.
- Escobar, Arturo. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press.
- Katz, Yarden. (2020). Artificial Whiteness Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence. Columbia University Press.
- Kjøsen, Atle Mikkola, Steinhoff, James, & Dyer-Witheford, Nick. (2019). Inhuman Power Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism. Pluto Press.
- Robinson, Cedric. (2000). Black Marxism The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. UNC Press.
- Treré, E. (2018). Hybrid media activism. Ecologies, imaginaries, algorithms. Routledge (Spanish version available Open Access: http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/la-comunicacion/17279.pdf)
- Milan, S. Treré, E and Masiero, S. (2021) COVID-19 from the Margins: Pandemic Invisibilities, Policies and Resistance in the Datafied Society, Theory on Demand #40, Institute of Network Cultures.
- Natale, S. and Treré, E. (2020). Vinyl won’t save us: reframing disconnection as engagement. Media, Culture and Society 42(4), pp. 626-633.