2026 Lab Newsletter

This year’s newsletter is also available as a PDF! Keep scrolling to continue reading the newsletter through this blog post.

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In this edition…

1. A Note from Our Founder

2. Reproductive Justice Futures Talk

3. Recl[AI]ming Ethical Digital Futures: Intro and Syllabus Statement

4. AI Manifestation

5. soft digital places to land

6. Lab Member Updates

7. Glossary of Terms

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A Note from Our Founder

Dearest gentle reader,

Welcome to our second newsletter in as many years! I’m your guide to the inside of our lab, the Digital Apothecary.

Thank you for your patience. Around here, we move at the speed of trust. We don’t rush the process because the process is the product. We take our time and take time off if we can’t make something work in the time frame we thought.

In this edition we are giving you a bit of our collective processes and dreams for the future. Please join us in celebrating our wins over the years including some graduates, new members, and a whole lot of archival work on the things we did and are doing.

We hope you will join us next quarter when we start a read aloud and along of Empire of AI by Karen Hao on April 10 @ 11am CST.

In whirs and beeps of love and justice,

Moya

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Reproductive Justice Futures Talk

Follow along Moya’s presentation from this year’s RJ Futures: “Transforming Misogynoir & Obstetric Racism through Recl[AI]ming our Futures”! If the video isn’t displaying below, go to bit.ly/RJ-Futures2026 to access it.

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Recl[AI]ming Ethical Digital Futures: A Manifestation from the Digital Apothecary

With the use of AI encouraged in many spaces today, we offer a manifestation and syllabus statement of our perspective.

Syllabus Statement

We will attempt to tread a little lighter on the planet, at least in the context of this classroom. Assignments and grades will be submitted both by hand and electronically depending on the requirements. Students are encouraged to use the same notebook and journal for in class assignments. I take seriously the hidden environmental and human costs of AI so we will continue to minimize its use in this class and the resulting harm it causes. My lab, the Digital Apothecary, has written a statement about AI in which we question its growing role in our world. There is no question that in this class, AI should not be used for course work as we are embarking on the very human process of creating our own stories. “Any use of content generated by artificial intelligence, constitutes a violation of Northwestern’s academic integrity policy.”

The Manifestation

We, The Digital Apothecary Lab, as a collective of educators and alchemists reject AI as presented to us.

• We challenge the notion that what AI promises is inherently helpful.

• We denounce the White supremacist logics of urgency and ableism that underpin the inevitability of AI.

• We do not valorize a digital future nor romanticize an analog past but remain steadfast for the possibility to create a world that holds both together.

• We recognize the ways the development and use of these technologies harm lands, waters, and peoples, and we contend that any theoretical benefit or utility of these technologies does not justify these harms.

• We condemn the unequal power relations that reward AI corporations for the theft of original ideas while using these very systems to reinvest in surveillance and punishment of the most marginalized end users.

• We take steps towards a future that does not rely on these technologies in coercive ways.

• We insist that pushing for productivity is not a real solution to societal problems within a capitalist system.

• We call forth a new relation with the digital through the integration of technologies derived before its birth and those we have yet to imagine.

• We collaborate with our communities to ensure that alternative tools, knowledges, and engagements are centered.

Through imagining more just worlds with our communities, we recl[AI]m the possibilities of ethical digital futures by championing slow work where we value process over product.

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soft digital places to land ☁️

the state of the internet in 2026 feels like a whiplash of urgency, performance, endless updates, ai slop, surveillance, attention harvesting, hyper-consumerism, and digital colonialism. it is exhausting. as part of my time as a community fellow with the Labs for Liberation project, i’ve been researching alternative corners of the web that offer respite, resistance, and reimaginings of what the internet can be. here, i’m in conversation with the work of the Disco Network, and their search for “digital… homes in inhospitable places.”

what follows is a collectively sourced list, gathered from Digital Apothecary lab members and my social media community, of soft digital places to land: places that remind us the internet can still hold intimacy, curiosity, and small-scale wonder.

• freerice: learning, care, and tiny acts of redistribution

• are.na: nonlinear research and visual wandering

• breonna’s garden: digital sacred pause honoring Breonnna Taylor

• internet archive: memory, history, and old web wandering

• club penguin: playful nostalgia and soft social internet energy

• neopets: browser-based whimsy and long-haul affection

• lo-fi girl: ambient focus and digital companionship

• letterboxd: film logging as mood, memory, and ritual

• cosmos: idea mapping and spacious digital thinking

• letter loop: slow exchange, thoughtful connection, and the feeling of correspondence

• sublime: thoughtful discovery, slower browsing, and internet wandering with intention

what are the soft digital places you’d add to this growing map?

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Lab Member Updates

Welcome to DA!

Dana and Namara have joined us as Early Research Experience Awards (EREA) Scholars.

Congrats Grads!

Annika, Bailey, Natalie, and Yena have completed their PhDs!

• Annika is an Assistant Professor at Hamline University

• Bailey is a PostDoc at Cornell

• Yena is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society in UPenn

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Glossary of Terms

For further reading, check out the sources in the footnotes, and/or look over the Key Equity Terms and Concepts: A Glossary for Shared Understanding¹.

AI: Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to a conglomerate of technologies including Generative AI, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Cognitive Computing, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision models, as well as other processes that are understood as intelligence demonstrated by machines. The popularity of models like Chat GPT, Copilot, Gemini etc., has caused AI to become almost synonymous with Generative Artificial Intelligence.

Broligarch / Broligarchy: This term is a combination of bro and oligarch/ oligarchy. Taken from 2000s surfer speak², it has come to refer to a small group of people, usually men, who own technology or are involved within technology industries. These men are extremely rich and powerful and have or want political influence and power to govern in place of, or in concert with (s)elected officials³.

Disability Justice: This is a framework and movement that seeks to dismantle systemic oppression facing disabled people. It goes beyond traditional civil rights based approaches⁴ and argues that we have to take into consideration the interconnection of disability with race, class and gender to really address and dismantle ableism in society. It was developed in 2005 by the Sins Invalid Collective.⁵

Fascism: A populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation, and often race, above the individual. It is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.

Genocide: The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. It is defined by the United Nations⁶ as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• Killing members of the group;
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Misogynoir: Misogynoir, a term coined by Dr. Bailey, “describes the uniquely co-constitutive racialized and sexist violence that befalls Black women as a result of their simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersection of racial and gender marginalization.” It describes the “anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience.”⁷

Slow Work / Scholarship: This term was created by and within broader disability communities, and refers to the focus on slowing down neoliberal capitalistic work standards⁸. It emphasizes focus on the process over output and moving at the speed of trust⁹. This philosophy argues that a better end product and relations to each other and the work result when we are able to slow down and complete tasks in a manner that aligns with one’s capacity and abilities.

Technofascism: This takes the definition of fascism as defined above and posits that this ideology would be better served with technology at the helm instead of a populist agenda.¹⁰ Within this philosophy, science and technology are viewed as the objective arbiter of economic, social and other regimentation and due to its perceived objectivity can be used to suppress dissent to technological progress. Further, it argues that regulation is the enemy of corporate innovation and government oversight, in particular, infringes on the ability to use or exploit human and natural resources as needed to propel technological progress.¹¹

Footnotes

1. CSSP (2019). “Key Equity Terms and Concepts: A Glossary for Shared Understanding.” Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Social Policy.

2. Ogilvie, S. (2025), The Rise of The Broligarchy. Prospect.

3. Norden, L. & Weiner, D. L. (2025), The Rise of America’s Broligarchy and What to Do About It. Time.

4. Hudson, H. (2021, September 8). Moving From Disability Rights to Disability Justice. World Institute on Disability. 

5.  Sins Invalid (nd). 10 Principles of Disability Justice. 

6. The United Nations. (nd). Definitions of Genocide and Related Crimes. Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.

7. Bailey, M. (2021). Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (Vol. 18). NYU Press.

8. Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure and Accountability in Academic Life. Duke University Press.

9. Bailey, M. (2021). The Ethics of Pace. South Atlantic Quarterly 120(2), 285- 299. DOI:10.1215/00382876-8916032

10. Chayka, K. (2025, February 26). Techno-Fascism Comes To America. The New Yorker. 

11. Dillet, B. (2025, March 10). Technofascism and the AI Stage of Late Capitalism. Blog of the APA.

Dr. Taryn Jordan: Exploring The Archive of Soul in Paul Steven Benjamin’s Black is the Color

This paper stages a critical convergence between W.E.B. Du Bois and Michel Foucualt through a discussion of soul [another word for black collective feeling]. I pair these two thinkers together to consider what Du Bois names “a peculiar sense,” an aspect of double consciousness of the black’s soul in Paul Steven Benjamin’s 2016 installation Black Is the Color. Benjamin’s 2016 video installation Black Is the Color is made of forty-one CRT televisions stacked in one row of eight televisions on top of three rows of ten televisions. Each screen repeats part of Nina Simone’s song, “Black Is the Color of my True Love’s Hair,” at slightly different frequencies. Considering Du Bois and Foucault’s thinking on soul I ask: how does Paul Stephen Benjamin’s Black Is the Color materialize “peculiar sense?” Ultimately, “peculiar sense” emerges from the combination of Simone’s repeating flickering image and the differing frequencies of sound which produce a sensory experience akin to eeriness. This peculiar sensation functions as a counter archive of black history that cannot be read, translated or copied, only sensed.

Inaugural Digital Apothecary Newsletter! (Copy)

Welcome to the Digital Apothecary!

“All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

is Change.”

- Octavia E. Butler

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Dear friends of the Digital Apothecary,

I am so excited to write my first official newsletter letter to you! When I was recruited to Northwestern, one of the things I most looked forward to was the opportunity to create a “lab for the labless” or a lab for those with humanist concerns that go far beyond the usual calls of research ethics in tech.

The students and scholars here, alchemists of academia and activism, are combining our collective skills to imagine new ways of relating to the digital. Concerns about environmental and racial justice undergird all our projects and we endeavor to reduce harm in our spheres of influence in the academy through our activism.

In this inaugural newsletter, we hope you will learn a bit about our vision and how we hope to, in the words of Afrofuturist Octavia E. Butler, “shape change” through collaborative and collective processes that are guided by principles of care. Be sure to sign up to receive the newsletter going forward and do share it with your friends.

The end of the Anthropocene is definitely upon us, but we are sowing seeds for a more liberatory future in the wake.

Fiercely,

Dr. Moya Bailey

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Our Lab Values

• Process over Product - In the digital apothecary, we are more concerned with the day to day workflows of the lab than what they generate. We want to cultivate a lab culture that is built with intention and where process takes precedence over what is produced. We value our everyday practice of our principles.

• People over Publications - We strive to cultivate relationships within the lab, the greater Northwestern community, and Chicagoland area that are sustaining and mutually beneficial. We will work with community members to create publications or other outputs but not at the expense of these relationships. Our goal is to nurture community and lab relationships in a way that outlives any particular project or goal.

• Accessing Accessibility - We commit to imagining and implementing a lab model that is accessible to (1) all lab members and (2) communities to whom our work can serve as a resource.

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Book Club!

We invite you to read with us!

Born out of Dr. Bailey’s 6-inch bookshelf, we open our digital lab space to anyone and everyone for book club readings on the last Friday of every month. We hope for our book club meetings to be open discussions, following themes from the selected texts.

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Get to Know: Jamie & Lauren

Jamie (she/they). Capricorn, Gemini, Sagittarius. Jamie is a 2nd year PhD student in Northwestern’s Media, Technology, and Society Program.

Lauren (she/her). Sagittarius, Sagittarius, Aquarius. Lauren is a sophomore student in Learning Sciences, Data Science, and Human-Computer Interaction.

The pair recorded a phone call where they discussed how they practice care as students in the academic space.

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Thank you, Dr. Gavaza!

Dr. Gavaza Maluluke was a Visiting Scholar in the Digital Apothecary from September 20th, 2022, through December 1st, 2022. She shared her research with the lab and had the opportunity to work with the esteemed scholars, Beth Richie and Dana-Ain Davis, on a forthcoming publication. Her presence was an important reminder of the global reach of the digital concerns our lab considers. We look forward to her work as a continued thought partner with the lab. We’re excited to have Dr. Gavaza chat with us on January 6th, 2023, about her latest research. Join us!

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Events

Gather Event Launch

On May 3rd of 2022, the Digital Apothecary Lab hosted our first launch event at our Gather Town lab, a virtual gathering space we have created for our lab. In different corners of this space, we embedded links to the various projects our lab is current working on, including Black Feminist Health Science Studies (BFHSS), Ethical Internet, and Honor. We introduced our lab and lab members and had a project rotation session where we had the opportunity to share our project and ideas with our attendees.

Cultivating Care Live Podcast

In March 2022, the Digital Apothecary Lab hosted disability leaders and activists Pidgeon Pagonis, Dr. Akemi Nishida, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha for a public roundtable. We reflected together on how integrating care work with activism and social justice is simultaneously essential, life-giving, and rife with challenges. We also discussed how an ethic of care might be integrated into academic culture. The event was co-sponsored by the Northwestern Kaplan Humanities Institute and the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities.

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A New Project!

Ethical Internet

This working group is dedicated to assessing the environmental and human costs of our digital infrastructure and trying to see what else is possible. Look out for a series of workshops on the role of tech in climate resiliency, coming 2023! (Funded by a grant from the Kaplan Public Humanities Workshop)

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D.A. Glossary

Digital Apothecary Defined: This is the name of our lab, and refers to our work in thinking about making social justice salves for the digital and using the digital to make salves for social justice. While the digital can be a place that can be transformative and imaginative, it can also be its own poison and toxin that we might need relief from.