Close

Toward Equitable Participatory Design: Data Feminism for CSCW amidst Multiple Pandemics

Catherine D’Ignazio, Erhardt Graeff, Christina N. Harrington, and Daniela K. Rosner. 2020. Toward Equitable Participatory Design: Data Feminism for CSCW amidst Multiple Pandemics. In Conference Companion Publication of the 2020 on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ’20 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 437–445. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406865.3418588

Link

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3406865.3418588

Abstract

CSCW, like many other academic communities, is reckoning with its roles, responsibilities, and practices amidst 2020’s multiple pandemics of COVID-19, anti-Black racism, and a global economic crisis. Reviewing our work with data and communities demands we address harms from overexposure caused by surveillance or algorithmic bias and from underexposure caused by design that is insufficiently participatory and equitable. This workshop will elicit narratives of good and bad design and data work with communities, apply the lenses of equitable participatory design and data feminism to current CSCW projects and our global context, and develop practical outputs for supporting academics and practitioners in pursuit of democratic and just partnerships.

Civic Education is the Civic Technology We Need Most

This essay was submitted to National Academies’ Idea Competition for Symposium on Imagining the Future of Undergraduate STEM Education. You can download a PDF version of this essay here.


Civic technology is an amplifier. It amplifies democracy by applying technology.

Democracy × TechnologyCivic

The technology part of this equation has been doing pretty well. Technology keeps advancing, making certain things easier and more efficient. There are also exciting movements in technology meant to instill public purpose among technologists. Code for America followed by the United States Digital Service and 18F have provided an outlet for technologists eager to build technology that allows governments to be more effective and accountable to citizens. Public Interest Technology, advanced by several prominent foundations, offers a framework for encouraging STEM professionals to engage in politics and policy and more broadly find their bearings by serving the public interest. The National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges Scholars Program seeks to enlarge the definition of the competencies STEM graduates need in order to tackle the world’s most difficult challenges. I celebrate these movements and participate in them.

The democracy part of the equation has been struggling. There is low trust in democratic institutions around the world. Surveys show declines in young people believing that living in a democracy is essential.1 There are also long standing crises in civic engagement at all levels of collective governance. Scholars and journalists have given various reasons for civic engagement’s decline: dwindling enrollments in informal organizations like bowling leagues, the rise of cable television and the internet, newfound awareness of corrupt and racist politicians and policies, and hyperpartisan politics touching every issue and locality. As threats to democracy mount, civic education as a component of primary, secondary, and higher education has gone missing in many schools or, where it still exists, represents antiquated notions of democracy and America.

We are failing to appreciate that civic education is our most important civic technology. While technologists working on civic projects often mean well and make helpful contributions, we will never recover our democracy or realize the true potential of civic technology if we don’t revitalize civic education.

A 2014 study of engineering students by sociologist Erin Cech finds evidence that the culture of engineering seems to weaken students’ beliefs in their professional.2 In 2020, a cascade of headlines points to ways digital technologies are threatening justice, privacy, and democracy, and the political battles over COVID-19 have exposed deep mistrust of experts in science and medicine. Between now and 2040, our need for civic-minded STEM graduates will only grow.

We need a civic professionalism movement anchored in transformative civic education curricula built inseparably into every undergraduate STEM program.

A revitalized civic education acknowledges fundamental shifts in society and democratic practice and expands its definition of where democracy starts—not with voting but with citizen cooperation. Civic education begins in childhood, but STEM professionals also need educational experiences that help them recognize their profound roles and responsibilities as citizens. We need to entwine technical literacy and civic literacy. We need civic professionals in STEM, who think first as citizens, practice their profession in deeply democratic ways, and build civic technology as expressions of the identities they have developed through years of civic education.

Democratic educator Harry Boyte has written and advocated for constructing professional identities like the “citizen engineer,” an engineer who acknowledges the public dimensions of their work, not separating their citizen identity from their engineer identity.3 Democratic theorist Albert Dzur gives us the idea of “democratic professionalism” as power sharing.4 Civic professionals embrace multiple forms of expertise, complementing their specialized skills with the unique experiences of fellow citizens to solve difficult problems. These open and accountable collaborations build public trust in professionals through mutual respect and shared struggle.

Civic professionals must also learn to embrace the political dimensions of their work, acknowledging the ways that technical work is always situated in particular contexts and depends on certain structures and policies that serve some ideas, people, and outcomes well and others poorly. Cech’s research with higher education professional Heidi Sherick has found depoliticization of work to be one of the problematic pillars of engineering culture.5 Science and engineering are not cleanly separable from the rest of society. That mindset robs our democracy of STEM’s public purpose and accountability. Instead, civic professionals should aspire toward what Boyte calls “public work,” committing to models of co-creation, joint problem solving, and shared ownership.6 Public work binds us together in our shared citizenship and represents the foundational elements of democracy as a project of collective governance.

Education scholar Carolin Kreber envisions forging civic professional identities through transformative experiences in undergraduate education.7 A transformative STEM civic education is action-oriented and community-engaged, forcing us to challenge and revise our assumptions, values, and identities. It asks students to practice their profession in partnership with the public at the beginning of their training. Working with citizens outside of the classroom helps cultivate civic-mindedness. A civic professional’s new competencies include being able to frame a complex problem in partnership with community members who may not possess technical knowledge but whose lived experiences lead to the right questions and priorities necessary to setting a research and design agenda.

This is the future of STEM education our world needs most, reclaiming the public purpose of higher education and rebuilding trust in professions. During the next 20 years, society will continue to ask STEM graduates and the technology they create to solve its thorniest challenges. We need civic professionals in STEM who understand and identify with a much deeper sense of their public purpose, who are prepared to amplify our collective effort as citizens.

  1. Foa, Roberto Stefan, and Yascha Mounk. 2017. “The Signs of Deconsolidation.” Journal of Democracy​ 28 (1): 5–16.
  2. Cech, Erin A. 2014. “Culture of Disengagement in Engineering Education?” Science, Technology, & Human Values​ 39 (1): 42–72.
  3. Boyte, Harry. 2008. The Citizen Solution: How You Can Make A Difference​. Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.
  4. Dzur, Albert W. 2010. Democratic Professionalism: Citizen Participation and the Reconstruction of Professional Ethics, Identity, and Practice.University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Dzur, Albert. 2018. Democracy Inside: Participatory Innovation in Unlikely Places.New York: Oxford University Press.
  5. Cech, Erin A., and Heidi M. Sherick. 2015. “Depoliticization and the Structure of Engineering Education.” In ​International Perspectives on Engineering Education: Engineering Education and Practice in Context, Volume 1​, edited by Steen Hyldgaard Christensen, Christelle Didier, Andrew Jamison, Martin Meganck, Carl Mitcham, and Byron Newberry, 203–16. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  6. Boyte, Harry. 2004. Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  7. Kreber, Carolin. 2016. Educating for Civic-Mindedness.New York: Routledge.

The Responsibility to Not Design and the Need for Citizen Professionalism

Citation

Graeff, E. 2020. The Responsibility to Not Design and the Need for Citizen Professionalism. Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility: The Past, Present and Future Values of Participatory Design. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.21428/93b2c832.c8387014

Link

https://doi.org/10.21428/93b2c832.c8387014

Abstract

I advise two programs at Olin College of Engineering that invite undergraduate students to conduct community-engaged design work. In the fall of 2019, project teams in both of those programs decided not to design systems requested by their outside collaborators based on ethical concerns about the harm they might cause. This paper briefly describes how those decisions came to be, the need to educate for and celebrate design refusal, and how this exemplifies the need to develop the next generation of designers and technologists to be citizen professionals.

Race After Technology book review

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin delivers a powerful synthesis of STS and critical race theory. She diagnoses a series of problems plaguing the creation and effect of design and technology, drawing throughlines from historical through contemporary examples. If pressed for time, the lengthy introduction chapter summarizes her core argument both about the existence of the “New Jim Code” and need for abolitionist tools to dismantle it and the need for analyses and lens like she offers in this book that bring together STS and critical race theory.

She offers us four dimensions to the New Jim Code: engineered inequity, default discrimination, coded exposure, and technological benevolence/beneficence, each of which is described in Chapters 1-4, respectively. As she summarizes on page 47 of the Introduction: 1) “engineered inequity explicitly works to amplify social hierarchies that are based on race, class, and gender and how the debate regarding ‘racist robots’ is framed in popular discourse”; 2) “default discrimination grows out of design processes that ignore social cleavages” and when “tech developers do not attend to the social and historical context of their work”; 3) coded exposure is about the ways that technologies enable differential visibility and surveillance that often fall along racial lines; and 4) technological benevolence interrogates the problematic efforts and claims of “tech products and services that offer fixes for social bias.”

In her last chapter, Benjamin tries to imagine what an abolitionist toolkit would require to address the New Jim Code. As primarily a book of theoretical synthesis, her toolkit leans heavily on other frameworks like the Design Justice principles and the recommendations Virginia Eubanks articulates in her essential book Automating Inequality, also it celebrates the work of those developing approaches for auditing technology like algorithms. The key work done by the last chapter though is articulating the need for new “social imaginaries.” Building on the work of Black science fiction writers, Black new feminist theory, and the prophetic speech tradition integral to the Civil Rights Movement (think “I have a dream”), Benjamin’s call for abolitionist and liberatory design and technology is one of narrative. What is the future we want to live in and how do we describe it to ourselves and those around us? How do we see ourselves bringing that future into being? How do we dramatically redefine or expand our efforts of inclusion in design practices and the expansion of who is called a “designer” to those situated in society in ways and with expertise not usually invited explicitly or implicitly into design?

While this is definitely a scholarly manuscript, it reads easily and quickly for social theory. If you are working in the areas of UX design/research, AI, tech ethics, tech criticism, technology and politics, or race and technology, this is going to be essential reading. I expect to be recommending this to my engineering students for years to come.

View all my reviews