About
Zelda Montes (they/them) is a tech labor organizer, memory worker, and digital humanist born to Colombian immigrants and raised in New York. During their studies at CUNY Graduate Center’s M.A. program in Digital Humanities, Zelda’s transmedia scholarship focused on technological infrastructures of cyber-resistance through the creation of digital archives that preserve and mediate embodied memories of worker struggle. Their work considers how engagement in collective worker action engenders agency and introduces critical sites of intervention for envisioning non-corporate, liberatory technology built as a reclamation of labor. Informed by their experiences as a former Google software engineer and organizer with No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), Zelda’s research seeks to explore how alternative tech labor formations grounded in decolonial liberation struggles reflect, reorient, subvert, and diverge from traditional labor organizing structures, driven by a sociopolitical understanding of the ways in which digital technologies reproduce ideologies and materialities of oppression.
