Proponents of the digital transformation of the welfare state argue that automated eligibility, algorithmic decision-making, artificial intelligence, and other high-tech interventions will distribute limited social insurance resources more efficiently and more fairly. The COVID-19 pandemic put that promise to the test as governments across the globe scrambled to deliver crucial public services without the hands-on and in-person work usually done by case workers and other public employees. Not a Number: Global Stories from the Digital Welfare State by Virginia Eubanks and Andrea Quijada gathers first-hand narratives that describe the very human impacts of these changes.  
 
Join Virginia Eubanks, author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, as she discusses her new work, scheduled to be published by Voice of Witness and Haymarket Books in 2027. Eubanks will share insights that emerged over five years of gathering first-person narratives about automation and the politics of care in Australia, Colombia, Finland, Indonesia, Kenya, Spain, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 
 
Dr. Eubanks’s lecture will be at 4 p.m., with a reception to follow from 5:15 to 6:30 p.m. This is an in-person event.

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Bio: Virginia Eubanks is a longform investigative reporter, essayist, memoirist, and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor; Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age; and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Her investigative reporting and personal essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, The Nation, Harper’s, and Wired. She is currently working on a memoir about community violence, PTSD, and caregiving. With Andrea Quijada, she is gathering oral histories of the global automated welfare state for Voice of Witness. She has been a fellow or resident at MacDowell, Edward Albee, New America, Carey Institute for Global Good, and Blue Mountain Center. She lives in Troy, NY.