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Welcome to Radical a-I, a podcast about radical ideas, radical people and radical stories at the intersection of ethics and artificial intelligence. Where are your co-hosts, Dylan and Jess?

And just as a reminder, for all of our episodes, while we love interviewing people who fall far from the norm and interrogating radical ideas, we do not necessarily endorse the views of our guests on this show. We encourage you to engage with the topics introduced in these conversations and take some time to connect with where you stand with these radical ideas.

We also encourage you to join the conversation and share your thoughts online on Twitter at Radical A I Pod.

And in this episode we interviewed Shamika Gotthard. Shamika is a p_h_d_ student at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Information Science Department. Before her p_h_d_ work, Shamika was a first generation college graduate from Stanford University, and she holds a master's of divinity from Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University. And she's also a founder of Techno Woman ISM, a discipline that speaks to the intersections between liberation, the experience and embodiment of black women and technology. She is the founder of Tech Chaplain Seek.com, whose mission is to stand at the intersection of technology and humanity and meet challenges therein with love, hope, peace and the joy of God.

Just I am so excited to share this interview with our listeners because Shamika is actually someone that I've known for about eight years now. I actually went to seminary with her at Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and I was there when she was birthing this idea of techno woman ism for the first time. It's been awhile, actually, since I've been in conversation with Shamika. We took different paths. I went to ministry should stayed in technology, ethics. And I was so excited to be able to hear her journey and all that she's been up to during that time.

Yeah, it's really a small world, isn't it, though? And another sneak peek of the interview that will follow. Dylan and I do a little segment we like to call Loved, Learned or Leave, where we discuss some of the major topics brought up by our guest that we loved and learned or maybe wanted to leave behind. And this can mean any topics that might have challenged us in some way. So for me in this episode, something that I loved was that Shamika has this idea to remember that you are the human in this equation, the equation being this relationship that we have with our technology. And she was teaching people to not fear and to not be anxious about technology and saying that we as the humans, we still hold the power in this relationship. I love that idea. Something that I learned was actually about that relationship. She Mehcad talks a lot about how technology like our phones and our laptops, they can be a conduit or almost a proxy relationship between us and our human relationships. And that because of that, we inherently have a relationship with our technological tools. And that's not something I've ever really thought about before. It made me think a little bit differently about the technologies that I use and interact with every single day and something that I would leave.

Just meaning something that really challenged me quite a bit in this episode was that shoemaker's idea of God or divinity existing and the bits and the bytes of technology and algorithms and the things that we use and interact with technologically every single day. And I think I struggled with this a bit because I think of myself as more of a spiritual person rather than a religious person. And inherently I've actually kind of thought the opposite twitch Yumiko is saying I tend to think that technology and our connection with humans are almost in conflict with each other. And Shamika kind of shed some light on why this is actually not really the case. She even said bless its heart to talking about her laptop with a cracked screen and saying that her laptop was a part of her family. So she talks about technology in a way that shows this really big connection and relationship. Almost this like appreciation and gratitude for technology that really made me think twice about the relationship and the appreciation that I feel with my own technology and the way that I use it. My connection with it. So that was something really challenging and a good way for me. And what about you, Dylan? What did what did you love, learn or leave?

I think the things that I loved the most. Actually, this stems right from where you were just talking about is the way that Shamika centers relationships and our relationships.

With the divine, our relationships with technology, our relationships with one another and puts them all on on a similar plane. I served as a chaplain in the hospital for multiple years, including serving on the burn unit and the neurological ICU.

And my entire reason for being there, my job as a chaplain was to help folks make sense of their mortality and their relationships with the world around them. And it's amazing to me what Schmidt has been able to do with this idea of chaplaincy in the technological space. It seems like there's so much potential for that idea. And it was really cool for me to hear her perspective on where techno chaplaincy can go. In addition to techno woman ism, which I think is the thing that I learned the most about during this interview, this idea of techno woman ism, this embodiment of the experiences of black women historically and presently in the technology space. It's something that. I have a very different experience of, I think as a white male in those same spaces, which also plays into what I would leave behind or what challenged me about this interview, which is this concept of what Shamika called the black tax. This idea that black folks, especially in technology spaces and industry, have to be extra diligent and have to work harder in order to get the same attention, to be respected, the same way that someone who looks like me might have to work. And that's something that I feel a certain level of guilt about as I navigate my own representation, my own identity in these spaces. I have to ask myself, why am I getting these opportunities? Is it because of what I look like? Is it because of who I am? Is because of the work that I'm doing? And there's questions of privilege all throughout this field, even as we talk about, you know, techno ethics in general. We can't think of ourselves as separate. Just because we're commenting on ethics doesn't mean we don't have to do the hard work ourselves. And I think that that's something that should Meeka really invites us to do on questions of accessibility and representation in technology spaces. Again, we are so excited to feature this interview with our good friend.

My old friend and wonderful colleague should make a.

Most Amiga, it's great to have you on the show today, and we would love to get started off just by getting to know you and your background and your story a little bit more. So if you would do us the pleasure. We would love to know about where you come from, your background, not necessarily just as a researcher, but just in life. And what brings you here today with us?

Thank you so much for having me here today and love chatting with you all. So the rumors are true. I am Shamika. I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, the oldest of four kids. And I went to Stanford University for my undergrad to study a number of things and ended up eventually studying African and African-American studies. A year of service with AmeriCorps took me to New York City. That is where I went to Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York for graduate school. During the course of my master's divinity program, a lot of really incredible things happened. I was able to rediscover my passion and love for technology and combine that with the commitment I made to serve others through my year of service with AmeriCorps.

After that work, that time working with reading partners as the site coordinator, working with with lead leaf reading literacy with students, I really decided to commit my life to service by don't know to whom and what that would look like. So I decided to go to seminary and to certain that end in the first semester there I was helping people set up their computers, set up their email accounts, setting up their Google Drive. There was one class in particular that was interested in systematic theology course in which I had almost 100 students on my Google Drive account now looking at my own papers and essays and this sort of thing.

But just how I had organized the notes, how I had organized all the documents that we've been given the students. And so there are a lot of people who, even after I had finished having the class, would share that information with other students to help them get through the course. So by the end of my first semester in seminary, I went to the I.T. department and said that there were a lot of students who need help. I was not sure if I would be able to help them all in my spare time. And so the I.T. department said, well, why don't we pay you to continue helping students and just support you in doing that? So I was like, OK, sure. So in my second semester of seminary in January of 2014 is when I started working and serving as a tech chaplain. I came up with the concept to embody the way in which I was approaching tech support I had over the course of the first semester. And leading into the second one, I had had conversations with students who were so grateful for the way that I met them in their technological crisis and help them find dignity as I ushered them through not only the crisis, but over to the other side of empowerment. And I really felt like there was a need for that level of service and the cross section of technology and faith leaders or folks who are using technology for good people who are purpose driven and have social justice orientation to the work that they do.

Oftentimes there is a struggle with technology. It might be that you have over a thousand something emails in your inbox and you're just drowning in them. It might be that you're working on a board for a faith community. And a lot of the board members are not familiar with Google Docs and they don't know how to use them and you're not sure how to train them. It could be a number of things. So I saw this need for for people to get help with tech literacy in particular, but also to overcome what I was seeing as a fear and anxiety around technology. And that was something I wanted to speak to specifically in the work that I did with folks. There was one story in particular where I was helping someone get down the inbox zero, which is one of the things that I really focused on in the first couple of semesters as the tech chaplain and this particular student had an old email account that they they didn't really use anymore. It wasn't really serving them and we were going to close it and we were on the very last step and they were sort of pausing. They were getting teary eyed. They were they were having some difficulty.

So I told them that a lot so far. Let's take a moment. Take a breath. I'm right here. It's OK.

Whenever you're ready, you just need to click the delete account button. This email just will go away. And the email address that you are using will still be there.

So they took a moment. They shed a tear. They click the button. I didn't see them for a week.

When I saw them next, they were on cloud nine. They were like, Should we go? You have no idea. That moment unblocked my brain. Somehow I went home and rearranged my. parlement. I feel so light now, that was an incredible experience for me and that was really rewarding for me to hear. So my experience of working with feet with people on campus from students eventually to faculty and staff and even working with folks outside of the university.

The seminary showed me that there was a definite need for. For what it is that I wanted to do as a tech chaplain. So that was as I said, I started back in 2014. I finished my degree at a theological seminary in 2017 and then decided to work for a couple years before going into a doctoral program. And because of my work as a tech chaplain, I thought maybe I can marry what I'm doing professionally with what I'm doing academically. So I thought about how can I incorporate technology? Something about social justice into my academic research. So as a as an emotive student, our final thesis was what I was working on that year and I decided to come up with techno woman ism as a concept and ethical framework that uses the woman as ethic, as an approach to deal with social justice issues that occur in and around the digital space. And so I wrote a paper as well as created a YouTube series, and I embedded those videos in my paper and that was what I turned into to the seminary for my thesis. And since then, that's what those are the two sort of things that I've been focusing on tech chaplaincy and technical woman ism.

Yeah, that's awesome, Shamika. I am I am a fellow, a union theological seminary alarm, and I was actually just on the one of the Facebook pages today. And you see you've got a very special shout out about all the work that you did with technology, because right now as we're recording, this is in the middle of the Koven 19 outbreak. And so people are starting to engage with technology and having to gauge engage with technology in a in a completely different way. But before we get into into all of that, I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about woman ism as a concept and how you have married that into the technological space.

Yes, I would be happy to. So woman ism is a concept that was coined by a woman named Alice Walker. She is an author. You may know her from The Color Purple, which is one of her more well-known texts.

However, she did write in nineteen eighty three a book that was called In Search of Our Mother's Gardens A Woman is prose, and in the preface of that book, she defined a term that she had been using in her writing for a couple of years up to that point. The term was woman is woman. This is she has a four part definition for what a woman. This is who a woman is is and what a woman is does in the four part definition. The first part of the definition says that a woman this is a feminine, a black feminist or a feminist of color. And the second part of the definition, she talks about how a woman loves men or women sexually or not sexually, is committed to the survival and wholeness of all people, men and women. And she, in the third part of the definition, talks about all the things a woman loves rowdiness, dancing, the moon herself, all of these different things, a woman that loves and loves them regardless. And the fourth part of the definition is probably what most people have heard from Alice Walker is a quote, woman is is a feminist as purple is to lavender. So this term was was picked up by black female identified theologians in the mid 80s to create and craft a theology based on this concept that centered the black woman's experience, religious experience and spiritual experience as a valid starting point for theological reflection. And that also ballooned into not only a woman's theology, but a woman is epic and similar to feminism. There been a multiple epochs or epics of time that woman ism has developed. Monica Coleman, who I believe she edited Ain't I a Woman IST, which was a look at third wave woman ism in that text in the in the introduction.

She talks about the three three essential waves of woman ism and how the first wave was, how people like Katie Cannon would wrote Katie's Canon. We're establishing woman ism as a theology. And the second wave, it was being sort of expounded upon from these first texts that were written, a lot of these women coming out of Union Theological Seminary. However, there were critiques of the second wave of Mormonism being very heteronormative, very Christian based, not very either local or global. And then the third wave of woman ism was it was defined by Monica Coleman somewhat as more an ideological politic as opposed to an identity politics. So it was less about black women specifically being able to think about, write about, speak about woman ism. But I was thinking more along the lines of what what do we all have to say about it to contribute to woman ism. So that was where you had people like Monica Coleman and other folks who were starting to take woman ism and share it with and expand it to as many folks as possible. And I found out about woman ism back in 2013 in seminary. So by the time I came to it, it was it was still something that, while very impactful and powerful, not a lot of people were familiar with. That's still the case. So when I thought to incorporate it into my own ethical framework of techno woman ism, it is a combination of an application of woman ism. But it's also a really focused attempt to take the the best practices and the tenets of woman ism and use those within an ethical framework as a way to assess, analyze and mitigate social justice issues that occur in and around the digital space and in and around technologies.

That's really awesome. Wow. Very unique and interdisciplinary. And I'm going to I'm going to shift the questioning a little bit away from techno.

Um, and I'm I'm intrigued about something that you initially mentioned when you were sharing the beginnings of your story with the teir felt an emotional inbox zero, which I totally empathize with, by the way.

That is a very big deal to get to inbox zero.

So props to you for enabling that. So you mentioned that you have noticed that a lot of people have a lot of fear and anxiety around technology.

We experience that a lot in the realm of A.I.. This is something that Dylan and I definitely discussed quite a bit. I'm curious what your take is on this from your experience in this realm and the people that you've helped?

Yeah, it's it's really interesting to me because you'll have folks who will get a device like a cell phone or a laptop or a tablet or whatever it may be. And it's not like when you got your driver's license for a car, you were given some information about how a car works, what to do if the tire breaks down, how to follow different signs on the road, like there was this process that everybody went to for safety reasons, but also for informative reasons on how to use a car. You're operating this this big mechanical vehicle that's that's very dangerous if it's not operated well. And that was that was what folks used to figure out how to use a car. But when you're handed a cell phone or when you're handed a laptop nowadays, you barely get a manual. You might get a flimsy piece of paper that sends you to a QR code or a website maybe on how this thing works. But there's less and less information about the what to do, something goes wrong or how to get started or or what kind of cues to follow and how to orient yourself in these particular with these particular tools. So there are a lot of people and I don't necessarily mean a particular kind of person, such as an older person or such as, you know, like anything like that. There are people across the spectrum who have various issues with technology.

You can be a young person and you're on Tick-Tock all day long, but you might not know how to take advantage of Google Docs in a particular way or, you know, how to how to use some of these tools for in a professional sense. So and they're also octogenarians like, oh, what's George Takai, who are doing great on their social media game? So they're across the spectrum. They're people who have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to technology. But in terms of the fear and anxiety, there's not any one process through which people go to go through to gain digital literacy. If you're in a K through 12 city, you might have access to a digital citizen reprogramming. Excuse me, digital citizen reprogramming is geared around teaching digital, digital literacy, digital etiquette, rights and responsibilities. There's there's nine elements of digital citizenry that might Rob came up with a couple of years ago. And Common Media has its own curriculum. I think the near pod might also have its own digital citizen citizenry curriculum. So if you're in certain school settings, you might get some of this information about how to create passwords, how to keep your data safe on the Internet, how to not be a troll like some of these sort of tenants that everybody who's using the Internet, everybody who's engaging in the digital space, everybody who's using these different tools would do well to have. I was born in nineteen eighty five.

I did not get any digital citizen classes in any of my K-through-12 experience. I learned on the fly, got my first phone in college and got my own desktop computer which I loved around or loved in between school school years for four years as an undergrad. So there are a lot of adults my age and older who had to learn on the fly, to learn on the job, and to learn while in school how to use a lot of the technologies we have. We take for granted today and in the time we're in now, there are so many more people who are leaning heavily on technological tools trying to figure them out because they're suddenly having to work from home. So they're doing meetings on Zoomer, suddenly have to go to school from home. So they're having to use different tools, tools like Xoom and other things. There are people who are trying to figure out how to take their faith community online, how do they continue to care for and communicate with and and worship with the people in their faith community, using the digital space, using technological tools. So if you don't have a healthy, empowered relationship with technology, then you're going to be using with a ten foot pole and you're going to be very comfortable with it. You're not going to be able to embrace it and use it to the fullest extent to do the thing that you need to do.

And so from my perspective, as a tech chaplain, I come from a Christian tradition. I consider myself to be Christian adjacent. And one of the scriptures that. I think speaks very well to this is from Second Timothy, which speaks about that we've not been given the spirit of fear and timidity. And so this notion of using technology, you know, I remind people, you remember that you're the human in this equation, that laptop. Don't let it beat you right there. There are moments where if something is going wrong, you might get a white rage and you just don't see anything. Someone can be trying to help you and say, well, there's a closed button right there on the top. Right. You're like, what button where? I don't understand. I don't see it like that kind of perspective. If you're coming from that fear and anxiety, if you're coming from this angry, why isn't this working? I don't understand. I'll never understand my whatever perspective you may be coming from. And that way, it's not gonna help you get where you want to go. And there's also this this understanding that some people are very playful with their technology bill. They'll try something new. They'll try something different if they don't know how to do it. They'll take her until they figure it out. Whereas a lot of people will think, I don't want to break it.

I don't want to break it because I don't know how to fix it.

I don't want to break it because you know, all these things. So there are folks who are less likely to just figure it out. Just play around with it and get accustomed to it and get a feel for how the technology works. So there's a couple different things happening when you talk about the relationship that people have with their technology.

Yeah. I'm curious about that, because at least when we talk about artificial intelligence and like the stories that we tell ourselves or that are told out in the media, you kind of fall into like two categories. It's they're like really dystopic, like all the, you know, technology Terminator is coming for us, you know, eventually or the Utopia, you know, our technology is going to fix everything in our lives. We can just keep, you know, progress is going to keep go. And it's wonderful. Whereas the reality is somewhere in the middle. But there's something particular about technology. And I'm also interested in the spiritual question. There seems to be a particular substance that technology takes on in our lives. And I'm wondering your thoughts about what is that what is that difference that lets us like talk to a laptop in a different way than we would talk to, say, like, you know, a can of soda or something like that?

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I feel like there's there is a relationship that you build with with technological tools. These things have been designed and constructed by other humans, of course, like everything else. But they also provide you with a window to the world. They allow you to communicate with other people so they act as something of a conduit. And I feel like because we use them so much in our interaction to communicate with other people, then they're part of the conversation. So in a way, we do have this proxy relationship, if you will, with our laptops. If you use, for example, if you use your iPad as the only way to see your grandchild in between Christmas and every, you know, every year, then that i-Pad takes on a level of significance to you because it connects you to your grandchild. So I feel like the relationships that we do have with our devices when there's so many people nowadays that's not that don't even blink about sleeping with their phones, sleeping next to their phone, waking up and seeing the first thing they do is look at their phone like I've seen people almost drop their phone and everyone collectively reads a sigh of relief for them because we've all had that moment. I remember one of the first times I've dropped my phone in a glass of water, dropped my phone. And I think of dishes like these moments. I will. I've told my phone after losing it before it was at a museum in New York and I dropped my phone, didn't realize it until I got to the ticket gate at the train station, walked back and found it in the intersection.

Cars driving right over it. I picked up my phone. I said, never again. I will never lose it. I have this like really significant moment with my phone because it is there with me all day long. At my side there is this level of reliability to it that I don't have and some of my human relationships. If I take care of it, meaning if I make sure it's charged, if I clean it screen every now and then, if I don't drop it too much but put a screen protector on there, then it is reliable to me. It does provide me with access to different things and facilitates different conversations and whatnot. So we do build these kinds of relationships to our technology. Right now I have a laptop with a cracked screen, bless his heart. And I don't I don't have the money to to just fix it right away. But I've found a way to connect it to an old TV monitor, too, that I have, which is why I could look two different ways and see you all or see the screen. But like to to recycle a laptop that I've had for years is is a very difficult decision because it is not necessarily a part of a member of the family, but it is a part of the family. Right. So that that's why I think there's that kind of connection and relationship to our technologies.

Yeah, it definitely gives me a little bit of fear thinking about how close our relationship with our technology can become. I think about my relationship with Alexa and how I keep accidently calling her.

She I mean it. She then I feel bad when I say it. And I I feel like I shouldn't feel bad about that. It's kind of messed up. There's like there's some weird like gray areas of these like healthy relationships that are a little bit uncharted territory for sure. Something I'm really interested in your overall, just your research. But then also like your background, Shamika, is this intersection between spirituality and technology.

And I'm just kind of curious from your experience how you think that. To have influenced each other in your life and how your background in that it is a very just unique and colorful background and how how you have highlighted each of those aspects of yourself to come to the place that you are and how they sort of play into each other.

Yeah, that's a really great question. So in terms of the technology and spirituality piece, some folks might think technology and spirituality first met when the iPhone introduced a prayer app. However, technology and spirituality have been intertwined since Gutenberg Bible, right? The Gutenberg press allowing the print of the Bible for lots of people to then read in conjunction with Martin Luther's transcription of the Bible from Latin into a German dialect. Most people in his area were able to read those two things coming together, really just disseminated so much new information and changed the landscape of church and church denominations forever. The Catholic Church was the only game in town for Christianity for hundreds of years, and then Martin Luther came along and wanted to remain part of the Catholic Church, but had questions, obviously. And so when he was able to disseminate that Bible through the Gutenberg press, that then afforded a whole new level of interaction and engagement with the Bible by people who weren't priests. So the Lutheran Church was an offshoot of that which started the Protestant Revolution of the Reformation and other denominations soon followed, like the Episcopal Church and the Methodist Church. All of these different denominations, a lot of the different fractures from there came from how and when and why to baptize people or this kind of thing.

Like they became more about some of the sacraments, how the liturgies work and this kind of thing. But that particular first moment was tied to a technology like the Gutenberg press. When you think about the other things like the radio or television, that when they were introduced, those those were became mediums for particular preachers to take advantage of. So there were radio preachers. There were and still are television preachers. And when the Internet came out, it was no different. There were there were pastors and faith communities who were streaming their services, had satellite churches where you would come to church and your pastor would be on a TV screen hundreds of miles away in a different state and they would be delivering the sermon. There were online spaces for sharing prayers and praying for people. And then, of course, apps came and fall. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of spiritual apps in the app store on Apple and in the play store on Google. And if there was still Windows phones, I would imagine there probably soapie a spiritual app there, too. But the idea that there's this long history of conj. points in which the dissemination of information and the ability to connect with other people was met with a particular technology.

So in the landscape today, their faith community is trying to figure out how do we continue to serve our communities? And one solution is through various technological tools. So I hope that answers the first question. The second question you were asking, if I remember correctly, was asking about my my very colorful history ahead. So when I was when I was a kid, I was all I am the oldest of four kids and we were very poor. So I chose to throw myself to school because I was free. And one of the things that I did one summer was find this free engineering camp called the pre freshman engineering program. It was a three summer program. You got college credits at the end. And I did that for three summers after that. Last summer, I found out about a math camp that was taking place at Texas State University in San Marcos, which used to be Southwest State University. So I went to that math camp for three summers as well. It was at that math camp that I met, Dr. Max War Shower, who encouraged me to apply to Stanford. Oh, I would've I would've gone to higher pay university in the middle of nowhere, Texas.

Had he not encouraged me to apply where I did. So that also changed the trajectory and course of my life by being a first generation college student at a place like Stanford. While I was there, I wanted to major in either mathematics or engineering, management, science and engineering. But the first math class I took, I was weeded out of unfortunately a combination of things being being a first generation college student, being one of them, but then also the way the class was structured. There was this one moment where the grades from the last quiz were shown in a scatterplot on the board, not with names, but with grades. And my grade was the last X standard deviation away from everyone else. That was not encouraging for a freshman who just came out of math camp, bright eyed and bushy tailed, and to see myself for the first time in my academic career not doing well. So after taking Matt and one other computer science course, I decided to become a fuzzy, which is essentially a person who studies non-technical non-STEM non-science majors. And so I found my way from economics to a couple other shortlived majors to African and African-American studies.

Since those were the classes I was responding to the most. And so I decided to graduate with that degree. I did decide on becoming or pursuing a peace deal when I was in the seventh grade and found out what aphc was. But it wasn't until I was at Union Theological Seminary and I was thinking about how I wanted to serve people. What were the important issues of my time?

I saw the writing on the wall in terms of how technology was changing so many things, but it was doing so in a way that was not always ethical.

And there seemed to be a story every day coming out about how technology was falling short for particular groups of people. And it was the same groups of people and all of these stories that kept getting the short end of the stick. So I wanted to be part of the solution to that particular problem. Which is why I decided to use my academic research life to address technology, ethics and social justice issues.

Yeah, I wanted to dive in a little bit more to that, actually. So in one way. It sounds like what you're doing is super radical because of the intersection of the interdisciplinary focus of your brain like spirituality and technology together. And the other way that I see that what you're doing is at least to hear you saying that what you're doing is really radical is about this, asking these questions about access and power in technology and in technology spaces.

And I'm wondering for for you as a black woman in these spaces, talking about issues of access and power, just what where where you're where you're at with that and how it's impacted, maybe how you've been seen in the academy or in industry or just really what your experience has been.

Yeah, that's that's also a really great question, which I appreciate. So in my doctoral program, I am one of two black people. Both of us are female identify and we're the first black people in this program, either as p_h_d_ students or even amongst the faculty. We, I believe have one faculty of color and she is not black. But the landscape in a lot of departments, whether they're information science or computer science, they're just not a lot of people who look like me. So I recognize the the politics of my position, naledi within the context of choosing to study something like technology from this critical perspective. So there's, of course, this desire to not fall into the angry black woman trope of coming up to the tech industry, wagging my finger and shaking my neck, talking about this, which you need to do. And here's why. So I feel like I want to be authentically who I am in the context of my research and and not not allow stereotypes or shortsightedness to derail what it is I'm trying to do. I have recognized that being at a PWI, predominantly white institution, I've accepted the fact that I will have to have some teachable moments or I will be afforded the opportunity to take advantage of teachable moments.

I have had someone reach out and touch my hair without asking several times and I've had to call people out for that kind of thing. It's like little microaggressions that are, you know, the death of a thousand cuts that I want to try and mitigate in terms of being in spaces like conferences or talk. So this sort of thing, I thankfully haven't had negative experiences in those arenas. I'm really looking forward to whatever my next opportunity is to have a conversation in either a technologically based setting or a research, an academic base setting. So either industry or academic where we're having these conversations and I want to be in the room to have the conversation. But I also want to be in the room to show that people like me want to have this conversation, that we have something valuable to say. There's also there's also this notion of the black tax, which says that we have to work twice as hard to get half as much. So I feel like. In this arena, I have to be my absolute best and then some. I have to know as much as possible. I have to be very on top of as much as possible and just be really diligent about being knowledgeable and and having the answers, the facts, the figures, whatever the case may be.

Because to be honest, I've been in situations where where people will look down on me and make assumptions about me and whatnot. And when I say something that doesn't fit with their think what they think, I am like, oh, really? I didn't realize you knew that word or whatever the case is. And so I don't mind surprising people with who I am. But I also feel like they're also going to be people who are gonna be looking to give me a harder time than they might someone else. If I were to be honest, if I were a white guy and I was going around talking about tech ethics with people eating it up left and right. But as a black woman, I know we have to go around talking about tech ethics, but I also have to do an extra diligence to say, I want to talk about this. I know what I'm talking about. And here's why. And constantly be reminding people that I know what I'm talking about. So I do feel that sort of pressure to to to have that at the ready.

But I have to kind of follow up questions. One is a big question. They're both big questions. They're all big questions. The first big question is, so if you had, I guess, any advice or words of hope or solace for, say, a younger black woman who is now in seventh grade and wants to one day get their p._h._d right in this field, what would you say to them? And then the second question is, you know, I'm an active pastor right now and serving a congregation. And so I asked myself this a lot. When I'm doing artificial intelligence ethics, which is, you know, where is God in this? And I have my own set of answers to that. But I'm wondering for you, if you have an answer to where God plays into this and how you think about God.

Absolutely. So first, the advice to the 7 year old, basically me from from myself to them, I would say that regardless of what you end up doing, cause I was going to do a p_h_d_ on psychology, on the relationship that other people have a black woman's hair like my piece de topick changed a lot. What didn't change was that I knew I wanted to get one. So whatever your dream is, whatever your vision is for yourself, know that it might change the way it's gonna happen or the way that it looks. But what won't change is your desire to achieve it. So to hold on to that desire and to have that vision for yourself on the other side of accomplishing it and hold fast to that vision as well. So see myself walk across the stage and the garbs get getting the piece of paper. Like if we have to do virtual graduations at some point in the future, then I'll change what that looks like. But the idea of being is that I would want to envision what it looks like to be getting that doctorate in front of my family and friends and loved ones. And that is what kept me going through the really arduous p_h_d_ applications or what kept me going through the the really tricky first semester where I'm juggling teaching a class and taking classes and figuring out school again and all of these fun things. So having a vision and being really focused on it and being very vivid with it, I think would be a really great piece of advice for someone like myself, because that's what that's what's helped me hold on to this since the seventh grade.

And in fact, I also would say whether or not someone is supportive of, you know, that you will never leave you. You will be the only person to never leave you. So you can always support yourself if no one else will. During the pre freshman engineering program, someone came to speak to our group and talked about how they have a P.S. in science. And it's really hard to get the p_h_d_ in general, let alone to be a minority, a person who is a minority group and get a p._h._d. And it's really hard, you know, in fact, we probably shouldn't even try because it's so hard. Like the conversation started dipping into that. And so the director had to run on stage and like whisper really furiously in his ear before he came back. Oh, I mean, I'm sorry. I don't mean to say that you shouldn't try, but it's just that it's so hard and that he took questions. So I was the first one to raise my hand and he a call out me. And I said, my name is Shamika. I just want you to know that I'm going to get my p._h._d. And I sat down and I never forgot that moment.

I kept his paper like that. His head handed out some paper with his information. I kept it for years thinking I was going to send him a copy of my piece was I got it. It got lost in a move. But the idea is still there. Is that not everybody's going to support you. But you can always support you. So those would be the two pieces of advice I would give that little girl and tell her she's beautiful and phenomenally intelligent and utterly capable and the world needs. She has to offer, in terms of the second question, thinking about where God is in the conversation around. There was a conversation that I had a couple of years ago when I was first creating the E Eucharist app. The EU press app is digital comedian. And when we were having this conversation with faith leaders, lay leaders about what they thought about digitizing a sacrament like communion. A lot of people were very nervous about taking something that was in the physical space and digitizing it. And a lot of the fears and issues that I heard were that Jesus was embodied and the death and resurrection. Those were also embodied moments to physically consume the bread. And the wine is to physically take, act and participate in that remembrance. For me, I believe that the divine exists in everything. The divine is omniscient, present everywhere all the time.

That includes the bits and bytes, the zeroes and the ones, the digital space. So for me, it makes sense that God would be online in an app and the screen.

And in these different ways, manifesting its divinity. And when we created the app, we founded the Thiel. The theological founding for the E ickarus app was the the ancient practice in the Catholic Church of Spiritual Communion, which is a prayer that is prayed over you or that you pray yourself if you're not able to physically consume communion. And the prayer simply, it's a very short prayer, but it simply says I'm not able to physically be with you, but I am at least spiritually with you. And so we changed the word physically to it, at least digitally be with you instead of spiritually.

So that theological perspective that says that God is in fact everywhere, including the digital space, allows me to open my faith in the way that I express it and engage with it into so very many other ways through technological tools. And I think that for people who are very anchored in, you know, we have to have church in a building.

We have to have communion this way.

Like being anchored into a physical place or particular expression of ritual that is anchored actually in tradition and not necessarily scripture. I think limits people and that limits their that limits the God they serve or the divine that they serve. So that's my perspective on it. And and I think it's something that has really allowed me to open up and and flourish in different ways in my expression of faith.

While Schumaker. I'm not going to lie. Those answers were incredibly poetic.

Thank you for the amazing words. That's great. Yeah. So on this podcast, we we usually close out our interviews with a set of questions about radicality.

Some might say. And so first question for you is how would you define the word radical base?

So the first thing that comes to mind is the notion of free radicals, which I learned about years ago as American Beauty consultant that has something to do with skin care and whatnot.

I think in this context, the concept of radical is something that deviates from the norm. Something that is over the top. off-center. Something that is above and beyond awesome.

I love it. So next question then is taking your definition of radical.

How would you say that either you or your ideas or your research or your story is radical to you?

So I would say that the fact that I am a black woman and I'm centering the experiences of thoughts of black women in my research is already off-center and as well as above and beyond. There are a lot of folks who will take concepts, thoughts, ideas and whatnot from black women and minorities, people, and then just sort of take them and use them as their own. So the fact that I want to use and cite the work of black women and minorities people and use that as my own inspiration, I would say is is very radical.

We should make it. Was there any any last comments or parting thoughts that you wanted to leave our audience with?

I would definitely encourage people to be kind to themselves, to their technology and to each other. When it comes to empowering yourself around technology, I think the ingredients are twofold. One is to actually learn how to use the technology itself. But then also you have to have that kindness in yourself to say I may not always get it right, but I'm going to keep trying. And so when you when you are that gentle with yourself, then that frees you up to be able to make mistakes and not let that stop you from moving forward. So that being kind is always a good idea in the context of empowering yourself around technology and should be good.

If our listeners wanted to follow up on your work or find out more about you, is there a place that they could go to do that?

Absolutely. The Web site would be tech chaplain dot com. I am on various social media platforms, but that's the best place. That's like the home base to learn about tech chaplaincy to get more information about taking a woman ism and find out where I am in the social media platforms.

All right. Well, we'll make sure to include that and other resources that we mentioned possible, even the Eucharist app.

I don't know if that's still in use in the show notes for this episode. Schumaker, thank you so much for joining us today. Absolutely.

Thank you all so much. It's always a pleasure to get to chat.

We want to make sure for joining us today and for a wonderful conversation. Just what did you find particularly radical about this conversation with your maker today?

So for me, I think that the radicality of this episode is actually more in Tamika's character and who she is as a person. I mean, there's definitely like a lot of radical ideas and research as well. But I. For me, what was really standing out was the fact that I think you should make a really symbolizes this notion that a lot of people who are in this space have like technology and ethics, whether it's a guy or not. A lot of people are really just looking to make a positive impact on other people's lives in the world. And she even said herself at one point she decided to commit her life to service when she became a tech chaplain. And that, I think, is just like so symbolic of a bunch of people who are doing similar things in this space, just really committing their lives to helping others in whatever way they can. And I think something else kind of along those same lines that was really standing out for me when especially when she was talking about how she really has to work hard to be recognized and trusted so that people can think of her as like a credible source of information. It was just sort of opening my eyes more to this idea that a lot of times it seems like the people who tend to do the most and some of the most important work, they are the ones who get recognized the least and they're also the ones who have to work the hardest. And a lot of these people are ones who suffer from a lot of racial and gender bias and stereotyping and discrimination. And so I think she Meeka as a whole just is a really, really great beacon of hope for anyone else who's maybe going through those those same issues and suffering in the same ways in life. But the fact that she is just really kicking ass while she's doing it is it's awesome to see. What about you? What what stood out for you, Dylan?

I think for me, what was really radical about Shamika and this episode was this conversation that we had about spirituality and technology. As I mentioned before, I'm a minister serving a congregation right now. But for a long time I was a chaplain in the hospital setting. So I worked for a year in the burn unit and neurological ICU. And my entire job was to meet with people, meet them where they were at emotionally and spiritually, and help them process their mortality, essentially.

That was the job of the chaplain. And so now Shamika has taken this concept of chaplaincy and brought it to a whole new level about technology ethics. And I think it's amazing how she's thinking about spirituality and thinking about technology and really bridging that ethical gap. I mean, we talk so much about access and about who has access to these technologies. And wouldn't it be amazing and maybe even spiritual, right, for people to have someone to walk them through that for for many different reasons. It's technology at this point is a way that we connect with one another and connect with the greater world. And so doesn't it make sense that Shamika is out there trying to connect people because technology is how we connect.

I'd also like to lift up right now, again, as we're recording this episode in the midst of this pandemic, just how important technology is for each of us to be able to stay connected even when we can't be connected physically. So what would the world be like if we didn't see technology and spirituality as two separate things completely? But if we really put them together and saw them as two elements maybe of the same world or at least the same human domain that we're all trying to navigate together. Now, I know just at the beginning of this episode you mentioned that historically maybe you were a little uncomfortable with thinking of spirituality and technology in the same thought or as the same substance or a similar substance. I'm wondering how you feel about that now. After our conversation with Sumiko.

Yeah, I actually really like the way that you word that.

I know she said a lot of things that led you down this path, but I totally agree. I think that maybe it's a little bit naive to think that technology and be it religion or spirituality or faith in general. It's kind of a bit naive to maybe think that those things need to be separated and that they even can be separated. I think that's like really true to say that they they need to come together in the future because. Maybe it's inevitable that it's going to happen anyway, so it's about like finding the best ways to to intersect technology and spirituality in a way that that's beneficial for everyone. So, yeah, I completely agree. I think to a certain degree there's definitely some inevitability there. And it's it's just about, you know, doing it the right way. The ethical way, some might say.

Some might say we might say. Let's talk about that, though. Let's talk about the ethical applications of what Shamika is doing. What should Mika's project is, especially in terms of artificial intelligence ethics, because she Mika's not really talking about A.I. ethics, but I think everything that she said is directly applicable to a AI ethics and maybe to all of us no matter where we find ourselves. I think the biggest takeaway that I had is she Mika's.

Bravado, I want to say, or bravery or courage to just name who she is. Name her identities and really lean into that.

And what I heard her saying is that that's what techno woman ism invites us to do, is to meet ourselves where we're at and say to ourselves, OK, this is who I am. Now how do I make the world a better place?

And I think for all of us in technology development right now, we really need to take that invitation seriously about who am I?

What are the needs of my communities and how am I going to make the world a better place with technology may be a more accessible place. It also is a reminder that the majority of faces that we might see in a high technology development meetings are not the entirety of the voices or the faces of the people out there that are going to be using the products. Now, I don't know about you just but the meetings that I've been in there haven't necessarily been a lot of black women there. And so Shamika saying, no, actually, we're here. This is this is who we are. This is what the perspectives that we have and the embodiment that we have now. Can we make technology that is accessible to everyone, including us?

Yeah, I think it gives me a lot of hope to just having been in the space of not necessarily artificial intelligence ethics for a while, but having been in the A.I. and machine learning and tech space around here, there's quite a lack of diversity, not just in terms of people, but I've thought. And so I think it's really refreshing to see somebody come in who is just so wholly themselves, you know, and and just not holding back and really like bringing something new to the table because they are so unique in their perspective. And I hope this can be like a nice little beacon of light for for other people who maybe come from less traditional backgrounds to do the same for themselves and for the world, honestly.

Now, obviously, when you say something like around here, we're not going to name any specifics, but I think it is really important for us to take Mika's invitation seriously, which is for us to throw ourselves to lean into who we are and what we bring to the table like I am a minister. All right. That's not normal in the tech field. And I feel like it gives me a unique perspective. And so one of the invitations that I hear a techno woman ism and ChemCam making to me and to all of us is to create more space for our unique stories. Can we be more imaginative based on where we come from and the identities that we inhabit and embody? And will that possibly transform the world for the better? Like, let's get creative, let's get radical, but let's do something that makes the world a better place, especially for some of us who do have influence and power about how these technologies are being shaped and designed. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Radical Podcast. For more information on this episode, please see the show notes app radical a-I dot org.

And if you enjoyed this episode, we invite you to subscribe rate and review the show on i-Tunes or your favorite pod katcher. Join our conversation on Twitter at radical iPod. And as always, stay radical.

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