James DeMarco is a business leader and digital business strategy practitioner with more than 25 years' experience. In his current business role, Jim advises some of Microsoft's largest financial services customers on their digital transformation stories and roadmaps; Jim has trained hundreds of Microsoft employees on how to engage their customers in digital transformation partnerships and how to use design-led thinking to drive customer engagement. Jim has held leadership positions in the telecommunications industry, where he helped innovate the use of real time decision making in customer interactions. A lawyer as well as a business strategist, Jim is a proud Northwestern alumnus (Kellogg MM 1999) and a graduate of the University of Notre Dame (JD 1994, BS 1990).  James also teaches for the MSIS program at the Northwestern University School of Professional Studies.

Amanda Starling Gould, PhD, is a technology scholar and strategist who leads the Partnership for Public Service’s multimillion dollar enterprise-wide Responsible AI Initiative. At Duke University she teaches graduate-level courses for the Graduate Liberal Studies program. Her Fall 2024 course is on AI and the Future of Human History; previous courses include Climate + Technology + Justice: Designing Nature’s Futures, Critical Digital Knowledge: Seeing Data Bodies and Practicing the Future, Learning to Fail: Creative Failure Studio, and Redesigning the Future: Radical Innovation after COVID.

Her work, scholarly and managerial, is informed by an awareness that technologies of connection can cause disconnect, bias, and harm – often due to unequal distributions of power and access designed into our technology systems – and seeks to create the conditions for a more livable future.

Her research practice draws inspiration from technology studies, media philosophy, environmental humanities, and disability justice and questions how digital information makes and manifests worlds. She thinks deeply about how the practices and places we create, online and off, prioritize equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Her current research and teaching are focused on advanced generative AI and AI Assistants, approaching them through the lens of maintenance, repair, and corporate producthood.

Nicol Turner Lee is a senior fellow in Governance Studies, the director of the Center for Technology Innovation (CTI), and serves as co-editor-in-chief of TechTank. Turner Lee researches public policy designed to enable equitable access to technology across the U.S. and to harness its power to create change in communities across the world.  Her work also explores global and domestic broadband deployment and internet governance issues. She is an expert on the intersection of race, wealth, and technology within the context of civic engagement, criminal justice, and economic development. Based on fieldwork across the United States, Digitally Invisible: How the Internet is Creating the New Underclass explores the consequences of digital exclusion through the real-life narratives of individuals, communities, and businesses that lack sufficient online access. The inability of these segments of society to exploit the opportunities provided by the Internet is rapidly creating a new type of underclass: the people on the wrong side of a digital divide. The book focuses on the places in America where technology is widening the gaps among social classes, racial and ethnic minorities, and urban and rural communities. Most of these non-adopters whether by choice or circumstance are poor, less educated, people of color, older, or living in rural communities. As the digital revolution is quickly carving out this other America, it's likely that these people on the margins of the information-based economy will fall deeper into abject poverty and social and physical isolation.

William Anthony Nericcio, PhD is on the lead faculty at the Digital Humanities Center at San Diego State University—this fall he leads his third excursion into something he calls #roboticeroticelectric, a 300 student undergraduate experiment at SDSU.

A notorious Mexican-American literature professor, public intellectual, artist, and sometime troublemaker, William Nericcio was born in the fabled “Streets of Laredo,” Texas, or at Mercy Hospital, at any rate, in 1961. For thirteen years he labored under the watchful, at times sinister, eyes of sisters, brothers, and priests at Blessed Sacrament Elementary and St. Augustine High School–no doubt this contributes to the rumors that he was “raised by nuns” that makes its way around the internets.

With an undergraduate degree in English honors from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA/PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, Nericcio now works as the Director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University—these postings followed a stint as an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut from 1988 to 1991 after his years freezing in Ithaca, New York (it also follows on his years as a bartender in Austin, Texas at the famous Cactus Cafe and defunct Texas Tavern).

Dr. Nericcio is president of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs (AGLSP). The author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America for the University of Texas Press and Talking #BrownTV: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen for OSU Press, he is presently working on his culminating opus Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race.  He spends much too much time online and yearns for nothing more than a quiet evening with a fountain pen, quality paper notebook, and a glass of Tempranillo.