Safiya Umoja Noble is an associate professor at UCLA, and is a visiting faculty member to the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication. She is the author of Algorithms of Oppression, and co-editor of two edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture and Emotions, Technology & Design.
Early life and education
Noble grew up in Fresno, California where she attended Roosevelt School of the Arts. She went on to study Sociology at California State University, Fresno with a focus on African American and Ethnic Studies. While at Fresno State, Noble was involved with the "campus political scene," protesting against apartheid and campaigning for racial and gender equality. She was a member of the Associated Students, Inc. and the California Statewide Student Association. After she graduated, Noble worked for more than a decade in multicultural marketing, advertising and public relations. Noble attended University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for graduate studies where she earned a Masters and PhD in Library and Information Science. Her 2012 dissertation, Searching for black girls: old traditions in new media, considered how gender and race manifest on technology platforms.
Noble's research focuses on gender, technology and culture, and how they influence the design and use of the internet. Her work has appeared in academic publications and popular media outlets including Time and Bitch. In 2016, Noble edited Emotions, Technology & Design and The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture andClass Online. The goal of Emotions, Technology & Design and TheInternet: Race, Sex, Culture andClass Online is to provide a text to stimulate individuals to think about new methods of global internets. She is the co-editor of the Commentary & Criticism section of the Journal of Feminist Media Studies. She is a member of several academic journal and advisory boards which include both Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, and the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies.
''Algorithms of Oppression''
Noble's first book, Algorithms of Oppression, was published by NYU Press in 2018 and has been globally reviewed in journals such as the Los Angeles Reviews of Books and featured in the . It considers how bias against people of color is embedded into supposedly neutral search engines. It explores how racism, especially anti-blackness, is generated and maintained by the internet. In it, Noble is greatly concerned with looking at the ways the Black community is commercialized in powerful technological companies. She focuses on companies like Google and Facebook and how their algorithms “black-box” information, e.g. when a search term is entered, it is unclear how results for the search are derived. Noble's work calls attention to a system that reproduces marginalization. Her hope is to end social injustice and change the perceptions of marginalized people in technology. She blogged about "Digital Infrastructures of Race and Gender" at the Fotomuseum in Zurich's online platform. She has also given talks and interviews about Algorithms of Oppression.
