Whitney (Whit) Pow

Whit Pow (they/them) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Pow is a media historian and theorist of computational media, electronic art, and computer history through the lens of queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, trans of color critique, and critical race theory. 

Pow centers the concept of mediation to identify the way that the bodies of queer and trans people, Black and Indigenous people, and people of color are mediated by the state through archives and bureaucratic documents like birth certificates, immigration forms, and sign-in sheets as well as medical diagnostic practices ongoing today like those documented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and its many iterations. Pow's work examines how these biopolitical and necropolitical processes of documentation, enumeration, and surveillance of queer and trans people and BIPOC exist today in the oftentimes “invisible” or normalized logics built into computers and computational systems like software, video games, artificial intelligence, and networked media. 

Pow's work engages with feminist and anti-racist science and technology studies (STS) and computer history, crucially working alongside scholarship in transgender studies and trans of color critique in order to center Blackness, Indigeneity, and people of color at the heart of our understanding of these institutional processes of documentation and surveillance, normalized through our everyday interactions with computers.