HASTAC 2023 Conference: Full Schedule

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For full details about the conference, please visit hastac2023.org

9:00am EDT

Registration open

Check in at the Student Union to receive your conference badge, swag, and housing information (for those staying at Emerson Place).

Note: For those staying at Emerson Place, registration will be open on the afternoon of June 7 from 12-5pm in the Student Union. For late arrival, please go directly to Emerson Place—135 Emerson Pl, Brooklyn, NY 11205—and call the conference assistant on duty at 718-715-3239.

Thursday June 8, 2023 9:00am - 7:00pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Registration/Breaks

12:00pm EDT

Co-Working Space

This large corridor room, joining Steuben Hall and Pratt Studios (PS) in the Design Center, is open Thursday afternoon as co-working space, particularly for attendees who want to join online sessions from campus.

Thursday June 8, 2023 12:00pm - 5:00pm EDT
Steuben 417 (Design Center)

Registration/Breaks

1:30pm EDT

Building Student Power & Global Solidarity in the Settler Institution: Teaching Habila’s Oil On Water

Theme: progressive pedagogy and educational engagements with issues of social justice

“I am walking down a well-lit path, with incidents neatly labeled and dated, but when I reach halfway memory lets go of my hand, and a fog rises and covers the faces and places, and I am left clawing about in the dark, lost, and I have to make up the obscured moments as I go along, make up the faces and places, even the emotions. Sometimes, to keep on course, I have to return to more recognizable landmarks, and then, with this safety net under me, I can leap onto less certain terrain” (Habila 3).

Thus begins Nigerian writer Helon Habila’s 2011 novel Oil On Water. As a colonizing project, the "land-grab" (High Country News, 2020) or settler university is a material marker of the historical present, and maintains resonance with neoliberal projects that continue to displace working people around the globe. The insufficiency of our land acknowledgments conjures a kind of cognitive dissonance, a “fog” that disorients us from real faces, places, and emotions. The fog thickens, disorienting us from the land and one another, when we teach literature as though English is not a colonial language, as though expert-oriented pedagogical practices do not mirror christian missionizing and the colonization of the mind to reinforce hierarchical structures of language, knowledge, and power.

In this paper, I argue that the function of pedagogy is to return “to more recognizable landmarks,” particularly in settler institutions. Analyzing neocolonial iterations of exploitation from an anti-racist pedagogical framework in an upper-division global literature course, Habila’s novel disrupts historic and cultural stratifications that mystify globalization processes and one’s place within them. By framing environmental racism (Robert Bullard, Ken Saro-Wiwa) and student debt within the context neoliberal strategies of domination and control (David Harvey), students are invited to work towards building student power in solidarity with global communities fighting for justice. I begin by discussing the material and educational context of the settler institution at which I teach and study, Washington State University (WSU), which is one of many land-grant universities founded on stolen indigenous lands. Per anti-racist pedagogies’ tenet of connecting course material to students’ lives (Paulo Freire, Kevin Kumashiro, Bettina Love), I expose the university’s investment in fossil fuels and challenge students to explore petracolonization and its effect on communities in Washington State and in Nigeria, per the National Priorities Project and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Genocide in Nigeria, respectively. Students reflect on the misappropriation of funds to militarization over social services including education and write personal narratives describing college during recent years of crisis. By identifying and critiquing the connections among stolen land, rising tuition, university debt, and fossil fuel investment, students organize panel presentations at WSU’s annual Social Justice Conference, sharing their experiences and inviting fellow students to join in solidarity to critique ongoing colonial practices at settler universities. Inviting students to collective action in a public forum disrupts learned passivity in higher education and foregrounds literature as an intervention in settler universities. Our pedagogy must disrupt neoliberal practices locally toward building student power, thereby working to align land-grab universities with social justice movements around the world.

In effect, I argue that when global literary texts in English, like Habila’s, are taught in solidarity with grassroots movements locally, they demystify the connections of neoliberal policies in our current age of global capitalism and climate collapse.

Topics: Anti-Racist Pedagogy, Decolonial Pedagogy, Settler University, Petracolonization
Keywords: Helon Habila, Global Literatures in English

Speakers

Chelsea Kopp

Washington State University Vancouver, Collective for Social and Environmental Justice

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - 1:50pm EDT
Main 210

Papers & Talks

Session Title (Re)Making the University
Modality In Person
Keywords education, languages & literatures, student-centered learning and teaching, activism, community, pedagogy, social justice
Area Pedagogy

1:30pm EDT

Citational Politics and Positionality: Analyzing Ethics of Social Media Research

Given the relative newness of the discipline of Digital Humanities (DH), it is important to put the disciplinary research through a constant process of (re)imagining its goals and values, something that has been a task of researchers specifically working on decolonizing and anti-colonial DH, building anti-racist and feminist DH, envisioning Critical Caste and Technology Studies. (Shanmugavelan, n.d.; Patel, 2022; Morford et al., 2020) The thread that binds all of these works together is the importance of ethics and the questioning of power structures in and through DH. (Verhoeven, 2015; Risam, 2019) One way to understand the ethics of research in DH is to look at how the ethics of one type of research, social media research, is discussed. This paper will therefore present a systematic review of papers on social media research ethics that employed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic review and Meta-Analysis Protocol (PRISMA-P) 2020 (Page et al., 2021). We will address the following questions:

How do citational politics inform the discussion of research ethics in social media research?
How does positionality affect and make the ethical structure of a research?
Do scientific methods of research, such as the PRISMA protocol, have their own ethics problems? How can we reflect back on the method used?

Whilst the PRISMA protocol consists of a 27-item list to “facilitate the preparation and reporting of a robust protocol for the systematic review” (Moher et al., 2016, p. 148), we modified it to suit our research by creating ten variables, namely year of publication, inferred gender of the author(s), region of publication, academic discipline, type, design, methodology, social media platform of focus, positionality statement and ethical protocol.

We problematise the results thus generated through the PRISMA protocol by drawing on Sara Ahmed’s conceptualisation of citation as feminist bricks and feminist memory. (Ahmed, 2017) We use Ahmed’s theoretical framework on citation practices to unpack the “reproductive technologies” that scientific methods produce, determining the way the world (of social media research ethics, in our case) is “reproduced around certain bodies”. (Ahmed, 2013) We analyze the (lack of) positionality statements in the papers reviewed and the ethical implications of (not) engaging with “situated knowledges”. (Haraway, 1988)

Our findings show the need for reflective research praxis, one that is in alignment with the research objectives of jettisoning and exposing the power structures that dictate the making of the world in ways more than one. We found out that the majority of the papers that turn up in the PRISMA protocol belong to the Global North academia, denoting a need to examine the making of disciplines and knowledge production in disciplines across the sciences, social sciences and humanities. We conclude that positionality is of importance and should be added to the theoretical frameworks of anti-caste and social justice critiques of pedagogy and research. (Subramanian, 2019) We conclude by turning the lens inward by reflecting and rectifying our own research ethics and practices by doing an analysis of our citation patterns, while acknowledging the limitations of our project.

Speakers

Ayushi Khemka

PhD Student, University of Alberta

Md. Sayeed Al-Zaman

University of Alberta, Canada

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - 1:50pm EDT
ARC E-13

Papers & Talks

Session Title Social Platforms
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords digital humanities, race/ethnic studies, gender studies, data, citational politics, positionality, research methodology, ethics, social justice
Area Platforms & Technology

1:30pm EDT

Critical Making Through Design in Computing-Integrated Teacher Education

The Computing Integrated Teacher Education (CITE) initiative supports City University of New York (CUNY) education faculty across 15 colleges to prepare teacher candidates to meaningfully integrate computing and digital literacies into their pedagogical toolkits to advance equity in their future classrooms. Our research and implementation teams at CUNY, alongside collaborators from Michigan State University, provided over a hundred CUNY faculty members (so far) with professional development sessions during the Summer of 2022 that embody HASTAC’s theme of “critical making” by focusing on our faculty’s ability to think about, with, through, and against technology. Now, participating faculty are working to integrate their own digital artifact designs into their teacher education courses. These designs aim not only to integrate computational thinking/digital literacies into teaching but also to draw attention to the interwoven connections between the content of teacher-ed curriculum and technology’s relationship to it. Designs take a wide range of forms, including homework assignments, class activities, multi-step projects, and more.

In preparing faculty for the design process, they were exposed to computational thinking and design through multiple lenses, including accessibility, student agency and creative computing, equitable K12 computer science, scientific inquiry and modeling, data privacy, digital civics and activism, and other dimensions of criticality around technology and the way it is embedded into our culture. The goal was for the faculty to develop a well-rounded perspective on computing and society. In centering an equity framework, much of this work has moved towards decentering the dominant ways of doing and knowing using STEM-based skills. Some faculty have taken up this framing within their approaches to digital artifact design by integrating methods such as data analysis through digital storytelling in multicultural and bilingual education courses, pattern recognition as a tool in historical research, identifying misinformation and being critical of mass media, and many more computational processes in various teacher education settings.

In this panel, you will be hearing from members of the CITE research team as they share insights into the structure of the CITE initiative, design choices made when planning professional development, and how they aimed to promote critical making. Joining the research team will be several faculty members participating in the initiative, who will share their experiences undergoing professional development, thinking through how to integrate these approaches while intentionally addressing specific New York State learning standards, student perceptions of computational thinking and digital literacies, and other challenges faced during the design and implementation processes.

Speakers

Anthony Wheeler

Doctoral Student of Urban Education + Digital Humanities, Graduate Center, CUNY

Anthony is a Doctoral Student of Urban Education + Digital Humanities at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. In addition to his role as a Professional Learning Research and Development Assistant with the Computing-Integrated Teacher Education (CITE) Initiative, he serves... Read More →

Aankit Patel

Director, STEM Teacher Education, City University of New York

Sara Vogel

City University of New York

Laura Scheiber

Melissa Garcia

Jessica Velez

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - 3:00pm EDT
Main 212

Panels/Roundtables

Keywords computing & computer science, education, design, pedagogy, design-based approaches, digital literacy
Area HASTAC Scholars, Pedagogy

1:30pm EDT

Feminist Design Pedagogy as Liberatory Practice

Issues of equity and inclusion in classrooms are increasingly a top concern for design educators, however they are typically approached without direct acknowledgement of or confrontation to the patriarchal and oppressive underpinnings of design education itself. Most design classrooms continue to center the professor-as-expert; promote a canon of white, Western-centric ways of knowing; and perpetuate a violent culture of individualism. Discourse around student-centered learning is typically understood within frameworks that reinforce hegemonic power structures and place the burden of change on educators rather than on institutions. To foster classroom environments that are marked by belonging, and to prepare designers to engage with complex social problems, inclusive teaching practices must be accompanied by an analysis of power in students' learning environments and in the world around them.
Feminist pedagogy is a framework that places questions of power, inequality, and justice at the center of teaching. Feminist scholar and educator bell hooks, informed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, defined feminist pedagogy as a liberatory practice that fosters critical thinking and provides students with the tools to question inequality and social structures. There is no precise formula for practicing feminist pedagogy; rather it comprises a set of unifying themes such as reducing the classroom power gap, viewing students as active participants in their education, addressing systems of oppression, and challenging those systems through a democratized classroom.

Adapted from the forthcoming book, Feminist Designer: On the Personal and the Political in Design (MIT Press, 2023), this panel aims to highlight ways in which feminist pedagogical practices are currently shaping design education. Through a moderated dialogue with five design educators featured in the book, each from diverse backgrounds and institutions, we will explore ethical and practical challenges that educators face in their teaching. Each panelist arrives at this conversation through the unique lens of their own identities and experiences as educators, administrators, practicing designers, mothers, social workers, queer folx, and people of color. Topics to be addressed include power relations in the classroom, care as a pedagogical method, culturally responsive mentorship, curricula and projects that center social justice, and enacting change within institutions. Panelists will share a plurality of approaches to implementing feminist ways of knowing and doing in the design classroom. We will also address current issues—such as reproductive justice, mental health, economic instability and inequality, systemic racism, climate catastrophe, and global pandemics—as the backdrop of the continually evolving role of educators and the growing expectations placed on them to respond to constant change. With an emphasis on collaboration and community, we aim to generate an open dialogue about design education as a liberatory practice for both students and educators.

Moderators

Alison Place

Assistant Profesor of Graphic Design, University of Arkansas

Speakers

Rachael Dietkus

Founder, Social Workers Who Design, Social Workers Who Design

Heather Snyder Quinn

Assistant Professor of Design Futures, Washington University, St. Louis

Heather is usually where she “isn’t supposed to be.” You will find her playing in unexpected places, physical or virtual, and collaborating with people from an array of backgrounds. Her work uses design fiction to empower communities to imagine possible futures and underst... Read More →

Aasawari Kulkarni

George Washington University

Becky Nasadowski

Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Ayako Takase

Associate Professor in Industrial Design, Rhode Island School of Design

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - 3:00pm EDT
ARC E-02

Panels/Roundtables

Modality Hybrid, Online, In Person
Keywords education, design, pedagogy, student-centered learning and teaching, feminism, liberation
Area Pedagogy

1:30pm EDT

Searching for Euphoria: Bodies as Resistance

Our bodyminds are mycellium networks, tender gatherings of rebellious, engaged stories. We are changemakers who manifest trans, queer, crip of color dreams for our collective liberation. “Searching for Euphoria: Bodies as Resistance” centers our bodyminds as sources of wisdom, as verb. Each of our panelists will explore how, when we are guided by our intersectional bodyminds, by feminist, queer, crip theory as defined by Alison Kafer, by Critical Race Theory, and by a Black feminist love practice as named by bell hooks and Sonya Renee Taylor, we can change the future of our communities. How can we embrace and be guided by the euphoria of our bodyminds? How can we transform ableist notions of pleasure and embodiment?

Performing Queer, Disabled of Color by Shayda Kafai
The embodied and enminded wisdom work of Sins Invalid, a Bay-Area based performance project, centers the wisdom, activism, and artmaking of disabled, chronically ill, queer, gender nonconforming, trans folks of color. Through performance art, workshops, and Disability Justice movement-building work, Sins Invalid urges that our bodymind stories hold the potential shift oppressive, intersecting networks of ableism, cis-heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. This presentation explores the ways our disabled, queer of color bodyminds carry lessons for our collective survival, how we–in all our infinite wisdoms–can create methods for us to thrive. What activist lessons come from disabled, queer of color bodyminds outward? How can performance serve as a space where these lessons are communicated?

Radical Trans Joy: Gender Euphoria from the TBIPOC Community by Liz Gerena
In a culture that privileges dysphoria, to me, gender euphoria is wearing an all pink outfit after years of despising pink for making me look too feminine; it is the small hairs under the bottom of my chin from taking testosterone. It is my voice dropping. Although I did not experience gender dysphoria for many years, contrary to the normative trans narrative, it was gender euphoria that taught me to celebrate my transness. This project amplifies the benefits of gender euphoria and most importantly, explores how we can dismantle the myth that gender dysphoria is the normative trans narrative. How many people are having a similar journey, of discovering their transness through their gender euphoria instead of their gender dysphoria? How many people are learning to fall in love with their transness after years of only focusing on their gender dysphoria?

To Queer and To Crip: The Euphoria of Change by Erin Masters
In many spaces, we are bombarded with rigid “norms” rooted in racism, patriarchy, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and capitalism, and we must find ways to queer and crip the world around us. We as crip, chronically ill, Mad, trans, gender-expansive, queer, people of color find ways to interrogate and deconstruct the oppressive norms that surround us. We search for euphoria by cripping and queering our world and our spaces, making home for our bodyminds and building community. We find that we are not alone, we can create and change our spaces, we can crip and queer our worlds together. We are meant to find joy and while the world tries to prevent our joy, our love, our euphoria, our spaces are meant for us and the world cannot take that away.

Not Our Bodies/Fragments: Mini Pieces Into a Life I’ve Never Known by Aja Solis
Mini Pieces Into a Life I’ve Never known is about the life I have come to know which is a funny thing to say because my life as I knew it was not how I wanted it to be. Therefore, this project is meant to open up the conversation regarding the struggles of how non-binary/trans folk are forced to live inside categorizations and labels. Without mentioning the process (the process of dysphoria and displacement), I provide a lens that is vulnerable, intimate, and distorted in hopes that those reading my work can find a place to feel at home outside of a space that was once limitless; because in order to break away from these confinements, we must do what is not expected of us.
liminal bodies, digitized touch: transmasculine navigators through eroticized digital space by James Aubreii
Cisnormative discourse pervades our existence in ways that validate the ostracization, abjection, mutilation, fetishization, and commodification of bodies that live outside the borders of binary sex. The intersex trans body is transgressive; it is a force that can and should disrupt the orderly oppression of normalcy and conformity. There should not be an "ideal" trans body. To be trans is to willingly enter into the liminal, to inhabit a bodymind that is Other and ephemeral. There is joy to be found when we shed the expectations of society's cruelly and mundanely fashioned reality. These bodies that continue to evolve and shift on the edges of the tangible need a place to stage their revolution, and this can potentially be found within the digital space. In digital spaces, communities of thought can thrive in ways that are more accessible, safe, diverse, and widespread. While ideological scrutiny and capitalist data mining has sought to destroy these spaces, there will always be pockets of resistance. My work aims to cultivate transqueer digital resistance that centers the euphoria of diversity in phenotypic sex expression.

Speakers

Erin Taylor Masters

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Shayda Kafai

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, United States of America

Elizabeth Gerena

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, United States of America

Aja Celeste Solis

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, United States of America

James Aubreii

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, United States of America

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - 3:00pm EDT
Online

Panels/Roundtables

Modality Online
Keywords LGBTQ+ studies, race/ethnic studies, disability studies, activism, community, resistance, liberation, euphoria

1:30pm EDT

The Placemats Project

Placemats is a collaborative weaving project to produce data visualizations. Using the HASTAC blog and social media, we will collect submissions of keywords in advance of the conference that signify points of connection, shared experiences, or commonalities during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. These keywords form the foundation (by labeling the warp strands) of each woven piece. The body of the fabric (the weft) is created collaboratively at the event as conference participants weave into the areas that speak to them, connecting their own experience of COVID to that of others and creating a tactile visualization of the “quantified self-in-kinship” (Knight). The resultant data visualizations are characterized by uneven textures, gaps, and other irregularities. On one hand, these defy the norms of proper weaving practice; on the other, the tactile and visual experience of the finished visualizations aligns with the sense that we have experienced (are indeed still experiencing) collective trauma. The material forms of the visualizations echo Andres Ramirez Gaviria’s framing of artistic data visualizations that are not trying to efficiently convey information but instead explore questions or issues in a way not possible via other means (482).

By crowdsourcing emotions and experiences and weaving collectively in community at the conference, Placemats draws upon multiple of D’Ignazio and Klein’s principles for feminist data visualization, specifically their call to “consider context,” “legitimize embodiment and affect,” and “make labor visible” (3-4). The visualizations produced are small in scale, akin to a placemat, and the aesthetics and contours of each placemat is specific to the particular time and place of its creation.

The placemat, as a feature of the kitchen table, reminds us of the many ways in which the boundaries of our homes took on different meanings during the pandemic. In regard to previous projects, we have argued that “the kitchen table has long held a place in the public imagination as a site of nourishment, family gathering, and care, but it also has served as an important hub of political organizing and movement-building. As a space of gathering both domestic and social, the kitchen table stands at the intersection of the personal and the political. It fosters the creation of intimate connection and affinity that enables collectives to prepare to engage in more public-facing work” (Wu et al.). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the kitchen table continues to be multivalent for an even wider group of people, transformed into office, studio, school room, game hall, and more. With the Placemats project, we aim to document COVID-19 with data textiles that memorialize shared experiences and provide soft and tactile reflective guides at the kitchen tables of the future.

For HASTAC 23: Critical Making and Social Justice, we invite participants to weave with us, creating a Placemat specifically for June 8 – 10, 2023 at the Pratt Institute as part of the HASTAC 2023 conference.

The project will be available in the Student Union while registration is open on Thursday, June 8 and Friday, June 9. The final weaving will be displayed in the Steuben Gallery on Saturday, June 10.

Works Cited
D’Ignazio, Catherine and Lauren F. Klein. “Feminist Data Visualization.” Proceedings from the Workshop on Visualization for Digital Humanities. IEEE VIS Conference. 2016.
Gaviria, Andres Ramirez. “When is Information Visualization Art? Determining the Critical Criteria.” Leonardo, vol. 41, no. 5, 2008, pp. 479-82.
Knight, Kim Brillante. “Wearable Interfaces, Networked Bodies, and Feminist Sleeper Agents.” The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities. Edited by Jentery Sayers. Routledge, 2018.
Wu, Hong-An, Wendy Sung, Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, and Kim Brillante Knight. “Stitch n' Glitch: Teetering on the "/".” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, vol. 21, Buzzademia: Scholarship in the Internet Vernacular, Fall 2019.

Artists

Atanur Andic

The University of Texas at Dallas, United States of America

Kasif Rahman

Doctoral Student, The University of Texas at Dallas, United States of America

Kim Brillante Knight

Associate Professor and Director of Fashioning Circuits, The University of Texas at Dallas

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - 4:45pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Activity

Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, media studies, data, participatory methods, weaving, data visualization, Covid

1:30pm EDT

1055113200

1055113200 weaves together receipts for the innumerable hours that people have given to create and sustain HASTAC. While this work is infused with data about countable events—website content, comments, commits—it also resists individualization, illusory precision, determinacy, and commensurability. Instead, it offers wholeness through patterning, playful imagery, the work of weaving, careful repairs, draping, wrinkles, folds, and so on in an effort to acknowledge the many uncapturable ways people have contributed to this community. The work was woven using a custom-built loom, to which it is still attached. As you participate in the weaving, you are putting physical form to everything we cannot count.

With assistance from Sourjyamoy Barman, Leonardo Bueno, Yvonne Chen, Michael Crockett, Eva Hymes, Schuni Mutalenu, and Xiaoyu Wei.

Artists

Molly Morin

Artist in Residence, Dartmouth College

Nikki Stevens

HASTAC/Dartmouth College

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - 7:00pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords HASTAC, data, text analysis, community, weaving
Area Data

1:30pm EDT

Closet

This work is located on the 2nd floor corridor between the Main Building and East Building, down the hall from Main 212.

This is an installation of an actual closet that you can enter, sit inside, and explore different items. It speaks to some immigrant experiences, evokes childhood memories, and makes space for reflections.

We are aliens. According to the law, we are non-resident aliens. We find ourselves alienated from land, kinship, and familiar epistemologies, that are suppressed or selectively extracted. To be ourselves, we must find and (un)make a space of refuge that will nourish us.

A closet can be this place of refuge for many, including us, aliens. We invite you to sit in solidarity in the anonymity of the closet and share our joys and grievances: fill out the book of complaints, map your geography of displacement, smell the air, touch the clothes, and hear waves washing over us.

After our immigration, we find ourselves smashed between non-belongings - to the hypernationalism we left behind geographically and to the hegemonic empire we inhabit. A closet is our spatial belonging outside of nationalisms.

For this work, we draw on the ideas of Eve Sedgwick (Epistemology of a Closet), Sara Ahmed (Complaint as Queer Method), Matt Brim (Poor Queer Studies), Eve Tuck (Biting the Hand that Feeds You), Fred Moten & Stefano Harney (The Undercommons), bell hooks (All About Love, Teaching to Transgress), David Graeber (Utopia of Rules), Laozi (Tao Te Ching), la paperson (A Third University is Possible), Sara Berman's Closet, and many others.

Artists

Abhishek Viswanathan

University of Pittsburgh

Maria Ryabova

PhD student, University of Pittsburgh

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - 7:00pm EDT
East 2nd Floor Corridor

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, anthropology, gender studies, participatory methods, performance, closet, immigrant, alien, unmaking, art exhibit

1:30pm EDT

Crafting Connections: Creating a Network of HASTAC 2023

Networks express connections, associations, and communities. Here, topics of the conference (via author-selected and author-generated keywords) have been carefully detangled and placed into conversion with each other and made physical in form. This social object can be viewed and interacted together with others, making the conference community tangible.

Each thread represents one work in the conference, its color reflecting format: papers, panels, and roundtables (green); workshops (orange); exhibitions (red); performances (purple); activities (blue); and multiple formats braided with their respective constituent colors. This design reflects some of our earliest thinking of the conference, which is also embodied in the HASTAC 2023 logo.

We invite you to identify and locate different work from the conference in this social object and to trace its lines in connection with others.

Artists

Chris Alen Sula

Interim Associate Provost; Visiting Associate Professor, Pratt Institute

Chris Alen Sula (he/they) is Interim Associate Provost for Academic Programs, Assessment, and Accreditation at Pratt Institute. He is tenured and teaches in the School of Information, where he founded the MS Program in Data Analytics & Visualization and Advanced Certificate in D... Read More →

Claudia Berger

Digital Humanities Librarian, Sarah Lawrence College

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - 7:00pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords conference planning, data visualization, digital humanities, data visceralization, HASTAC, network
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

1:30pm EDT

Language Learning Gamified

“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” has become one of the most popular topics in education lately. While serving on various DEI committees at different levels, I notice that the conversations tend to generalize people’s experiences and thus minimize the individuality of the scenarios. For instance, for the current generation of students, it is necessary to use the correct pronouns that they prefer. However, we also need to be patient with students whose mother tongues do not have gendered pronouns, in another word, have the same word for he, she and they. We also need to take into consideration the languages that only have masculine and feminine genders. In some languages like Spanish, it is simple to use “e” (neutral) instead of “o” (masculine) and “a” (feminine). In other languages like Arabic and Hebrew, where the verbs conjugate differently based on gender, it is more complicated.

I cannot offer a straightforward solution to this complicated issue. However, I could invite people to be more empathetic to people different from them.

The project evolves into a series of board games in various languages that use non-Latin alphabets, that can be played by people who have zero prior experience with these languages.

Each writing system requires the reader to see different details, which influences the inherent perspectives of the speakers of the language. In English, the top half of the letterforms is more crucial to readability than the bottom half of the letterforms. Therefore, English readers mostly read the top of each sentence. In Hindi, however, the top is only used for certain vowels. In Thai, a vowel can appear in front of a consonant, after a consonant, before and after a consonant, above a consonant, and before and above and after a consonant. The readers’ eyes go in circles in order to identify a word. Because of this, by having people play games in different languages, we can help them understand how different our points of view are.

In order to design games that the players enjoy, I visited board game cafes to go through their collections. I joined board game groups to play games with them and interviewed them regarding their experiences with different games. During the process, I took notes of what rules can also be applied to my game design. It is also essential that the learning process of my games should not take more than five minutes, for accessibility matters.

The production of the game pieces involves a laserjet printer, an inkjet printer, a Cricut machine, and a laser cutter. The prototype might be given to the testers without any design element on the cards. I tried my best to find testers who did not speak the language and testers who were native speakers. If the participants enjoyed the game, I would finish the surface design and find a higher-quality material for the production. If the participants did not find the game interesting, I would discard the rules and come up with a brand-new one for them to play.

The final product is a set of board games. Each allows between 2 players and 6 at each round. The experience is the same despite the number of players. When there is only 1 player, the pieces can function as flashcards for memorizing letters and words. Each game takes about 15–30 minutes to play. The goal is to make it engaging but accessible to new players.

Each game was designed based on the unique characteristics of the language. For example, Japanese has only five vowels and a matching game would work well. For beginners who are still learning hiragana and katakana (the Japanese letters), the rule is to discard a card that either matches the vowel or the consonants in the card that the previous player discards. If the player has no card matching either the consonant or the vowel, and no special card (wild, switch, stop, etc), they have to draw a card from the draw pile. The winner is the first player who gets rid of all cards in hand. While playing the cards, the players can become familiar with the letters with English transliteration. For intermediate learners and advanced learners, the rule is to discard a card with the sound that can make a word with the card discarded by the previous player, and name the word. The players can build their vocabulary through playing.

Each Arabic letter appear differently based on its position inside a word, thus helping the players identify the same letters is important. In the Arabic game, each letter appears four times on four cards based on their forms in different positions: initial, middle, final, and isolated. Each position is labeled with different patterns on the borders. The game starts with each player with 5 cards in hand, and 4 rows in the center of the play area. Each row has one card to start the row. The rest go to the draw pile. Each player takes turns to place a card in any row, but cannot place a card adjacent to cards that have the same pattern. After placing, the player immediately draws a card, to keep 5 cards in hand at all times until there is no card in the draw pile. If the card placed shares the identical letter with another card, the player can immediately collect the two cards and any cards in between. The winner is the one with the most cards collected. The game helps people understand the Arabic writing system and differentiate different letters.
All the games help people practice looking at different details of the letterforms, to understand the diverse perspective rooted in languages and cultures.

For HASTAC, I would like the games to be displayed and available for anyone to play. Ideally, there will be a table with chairs for each card/board game accepted. The instruction for the game will be taped to the table.

Artists

Sherry Muyuan He

Assistant Profesor, City College of New York

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 3:00pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Activity

Modality In Person
Keywords linguistics, design, gaming, participatory methods, languages & literatures, culture, accessibility, diversity, equity, inclusion

1:30pm EDT

Feel the ghosts hanging around in the shape of love: an immersive AR poetry suite

Feel the ghosts hanging around in the shape of love is an immersive webXR poetry experience accessible to HASTAC attendees via their smartphones, from any location. The full navigable area will be about 500 sq feet, but can be overlayed on any space. The poem will be recorded as audio, with interactive elements.

The central text I’ll be working from was composed during a residency in computational creativity at the Banff Centre this past spring. The text is computationally generated based on an archive of poems written by the author over a decade with additional ai-generated stanzas. Visuals will be created using AI-image generation tools and the AR components will be built in either 8th wall or Aero or similar for easy dissemination in a conference setting.

The work involves co-creation with machines, combinatory poetics, and a navigable environment that will emerge iteratively as I write, import imagery, code and rework. New poetry will be added to the narrative spine already created. Images will be co-created with commercial AI image generation tools. This queer feminist work reflects a broad commitment to creative practices and research-creation that challenges oppressive power structures and involves a critical exploration of extended reality (AR/VR/MR). The resulting work is surprising, erotic, makes new space for poetry in empty hallways, registration lines and hotel rooms, queering spaces by creating meaning at the intersection of real world conference locations and literary augmentation, remixing a lesbian poetry archive, overlaying spoken word and a visual world, co-created between poet and machine. The experience will be designed to last about 5 minutes. Best with headphones.

The girl’s body soft as oatmeal
And smelling like opium
at lunch I go to her with the eyes of a car.
diamonds move within us
Ancient. new Look: we made this.
This potent Deep dive into two people
fold enough of them together for a long staircase
Narrow and dirty might as well be fucking Ithaca.
standstillstandstillstandstill hands together, fragile,
Each other’s most beautiful and impossible pressure
Look: we made this.
Reach out, feel the ghosts hanging around in
The shape of love
A clear golden shot from my soul to your bed,
screaming your name.

Speakers

Caitlin Fisher

Director/Chair, Immersive Storytelling Lab/Cinema and Media Arts York University

Caitlin is an award-winning digital storyteller and poet, working mostly in XR. She directs the art+ science Immersive Storytelling Lab and the Augmented Reality Lab at York University in Toronto. At York she is also a Professor and Chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Arts... Read More →

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 8:00pm EDT
Online

Activity

Modality Online
Keywords arts, LGBTQ+ studies, gender studies, AR / VR / MR, performance, poetry, writing

1:30pm EDT

Prediction XR - False Negative Or The Computer Says Nah

"Welcome to Digital Synchrony: Enter the Metaverse, Control Your Fate"In a digitally driven society, individuals can create virtual twins to navigate the metaverse, but the price is surrendering their biometric data. As society craves order and balance, a scoring system determines an individual's daily risk level based on facial expression and voice, impacting their digital twin's life. In this high-stakes world, hope lies in the promise of a better tomorrow.
Prediction XR is a WebGL interactive experience, which discloses scoring and risk assessment systems through face and voice recognition in a playful, yet realistic way. These scoring systems serve as the basis for future behaviour prediction, which is based on datafication, abstraction, classification and patterning which disqualify or omit certain data, and thus give rise to error and bias. “How data are conceived, measured and employed actively frames their nature” (Kitchin & Lauriault, 2014, p. 4). What happens if our datafied selves become real and influence our future? What and who gets to be perceived and what and who gets to be silenced? This world’s centre and its margins are inverted. It is a world where the “noise” becomes the “signal” (Steyerl 2017), and your anonymized data will transform into particles forming patterns in a collaborative, open ever-changing audiovisual artwork. Welcome to a world where data is never raw, and art is always political.

You are guided by a synthesized voice over through a sonic and visual journey in your web-browser. You will interact with an artificial facial and speaker recognition system via your biometric data (face, voice) to create your enrollment biomarkers (the system extracts some of your biometric features). The twist is that you can only enter the second part of the experience if your score reaches the "risk potential". This means that you must be profiled as “undesirable” to access the system (i.e.potentially dangerous because you are in a bad mood, your face is asymmetric and the system can't recognize it, and thus gives you automatically a high risk score, your voice shows traces of illness, you have an unrecognizable accent in English). The system must misrecognize and misclassify you. Thus, congrats to you if you are profiled today as “undesirable candidate” for a loan, or a job or a good insurance plan, and you might even end up on a heat list of the potentially dangerous just because you are in an “urban” area, you are in a bad mood, sick, you have a strong accent or a face defect! Trick the system as much as you can! But what happens if you are “positively” identified as you? Try to be somehow different: fake an accent, use facial-hacks, or go to a less affluent area in your city. If you succeed, you will enter the second part of the experience.

Created by Michaela Pnacek(ova)Technical Director - Anna Leschanowsky

Artists

Michaela Pnacekova

PhD candidate, York University

Michaela  Pňaček(ova) is an award-winning XR artist, PhD candidate and ELIA scholar at Cinema and Media Arts at York University, Toronto. As Graduate Assistant at the Immersive Storytelling Lab headed by Dr. Caitlin Fisher, she’s worked on multiple prototypes focusing on human-machine... Read More →

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 8:00pm EDT
Online

Activity

Modality Online
Keywords digital humanities, media studies, data, gaming, AR / VR / MR, risk assessment, facial recognition, voice, activism

1:30pm EDT

Queer City

This interactive Twine-based project is conceived as an art-installation that uses narrative storytelling to foreground enclave cultures of LGBTQIA+ communication and activism in urban Bangladesh. The project is conceptualized through the lens of 'Critical Making' both as a field of critical inquiry and a site that mobilizes trajectories of creative social justice engagements and makerspace activism and resistance against institutions of social oppression in the context of South Asia. The project came out of a series of Twine workshops organized in Bangladesh in February, 2022 by the artist, and it focuses on the extreme marginalization and oppression of the LGBTQIA+ community by the heteronormative and cissexist political, legislative, and religious institutions of the Bangladeshi nation-state. The project traces story-telling and documenting techniques by Bengali queer subjects as both queer curation and queer enclave counter-public formation and emphasizes the importance of Twine at the center of such LGBTQIA+ activism. Recalling Anastasia Salter’s theorizing of Twine’s ability to revolutionize and disrupt normative ways of storytelling, and Twine’s orientation towards queer and feminist outlooks, the project foregrounds how Twine as a platform coupled with critical feminist and queer makerspace practices can become a powerful tool against networked cis-sexism and queer-bashing not only in the context of Bangladesh, but also more globally. Elements of the project can be found here - https://mohammedrashid.net/socially-engaged-art-and-critical-making-projects/queercity. The final version of the installation will include interactive Twine storytelling sequences that will invite participants into the world of enclave queer cultures and makerspace activisms of Bangladesh.

Artists

Mohammed Rashid

The University of Texas at Dallas

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 8:00pm EDT
Online

Activity

Modality Online
Keywords digital humanities, LGBTQ+ studies, media studies, activism, participatory methods, twine, critical making, resistance, storytelling, public
Area HASTAC Scholars

1:30pm EDT

The Corrections

This proposal provides an overview of my current curatorial project “The Corrections.” “The Corrections” is an interdisciplinary exhibition showcasing a group of women artists-activists who are survivors of the Troubled Teen Industry (TTI). While the exhibition is specific to the lived experience of TTI survivors, it is reflective of larger societal issues involving disability justice, gender expectations, and oppression ingrained in carceral systems. “The Corrections” merges my artistic practice with my work as a community organizer fighting institutional abuse. The goal of the project is to provoke uncomfortable conversations about human captivity, reexamining who is entitled to inhabit civil society and who “deserves” removal.

The so-called Troubled Teen Industry is a multibillion dollar industry designed to modify the socially undesirable behavior of adolescents. This opaque network of for-profit facilities includes boot camps, wilderness programs, religious reform schools, and residential treatment centers*. The estimated 100,000 to 200,000 children currently confined in TTI facilities are held indefinitely at the program’s discretion, often for years. Communication with the outside world is grossly restricted or forbidden altogether. Widespread physical, sexual, and psychological abuse within TTI programs have been reported for decades.

Youth enter the TTI through the school system, foster care system, or are directly placed in programs by their family. The so-called delinquent behavior used to justify TTI placement is arbitrary and reflects our country’s legacy of institutionalizing women for subverting traditional gender expressions and expectations. Websites of female TTI facilities list items like “losing temper,” “relationship with older boyfriend,” and “promiscuity” as concerning behaviors that necessitate institutional placement. De-facto gay conversation therapy is a common experience for queer, trans, and nonbinary adolescents assigned female at birth.

The TTI is largely unknown to the public and remains almost entirely unregulated on both the state and federal level. It is only recently, through survivor-led activism like the #BreakingCodeSilence movement, that legislators and the general public are being forced to pay attention. The artists featured in “The Corrections” draw upon their first-hand experiences to expose the inner workings of this shadowy industry. While each story is unique, viewed collectively they share overarching themes: community dislocation, identity erasure, and the struggle to reintegrate in normative society after a period of prolonged captivity.

“The Corrections” was born out of my work as a grassroots organizer, and I view this curatorial project as a form of visual activism. Art becomes a vehicle giving voice to survivors, empowering them to publicly share their truth and resist the institutions designed to silence them. The project also celebrates the resiliency of survivors and their dedication to fight this system and protect future generations. My hope is that the exhibition and related programming help to move public sentiment away from confinement in favor of community-based alternatives.

For HASTAC 2023 I would like to guide conference participants through a 3D virtual tour of the exhibition on Matterport (the physical exhibition will be on view through June 17, 2023). In conjunction with the virtual tour, I will discuss exhibition-related issues such as carceral systems, behavior modification, and the use of visual mediums in organizing communities.

The topics that I will touch on during this talk include:

A brief overview of the Troubled Teen Industry. This includes recent cases of abuse and deaths that have occurred in TTI facilities as well as the ongoing work of activists to protect children currently being held in these programs
Situating the TTI within a centuries-long history of imprisoning individuals considered socially undesirable by the dominant culture. This includes women displaying gender nonconforming behavior, alternative gender expressions, and people with disabilities– particularly mental illness and substance use disorders.
Placing the TTI in context with our present-day carceral systems that profit from the surveillance and confinement of human beings
How visual mediums give voice to survivors and the ways in which activists are using participatory creative campaigns to amplify their message
The power of branding and design to create a cohesive organizational voice for activists. Design carries implicit emotional messages and helps legitimize survivors’ work
Sustainable and effective organizing practices when working with disabled people in disparate locations who face challenging life circumstances. I will reference the importance of collective care, resource-sharing and harm reduction

*While genocide and cultural erasure generally are not the main goals of TTI facilities, it is important to note that some Indegenous survivors of residential schools align themselves with the #BreakingCodeSilence movement

Speakers

Samantha Fein

Artist, curator, and community organizer, Independent Artist

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:30pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 8:00pm EDT
Online

Activity

Modality Online
Keywords arts, gender studies, disability studies, activism, community, participatory methods, art as activism, decarceration, institutional abuse

1:50pm EDT

Navigating and understanding Arab immigrant parents as the U.S. educational system

Being an Arab designer, and a researcher, enabled me to look differently and carefully at how are things made. My initiative is fueled by my passion for “critical making”, and by that, I mean being an open investigator within our community. Ya Salaam, situated at the intersection of design, education, and Arab migration, explores how to foster opportunities for Arab immigrant mothers (AIMs) to more fully participate in their children’s public school education.

Living in the United Arab Emirates allowed me to understand what multiculturalism and co-existing mean at a very young age. At a very young age, I learned the beauty of living in a diverse multicultural environment where the exchange of perspectives, culture, language, and experiences happens involuntarily. Having friends from different nationalities enabled my family and me to explore the diversity of the world through our everyday interactions and learn from each other. This diversity required international teachers to learn about each family individually, as well as complete a workshop at the beginning of the year to learn about the Arabic culture and traditions. Being a kid I was not able to understand how effective this is, however, I was able to see how my parents and other parents had very strong communication with the teachers and other parents. This made my parents as well as other parents very comfortable and allowed them to provide the needed support at home.

However, coming to the United States and being part of the Arab Community in Florida opened my eyes to issues that as an Arab immigrant myself worry me a lot. One of the recurring topics that are constantly discussed by the community in our meetings is the inability of Arab mothers to be involved the way they want in their children’s education. My qualitative and quantitative research indicates that AIMs are often othered and less engaged than they hope to be (or other parents are) due to a range of factors. Whether these are cultural misunderstandings, language barriers, stereotyping, or other barriers, the result reflects negatively on their children’s learning experiences and their ability to support their education (Bazzi-Gates, 2015).In order to address this problem, I listened to schoolteachers and Arab immigrant mothers as they spoke about their experiences and aspirations. Being an Arab immigrant mother myself, my research is further reinforced by my position within the community. Given this, I was eager to look closely into methods and solutions to bring mothers and teachers together. A lot of research has been done on immigrant parents and the educational system in the United States. For example, Korean mothers also feel unwelcome in their children’s schools in the United States(Sohn, Soomin & Wang, 2006). However, not much research focused on Arab immigrants, which made me more eager to explore opportunities.

The result of my research is the Ya Salaam initiative, a range of activities and interactions co-designed with Arab immigrant mothers and teachers to build community and understanding for long-term benefit. Ya Salaam creates a sense of familiarity between public school teachers and Arab immigrant mothers, opening the door to many opportunities for parents to more fully engage in their children’s education. The initiative encourages strong communication as an opportunity for growth and helps Arab parents unleash their potential within a multi-vocal, inclusive, diverse, reliable, and courageous environment. After data analysis, I found out that the road to community building with Arab immigrant mothers requires their involvement, thus I decided to base my initiative on the concept of “Manage by participants” this means that the session will be directed, managed, and led by potential participants.

Speakers

Shaza Jendi

Visiting Assistant professor, University of Florida, United States of America

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:50pm - 2:10pm EDT
Main 210

Papers & Talks

Session Title (Re)Making the University
Modality In Person
Keywords education, design, data, student-centered learning and teaching, equity, inclusion
Area Pedagogy

1:50pm EDT

“Content is King”: Content Moderators in an Information Economy

As social justice must account for private processes and the distribution of labor, critical making, which refers to “critically-infused reflection about aspects of the [making] process” (Ratto & Boler, 2014, 3), offers an entry point into interrogating social justice movements, including DIY-citizenship practices on social media.

Specifically, since Ratto and Boler (2014) argue “labor in an information economy” is a concern for critical making, I argue greater attention must be paid to the role that content moderators play in this process. Content moderators are the people who customer experience and staffing companies hire to delete objectionable content for their clients. Moderators perform a type of immaterial labor (Pinchevski, 2022), which can result in post-traumatic stress disorder (Riedl et al., 2020).

Thus, as critique is an iterative part of making (Galloway, 2015), this paper asks: what rhetorical strategies naturalize the harm that content moderators often experience?

I use critical discourse analysis to examine two data sets; first, I examine ten online job ads for social media content moderators. These job ads were selected because they were posted from different companies. Next, I examine the public-facing websites of the companies that posted those ads.

Through discussing three interrelated themes that emerged from this discourse analysis, I ultimately argue that both company websites and job ads subordinated content moderators to the content itself.

This work is significant to critical makers because, although content moderation processes are proprietary, critical making, with its history of seeking open-source solutions, is in a unique position to look for ways to make these processes and the effects more open and equitable. Following Costanza-Chock’s (2020) argument that how designers scope and frame their problems foreclose the types of problems they solve, this paper ends by calling for critical makers to scope and frame content moderation “problems” to account for the effects on human content moderators, rather than “content.” Specifically, I argue that a language of a feminist ethics of care (Leurs, 2017) might disrupt the current paradigm of content moderation that prioritizes growth at all costs (Gillespie, 2020).

References:
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. The MIT Press. https://design-justice.pubpub.org/
Galloway, A. (2015). Critique and Making. In G. Hertz (Ed.), Conversations in Critical Making (pp. 71–85). CTheory Books. https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/7070
Gillespie, T. (2020). Content moderation, AI, and the question of scale. Big Data & Society, 7(2), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720943234
Leurs, K. (2017). Feminist data studies: Using digital methods for ethical, reflexive and situated socio-cultural research. Feminist Review, 115(115), 130–154. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-017-0043-1
Pinchevski, A. (2022). Social media’s canaries: Content moderators between digital labor and mediated trauma. Media, Culture & Society, 0(0). https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1177/01634437221122226
Ratto, M., & Boler, M. (Eds.). (2014). DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media. The MIT Press.
Riedl, M., Masullo, G., & Whipple, K. (2020). The Downsides of Digital Labor: Exploring the Toll Incivility Takes on Online Comment Moderators. Computers in Human Behavior, 107, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106262

Speakers

Corinne Jones

Howard R. Marsh Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Thursday June 8, 2023 1:50pm - 2:10pm EDT
ARC E-13

Papers & Talks

Session Title Social Platforms
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords digital humanities, design, media studies, data, content moderators, social media, labor, digital economy
Area Platforms & Technology

2:10pm EDT

Being Chinese Online – Discursive (Re)production of Internet-Mediated Chinese National Identity

A further investigation into how Chinese national(ist) discourses are (re)shaped online on an everyday basis by diverse socio-political actors (especially ordinary users) can contribute to not only deeper understandings of Chinese national sentiments on China’s Internet but also richer insights into the socio-technical ecology of the contemporary Chinese digital (and physical) world. My enquiry aims at altering the focus of Chinese digital nationalism studies from merely fervent and political-charged online expressions of Chinese national sentiments to the discursive (re)shaping of the Chinese-ness via multiple socio-political actors’ everyday national(ist) discussions on China’s web. By making sense of how Chinese digital technologies’ affordances inform Chinese national(ist) discourses and their embodied national identities’ (re)production online, this study will be useful to both Chinese ICTs and nationalism researchers. This investigation will also uncover the underlying socio-political patterns and trends within the socio-technical context where significances of the Chinese nation are discursively (re)shaped online. Overall, it will offer significant implications for entities like the governments, corporations, news media and international organisations both in China and abroad concerned about socio-political impact of Chinese digital nationalism when dealing with problems about PRC. I adopt a discourse analytical approach to national identity and an ethnographic methodology with Sina Weibo (a Twitter-like microblogging site) and bilibili (a YouTube-like video-streaming platform) as ‘fieldsites’. The data collection method is virtual ethnographic observation on everyday national(ist) discussions on both platforms. Objects for observations on the two ‘fieldsites’ are dissimilar because of their differential socio-technical affordances. For Sina Weibo, observations centre upon targeted discussions on topics/objects that may evoke national(ist) sensibilities, whilst for bilibili, emphasis is located on ‘barrage’ comments and postings in the comments section attached to specific videos and other textual content which may elicit national(ist) feelings. On each ‘fieldsite’, I observe how different socio-political actors contribute to the discursive (re)generation of Chinese national identity on a day-to-day basis with attention to forms and content of national(ist) accounts that they publicise on each ‘fieldsite’, contextual factors of their posting and reposting of and commenting on national(ist) narratives and their interactions with other users about certain national(ist) discourses on each platform. Critical discourse analysis is employed to analyse data. From November 2021 to December 2022, I have conducted 36 weeks’ digital ethnographic observations with 36 sets of fieldnotes. Based on fieldnotes of the first week’s observations, I found multifarious national(ist) discourses on Sina Weibo and bilibili, targeted both at national ‘Others’ and ‘Us’, both on the historical and real-world dimension, both aligning with and differing from or even conflicting with official discourses, both direct national(ist) expressions and articulations of sentiments in the name of presentation of national(ist) attachments but for other purposes. Second, Sina Weibo and bilibili users have agency in interpreting and deploying concrete national(ist) discourses despite the leading role played by the government and the two platforms in deciding on the basic framework of national expressions. There are also disputes and even quarrels between users in terms of explanations for concrete components of ‘nation-ness’ and (in)direct dissent to officially defined ‘mainstream’ discourses to some extent, though often expressed much more mundanely, discursively and playfully. Third, the (re)production process of national(ist) discourses on Sina Weibo and bilibili depends upon not only technical affordances and limitations of the two sites but also, to a larger degree, some established socio-political mechanisms and conventions in offline China, e.g., the authorities’ acquiescence of citizens’ freedom in understanding and explaining concrete elements of national discourses while setting the basic framework of national narratives to the extent that citizens’ own national(ist) expressions do not reach political bottom lines and develop into mobilising power to shake social stability.

Speakers

Zhiwei Wang

PhD student, University of Edinburgh

Thursday June 8, 2023 2:10pm - 2:30pm EDT
ARC E-13

Papers & Talks

Session Title Social Platforms
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords sociology, media studies, race/ethnic studies, data, platforms, identity, discourse, nationalism, China, digital media
Area Platforms & Technology

2:10pm EDT

Making, Not Breaking: Resilience and Inclusive Making in the Era of COVID-19

Many educational institutions find themselves, in the wake of years of emergency remote learning, newly re-dedicated to in-person activities. Participants and educators alike approach these events cautiously, but with newfound appreciation for the types of activities that cannot be accomplished virtually. This paper urges those who are venturing into the world of hands-on learning to be deliberate in the spaces you create and the activities you cultivate, and to use these opportunities to help build resilient, inclusive communities. Collective making, especially in a learning environment, is an opportunity to be mindful of all of the ways material objects carry the weight of social systems: including but not limited to questions of consumption, wealth inequality, sustainability, and accessibility.

Based on case studies of spaces at the NYU-Gallatin School, located in Manhattan at the epicenter of the pandemic, this paper demonstrates how hands-on making, particularly projects that include some element of critical reflection, functions as a form of community building before, during, and in the aftermath of the height of COVID-19. Then, drawing from the creation of three spaces (a makerspace, an art/science collective and a shared studio space) as well as the work of a critical making research team, the paper presents locally-contingent best practices for the creation of an inclusive, student run and student centered experiential learning space.

Our space creation methods are informed by the work of Donna Haraway, Sara DiGiordano, Ellen K. Foster, Matt Ratto, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Eve Tuck, Ruha Benjamin and Sara Ahmed - among others. While recognizing the importance of terms like inclusivity and resilience, one cannot embrace these concepts without criticism - especially within the University (Ahmed), or within a larger captialist, imperialist structure, where "diversity" has become, in and of itself, a tool for commerce (Benjamin). Making truely safer spaces is

The final recommendations from our practice center on four principles: start sparse, partner with constituents, invite people multiple ways, and compensate everyone. The paper discusses the impacts of each of these principles, and then, recognizing our situated, specific knowledge, argues for greater networks of sharing between maker and creative spaces as localized sites of knowledge creation.

Speakers

Cyd Cipolla

Associate Director of Science, Tech, Arts and Creativity, New York University

Thursday June 8, 2023 2:10pm - 2:30pm EDT
Main 210

Papers & Talks

Session Title (Re)Making the University
Modality In Person
Keywords LGBTQ+ studies, race/ethnic studies, student-centered learning and teaching, makerspaces, critical making, feminism, anti-racist
Area Pedagogy

2:15pm EDT

Keeping the Edges Open: Towards an Inclusive Curatorial Practice in Regions Distant from Cultural Centers

The theoretical underpinnings of the lecture is in the critical reconsideration of culture in regions that are distant from cultural centers as conceptualized in subaltern studies from the mid 20th century, for example by Eduard Glissant and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and as developed by postcolonial theorists of the early 21st century such as Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, who consider marginal and indigenous cultures through the conceptions of multiscalar and queer cartographies. The lecture introduces the perspectives of curatorial and cultural professionals operating in regions that have sustained/ presently withstand a colonial reality and that are distant from cultural centers. Specifically, professionals that deal with the dominating force of a westernized cultural perspecive that is embedded in the ruling ideology of the region and that overshadows other cultural perspectives. Departing from Louis Althusser’s theory of the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) that explains in what way government institutions create knowledge constructions that are embedded within the ruling ideology, the lecture will ultimately deal with the power that is invested in cultural leadership/curatorship in regional institutions that are in the position to either enforce or critique the western, colonial cultural perspective. The lecture will embark with the question of how an institutional curator or cultural practitioner based in a region that was settled as part of the colonialist impulse, faces the dilemma of either reinforcing the colonial, governing agenda or openi it up to critique. This question will be addressed by considering Michel Foucault’s notion of local knowledge as an autonomous, non-centralised form of culture that is not dependent on the approval of the established regime. The lecture will consider Foucault’s idea of local, autonomous, non-centralised forms of culture that had stemmed in the European discourse of the 20th century, and how it has met the cultural discourse of the beginning of the 21st century. In what way is it possible for cultural professionals operating in institutions that are distant from cultural centers to introduce autonomous and non-centralised forms of culture into regional institutions that have assumed an overarching western cultural perspective and to ultimately challenge the ruling ideology that has eroded local knowledge and tradition? The lecture will tackle this question by demonstrating how their practice has met the limitations of the western cultural perspective and in what way these limits had led to the development of counter curatorial approaches. My presentation will present counter curatorial methods that I had developed during my directorship at two institutions, which I had also co-founded in the Negev, the international residency program Arad Art and Architecture, and the exhibition space Arad Contemporary Art Center, in the city of Arad (2014-2018) and how they communicated the cultural dominance and the power administered by the ruling ideology in terms of its western cultural perspective to its audience. From the perspective of a second-generation Israeli, I will demonstrate in what way the colonial impulse of my father’s generation that considered the region within a Jewish context, had overlooked rich regional knoweldges and cultures, and how the rushed creation of the state of Israel in the middle of the last century encouraged the dominance of a westernized perspective on culture. How the perspective that I embody, as a white, gendered and classed subject, brought me to research the Arab Bedouin indigenous culture through the notion of ‘situated knowledges’ as developed by Donna Haraway: as a mode of feminist objectivity that brings in vantage points of the subjugated that includes partial cultural perspectives of limited locations and embodied experiences that include traditional customs that pass from generation to generation through oral narratives. The challenges of representation of Arab Bedouin culture of the Negev will be demonstrated by myself through the analysis of The Museum of Bedouin Culture (f. 1980), located in the Negev (the area that lies between the Gaza border and the Dead Sea). The biggest museum in the world that deals with Arab Bedouin culture museum serves as a strong case of the absorbance of traditional and non-western cultural forms into the westernized, cultural perspective. I will discuss in what way the curatorial framework of the museum that exhibits traditional costumes; medicinal herbs; kitchen utensils; wedding ceremonials and guns and ammunition is tied to European museums that built their collections on artifacts from expeditions to the colonies during the 19th and early 20th centuries. And how, although the museum was founded at a time when post-colonial discourse was already very much alive, the museum’s curatorial agenda propagates the colonial ruling ideology and pursues a western approach to curating the Arab Bedouin culture. I will demonstrate counter curatorial approaches that combine subjugated perspectives, creating alliances between minority communities in the Negev ‘open the edges’ of the univocal western perspective and provoke a mode of engaged critique. Fleshing out the notion of ‘critique as engagement with’ as articulated by Chantal Mouffe as a form of radical politics that disarticulates existing discourses and practices with the aim of constructing a different discourse, I will demonstrate counter curatorial methods developed by myself in the city of Arad in the Negev desert that tackle the univocal and westernized curatorial perspective of the The Museum of Bedouin Culture by creating discursive settings in which perspectives of audience members from different communities may be articulated. Taking the contrasting social realities of Negev residents as its starting point (the Arab Bedouin population is the poorest community in Israel while the Israeli Jewish are the most well-off), the public event Salon Beton 1 that I curated dealt with the ideological construction of the city of Arad that was rooted in the analysis of the modernist aesthetic ideology of the construction of the city that was intended to create common ground between differential positionalities. Discussing what happens when artistic and curatorial interventions that raise differential opinions and positionalities exist in the public sphere of the Negev - where the ‘messiness’ of differential opinions is very much present - the analysis of the outdoor event that focused on a series of regional ‘brutalist playgrounds’ that were designed by the original planning team of the city will open adiscussion on the politics of play, leisure and recreation in the public sphere of the Negev and how it reflects the ruling ideology. How thewesternized cultural perspective that was present in the initial design of the city dictates the current reality of the city’s public sphere and the need to reach consensus regarding the meaning and use of public spaces. I will contribute my own experience in the development of curatorial methods that deal with the collection, categorization, preservation, and exhibition of ‘situated knowledges’ of non-western cultures in cultural institutions that represent a wide range of cultures including indigenous cultures. And finally, the lecture will conclude with a discussion on ‘critique as engagement with’ as a counter curatorial approach that sustains the tensions and hostilities that may arise from the intersection of partial perspectives and ‘situated knoweldges’ of residents from western and non-western cultures in cultural institutions that are distant from cultural centers and that represent a wide range of traditions and knowledges.

Speakers

Hadas Kedar

Lecuturer, Bezalal Academy of Art and Design

Thursday June 8, 2023 2:15pm - 3:00pm EDT
Room D

Papers & Talks

Keywords arts, cultural studies, platforms, accessibility, Indigenous/Native studies, inclusion, curating, subjugated cultures

2:30pm EDT

Design, but with borders back home: A Pathway to Explore Horizontal Design

In our paper, we will reflect on our teaching pedagogies as two female creatives and educators from two different parts of the Middle East. Our undergraduate experience allowed us to learn and understand from the opportunities given to us while pursuing our MFA in the United States and enabled us to shape our teaching methodologies to become more student centered. "Controlled structured design" is what we call our undergraduate educational experience. As undergraduate students, we had little to almost no freedom in choosing our topics or audience. Due to the endless social, political, cultural, and religious topics considered "taboos," our countries' systems and rules limited our design education. In college back home, design educators come to the class with project sheets where the instructor has already decided on the project topic, target audience, and deliverables — leaving students with no space or freedom to direct their own project. Living in a region surrounded by wars and several issues affecting human rights, we desired to reflect these events within our design work. This was strictly prohibited, and instead we were working on superficial topics far beyond the reality we were living in. This affected our perception of design.

While pursuing our graduate studies in the United States, we were first introduced to "Horizontal Design" in our program and coursework. The horizontal design methodology is a decolonized process where people from communities are directly involved in the process providing their input and making decisions about how they want themselves and their culture to be represented in the design (Cornejo & Rufer, 2020). This was an opposite approach to design that we had never experienced in our countries. Using Horizontal methodologies, we learned how designers could be part of more extensive conversations. This encouraged us to bring critical topics to the table. We were given a chance to discuss topics we feel passionate about that can alter people's lives and lived experiences positively.

Today, as two assistant professors in design at different universities in the United States, we encourage students to work on topics they are passionate about and want to impact change. Our classrooms are fueled with inclusion, acceptance, and collaboration that we missed as students in our home countries. We value using Horizontal Design methodologies in our assigned projects and exercises—giving students the freedom to choose topics and the audience they feel connected while enabling them best demonstrate their unique design skills and abilities within a solution. In addition, this allows for distinct topics to be put on the table and discussed. As design educators, this significantly affects the classroom environment and nourishes creativity within students' minds. Design students should be allowed to be part of any discussion, reflect their opinions, hopes, and ideas, and be trusted to be a transformative force in society. Our paper also reflects on the projects we worked on with students, which are multivocal and inclusive, using Horizontal Design and Co-design methodologies.

Speakers

Shaza Jendi

Visiting Assistant professor, University of Florida, United States of America

Samira Shiridevich

Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Thursday June 8, 2023 2:30pm - 2:50pm EDT
Main 210

Papers & Talks

Session Title (Re)Making the University
Modality In Person
Keywords education, design, student-centered learning and teaching, design-based approaches, equity, inclusion, freedom
Area Pedagogy

2:30pm EDT

What’s the #realdeal with #boycottism?: A critical analysis of online activism to study social movement on digital platforms

The societal structures of ‘new media’ artifacts are diversely perceived by people as per social understanding and positionalities. With a curiosity to find the provenance, meaning, and patterns of existing ‘digital’ cultures, I want to look at existing narratives and trends of social media. Using a critical lens, this project explores online activism leading to cancel culture and woke culture in and on digital spaces to highlight the existing power dimensions of networked societies. In the age of digitalization, the institutionalized social realities have found their way into the existing technohabitus (a word coined by me, inspired by Bourdieu to understand how dispositions in technological/networked societies are constructed/shaped and evolved), and so forth, governing critical digital sociology. Media consumption and popular culture play a significant role in the narrative formation and monitoring of societal norms and values. Technological determinism and its contestational dialectic with social-cultural realms have reified that technologies are not passive apolitical (Winner 1980) tools but radical interactive systems modifying human cognition (Dascal 2006).

With the ‘digital’ being the new 'normal' and popular culture rising, it is rather interesting to trace the pattern of ‘#’ (hashtag) trends that get viral on social media platforms. Be it companies like Tanishq, Manyavaar, Sabyasachi or Fab-India with new advertisement campaigns or some socio-political discussion, the slightest deviation from patterned norms leads to what can be called as ‘cancel culture’. Picking on the theme of social positionality with aspects of religion, gender, and caste — this project is a critical take on the debated and controversial ads of the aforementioned companies in the year 2020 that led to multiple ‘#boycott’ online movements. This digital hate culture has a deep sense of ethnocentrism giving allegiance to a particular way of life. It exists and thrives for power and control of human agency rather than justice. This project offers a critical review through an intersectional lens toward the idea of ‘what makes mainstream media mainstream’, so that the patterns in popular culture may uncover the intermingling or intertwining of cancel and woke culture through internet activism.

To conduct above stated research, I would be passively engaging myself in conversations around #boycott trends across platforms to understand the politics of internet activism. While the methodology is yet to be explored I attempt to unpack the humanistic inquiries on digital platforms using some computational tools and techniques. Using methodologies from digital humanities this project examines the conversations of cultures (Kirschenbaum, 2007) in internet activism.

Speakers

Lavanya Dahiya

MSc in Digital Humanities, Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur

Thursday June 8, 2023 2:30pm - 2:50pm EDT
ARC E-13

Papers & Talks

Session Title Social Platforms
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords digital humanities, sociology, media studies, data, activism, digital culture, boycott, critical lens, Internet, media
Area HASTAC Scholars, Platforms & Technology

3:00pm EDT

Break

Stop by the Student Union / Registration area throughout the conference for coffee, food/snacks, and daily activities.

Thursday June 8, 2023 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Registration/Breaks

Modality In Person

3:30pm EDT

House of the Living

House of the Living is a collaborative, socially engaged artwork between Swarthmore College and FarmerJawn, a Philadelphia-based, black-led food justice and urban agriculture organization. The project foregrounds social justice and critical making by using the intersection of art and agriculture to transform FarmerJawn’s greenhouse into a community memorial honoring individuals lost to the growing gun violence crisis in Philadelphia. Over the course of the project, the greenhouse will be transformed by over 400 photographic portraits laser etched onto plexiglass that will be installed as panels at the greenhouse. Upon completion, House of the Living will become a working monument; a functional space used for growing plants, a place of healing and regeneration for visitors, and a site for for violence prevention programing.

House of the Living is multi-year endeavor with many phases of planning and making. During summer 2022, we received funding from the Engaged Humanities Studio at Swarthmore College’s Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. This support has enabled us to develop a second community partnership with EMIR (Every Murder is Real) Healing Center, co-design the the memorial site with victims’ families, and fabricate the installation at pilot scale.
EMIR Healing Center is a Philadelphia-based organization that supports and advocates for families who are co-victims of homicide. With EMIR, we have held a series of participatory design meetings with families engaged in the project. Thus far, families’ responses to House of the Living have been overwhelmingly positive. Many have spoken to the idea that visiting the greenhouse will offer a more uplifting, forward-looking way to spend time remembering their loved one, because the site is focused on growing food and nuturing community. We are also working with families to envision and co-design future programming at the site. So far, participants have suggested planting sessions led by FarmerJawn at the greenhouse, art workshops to paint ceramic pots for landscaping the surrounding site, and poetry readings. FarmerJawn currently offers a number of violence prevention programs with PowerCorps and Urgent360, and plans to expand this programming in the future.

In addition to social justice, critical making, and participatory design, House of the Living also engages progressive pedagogy. Since receiving initial funding in summer 2022, two Swarthmore classes “Monuments and Public Space” and “Sculpture and the Environment” have been involved in the project. In these courses, we are critically applying technology available in our campus MakerSpace towards the project. This semester “Sculpture and the Environment” students are meeting with community partners, making three site visits to FarmerJawn, and creating 60 portrait panels, which we will install at the greenhouse at the end of the semester. Through using the laser cutter to create portrait panels, students are embodying critical making. After the class installs the first 60 panels at the greenhouse in May, a private opening for participating families is planned for summer 2023, with a public opening to follow in fall 2023. We are currently applying to national grants to complete the project at full-scale and begin programming on site with EMIR Healing Center during 2024.

Speakers

Jody Joyner

Assistant Professor of Art, Swarthmore College

Ron Tarver

Swarthmore College, United States of America

Brandon Ritter

FarmerJawn and Friends Foundation Fund, Philadelphia PA

Thursday June 8, 2023 3:30pm - 3:50pm EDT
PS 405 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Addressing Gun Violence
Modality In Person
Keywords arts, activism, community, sustainability, social justice, critical making, participatory methods, environment, race/ethnic studies, urban, agriculture, gun violence
Area Arts

3:30pm EDT

Remaking Classics: The Seven Wonders Project

Classical studies, traditionally the study of Ancient Greece and Rome, is at an impasse. Built on centuries of Eurocentrism and elitism, the field is now confronting appropriations by white supremacists that proclaim the superiority of “white heritage” and “western civilization” (McCoskey 2018, Dozier 2022).

This paper present my own contribution to a more just classics: a born-digital Scalar book called The Seven Wonders Project that mixes fiction, creative nonfiction, and scholarship to explore how modern and contemporary artists from marginalized standpoints, especially women and non-binary people of color, are reimagining ancient monuments. Particopants will be able to engage the project via url during the presentation.

Seven Wonders amplifies the work of these artists by inscribing them in a canon of wonders, a riff on the seven wonders of the ancient world. Although primarily selected by Greek writers, ancient lists of wonders disrupt the idea of Greece and Rome as the heart of cultural value by spanning a broader ancient Mediterranean that includes Africa, the Middle East, and culturally hybrid Greek city-states.

The project invites readers to put the canonical seven wonders, as well as other ancient monuments, in dialogue with modern and contemporary artworks that are themselves monumental or engaged with ancient monumentality. For example, a section on Kara Walker’s 2014 A Subtlety explores the Great Sphinx at Giza and the history of pyramids in Africa by way of Walker’s giant, Sphinx-like sculpture. The dialogue between past and present is enacted by the reader’s non-linear, hyperlinked navigation of the project and the connections they make between the many works it contains. This navigation is itself a form of critical co-making in which reader and author become mutually responsible for materializing the past in the present.

Yet information about ancient and modern monuments is not on the surface of the text. Instead, scholarly notes and citations are embedded in a series of letters between two semi-fictional characters. The interplay between letters and embedded annotations probes the nature of authority: what does the personal, embodied experience of art offer academics, and vice versa? Can scholarship co-exist with the knowledge-making practices of those historically excluded from the academy?

Taking inspiration from community art projects like Zena Kamash’s Crafting Heritage, the project also includes instructions for readers to make their own art. One section discusses Hive, Nancy Davidson and Lakshmi Ramgopal’s 2020 collaborative reimagining of the Artemis at Ephesus, a statue of the goddess Artemis adorned with rows of breast-like objects. This section ends with an activity called “Make a Votive Breast” in which readers are instructed to print, assemble, and manipulate a lacing card in the shape of a breast.

Yet the digital environment also poses some drawbacks. While I can include prompts and instructions for readers to engage with text and image, I can’t provide materials or ensure hands-on exploration. I would like to combat passivity in the digital environment and I look forward to feedback from the HASTAC community about how to do so.
Dozier, Curtis. 2017-2022. Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics. https://pages.vassar.edu/pharos/
McCoskey, Denise. 2018. “Black Athena, White Power.” Eidolon https://eidolon.pub/black-athena-white-power-6bd1899a46f2

Speakers

Clara Bosak-Schroeder

Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Thursday June 8, 2023 3:30pm - 3:50pm EDT
ARC E-13

Papers & Talks

Session Title Mediating the Ancient World
Modality In Person, Hybrid, Online
Keywords art history, digital humanities, classics, archaeology, arts, public engagement, scalar, interaction
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

3:30pm EDT

Brightly Burning: A workshop for primary caregivers

Novelist Doris Lessing (1919-2013), who tried to “keep brightly burning that lamp above the dark blind sea which was motherhood,” would not allow herself to be submerged by the chaos of taking care of her home and children. She was fully aware of the “stressful and burdensome” role of the caregiver, which includes “physical and psychological strain over extended periods of time, [and] is accompanied by high levels of unpredictability and uncontrollability, has the capacity to create secondary stress in multiple life domains such as work and family relationships, and frequently requires high levels of vigilance.” (from Physical and Mental Health Effects of Family Caregiving by Paula Sherwood PhD, RN, CNRN and Richard Schulz, PhD, published in American Journal of Nursing in 2008). A lesser known strain of caregiving includes a forfeiture of time and space to dedicate to creativity, which may lead to loss of identity, resentment, depression and/or other health issues.

Frequently, caregivers will begin revealing the trials of their duties by prefacing their complaints with, “I love [insert person being cared for], but…” or “Don’t get me wrong: I love [insert person being cared for], and…” to avoid judgment, to avoid being perceived as ungrateful or a person of ill intent. This will usually jumpstart a conversation of woes. Brightly Burning is an interactive writing workshop that assumes that introductory sentiment of love and yet challenges participants to avoid such obligatory statements and instead jump into the meat of their experiences unabashedly in the interest of communal understanding and in the interest of time.

Brightly Burning is mainly for primary caregivers of small children, though all caregivers of all types of human beings are welcome, in addition to anyone else who would like to join to discuss/write about themes including caregiving, self-care, time and creativity. This is a space for caregivers to emote and to share. It is for us to come together and feel taken care of, albeit for a short amount of time. It is an opportunity for us all to unearth kernels of creativity that we may have buried or ignored on account of being someone else’s pillar. My hope is that it will serve as an escape, a haven, a beacon. Because society sees caregiving and creativity as being at odds with one another, it is vital that we create spaces where caregivers are encouraged to practice and release their creative impulses.

In this workshop, we are asked to think about and dissect our own narratives in a nonjudgmental way by giving ourselves the gifts of time and reflection. We are asked to keep brightly burning our ideas, our own selfhood, and whatever makes us unique and weird. The Brightly Burning format will be similar to workshops I’ve held for socially engaged artists: We will welcome one another by briefly stating community guidelines (including but not limited to the fact that there will be no constructive criticism in this workshop, given the rawness of the material that will be devised). Then, I will read a passage on caregiving from Baby on the Fire Escape by Julie Phillips that we will then use as a diving board for a writing prompt. This is just the warm-up, and we will write for about 7-8 minutes. Following this, we will read a poem on this topic, discuss it (including craft and thematic components), and use that as the second writing prompt. The second free-write will be for roughly 15 minutes. We will use the remaining time to share and affirm one another’s work. No need to prepare anything in advance or bring anything other than something to write with.
Ideally, the next iteration of this work (after HASTAC) will include the same workshop format with the additions of this being in an in-person format and also including qualified childcare, so that participants are able to attend with their children.

Speakers

Sarah Esmi

Thursday June 8, 2023 3:30pm - 4:15pm EDT
Online

Workshops

Session Title Accessibility & Embodiment Workshops
Modality Online
Keywords languages & literatures, disability studies, community, participatory methods, accessibility, writing, workshops, creativity, caregivers

3:30pm EDT

Big Books Field Studio: Design Methods and the Canon

How might we critically remake a 19th century text written by a canonical British author by reading it in today’s place and time? What might the pages of David Copperfield have to say about shaping the city—whether by foregrounding indigenous knowledge, revisualizing its infrastructure anew, or tending to the feelings of righteous rebellion among one another? And crucially, how might educators craft new forms of socially-engaged pedagogy by adapting studio approaches to emplace text in the city? This proposed panel convenes the director and collaborators of “Big Books Field Studio” from the University of Arizona to share their answers to these questions.

Supported by an Fearless Inquiries Initiative “Opening the Canon” award from the College of Humanities, Assistant Professor Dr. Jacqueline Barrios conceived and directed the Public & Applied Humanities project “Big Book Field Studio” in the Fall of 2022. Collaborating students, artists, and scholars produced works that responded to a common design brief re-imagining Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850) within the landscapes and urban contexts of Tucson, AZ. These works formed the basis of The Book of the City: Exhibiting a Southwestern Urban Humanities, a public exhibition held October 25, 2022 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson as a part of the Tucson Humanities Festival.

Scholarly Context
Cued by the novel’s central concern with experiences of displacement, the studio weaves literary studies with design research, making visible moments of spatio-temporal collapse between the world of the novel and the borderlands city in which this community of readers resides. The studio participants work to resituate the novel as its 21st century “emplaced readers,” reconsidering in their own specific time and place how Dickens navigated his readers through experiences of social and emotional expulsion in his era. LitLabs forwards ways to play with canonicity and shows how site, the arts, and public-engagement intervene and translate textual objects and their status as symbols of rarefied literacy into as-yet unimagined forms of literary urban belongings.

These are spatial experiences of embodied understanding, historical interconnectedness, and speculative power about the city, that are produced and activated by the literary imagination. At once an emergent archive of cultural material and a repertoire for cultivating political consciousness, literary urban belongings result from transforming reading into a process for feeling and expressing a collective power to represent and transform our relations to the city itself.

Over the course of three months, students, artists, and early-career faculty collaborated to develop with the “fused practices” of the urban humanities (Cuff et al., MIT Press,2020). Building upon the publicly-engaged work of Dr. Barrios’ LitLabs in South Los Angeles K-12 school (Barrios, University of Iowa Press, forthcoming), the transposition of curriculum creates new intertextual and interspatial stories, of reading, audience building, and literary urban belonging.

Development & Organization
In the panel, participants will briefly present their projects through images and excerpts of video, describe the textual anchors for their work, share the creative processes behind them, and the conceptual engagements advanced through their fields. These include:

reading by moonlight to reveal the shadow of indigenous epistemologies and decolonize a white text (Kiana Anderson, PhD Student in English)
recontextualizing sites and situations of disciplining in a participatory project to cast off individual burdens of shame and humiliation onto thrift store figurines through queer theory and activism (Dr. Harris Kornstein, Assistant Professor in Public & Applied Humanities),
a visualizing the entanglements of exploited and low wage labor to reimagine bus shelters and infrastructure for spatial justice (Kenny Wong, Lecturer in Sustainable Built Environments and Urban Planning).

At roundtable’s end, participants and audience alike will discuss a shared set of questions and provocations:

How do these projects illuminate new relationships and critically remake the “canon” (or “big books”) of your field and beyond?
What are the publics of so called “big books,” and what could be the urgency or motivation behind the task of producing them?
How can a literary imagination produce new ways to study space?
How might fused methodologies, growing from the studio and collaboratively reaching across disciplines, impact practice, pedagogy and research in your field?

Impact
The panel will speak to a wide audience: from advanced undergraduate and graduate students, to faculty and instructors, to community-based practitioners and creative collaborators. The “Big Books Field Studio” framework and its individual projects provide a successful example of place-based, interdisciplinary collaboration across expertise and positions. Brought together by the literary imagination and driven by critical making, the studio emplaces the work of the classroom to “coauthor the city” by experiencing it through the eyes of community storytellers, treasured places, and the studio collaborative. It layers the reflective development of new curriculum, critically reimagining the instruction of canonical works,and the education of an increasingly diverse population of readers, with the advancement of each participants’ own areas of research.

Speakers

Harris Kornstein

University of Arizona, United States of America

Jacqueline Barrios

Assistant Professor, University of Arizona

Dr. Jacqueline Jean Barrios is an Assistant Professor of Public & Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona. Dr. Barrios specializes in projects that connect literature and urban spaces, bringing urban histories and culture to life through interdisciplinary, socially engaged... Read More →

Kenny Wong

Lecturer, University of Arizona

Kenny Wong is a lecturer in the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning. He carries experience in the diverse facets of housing design and policy, with a concentration on affordable housing and community development. Driven by commitments to spatial and social justice, he has... Read More →

Kiana Lynn Macayan Anderson

University of Arizona, United States of America

Thursday June 8, 2023 3:30pm - 5:00pm EDT
Room E

Panels/Roundtables

Modality In Person
Keywords languages & literatures, LGBTQ+ studies, architecture, Indigenous/Native studies, design-based approaches, canon, 19th century novel, humanities, borderlands, design research

3:30pm EDT

Critical Making from Within the Academy: Enacting New Paradigms for Academic and Social Change

In this panel, nine doctoral students from five fields will reflect on how collaborative program-making can help to transform one’s research, teaching, and institution making and resisting--and with potentialities for community activism beyond the academy as well.. All students on this panel are at a public graduate school, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where, on fellowship, they all still teach as adjunct professors throughout the vastly underfunded, “minority majority” CUNY system. Given our dual roles as students and teachers, we will discuss how our mission of “advancing equity and innovation in higher education” shapes our programs and how these core values are reflected through daily praxis and pedagogy. Critical making and social justice are the cement of our activities, and the way we organize and manage FI is strongly anchored in transgressing traditional boundaries of the academy (Davidson, 2017; Hooks, 1994;).

This panel will highlight how this collaborative program models a different way of being than is traditional at our higher education institutions (Davidson, 2017; Hooks, 1994). For example, two doctoral students in FI serve as the co-directors of HASTAC Scholars, the arm of our program that extends peer learning, collaboration, and equity far beyond CUNY. We will discuss formative principles including collaborative work, innovative pedagogies, peer mentoring (Budge, 2006) and collective brainstorming that help foster both success within the academy and beyond.

Budge, S. (2006). Peer Mentoring in Postsecondary Education: Implications for Research and Practice. Journal of College Reading and Learning, 37(1), 71–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/10790195.2006.10850194
Davidson, C. N. (2017). The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux (1st edition). Basic Books.
Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.

Speakers

Hilary Wilson

HASTAC Scholars Co-Director, CUNY Graduate Center

I'm interested in collective ownership and cooperative economies, housing, public institutions and their role in community-building and social justice struggles, food justice, and participatory research

Kelsey Milian

Futures Initiative, CUNY

Rod Hurley

Futures Initiative, CUNY

Shaun Lin

HASTAC Scholars co-director, Futures Initiative, CUNY

Shaun Lin is pursuing a PhD in geography at the CUNY Graduate Center, where his research interests include immigrant communities, food and foodways, and abolition geography. He is an adjunct lecturer in Urban Studies at Queens College.

Christopher McGuinness

Parisa Setayesh

Futures Initiative, CUNY

Thursday June 8, 2023 3:30pm - 5:00pm EDT
Main 210

Panels/Roundtables

Modality In Person
Keywords education, mentoring, student-centered learning and teaching, participatory methods, community, students, mentorship
Area HASTAC Scholars, Pedagogy

3:30pm EDT

Spatial Equity Tools: A roundtable discussion on data transparency, spatial equity, and community co-production

Using data to reveal conditions and experiences of inequity can be a critical tool in the fight against socio-spatial inequalities (Williams, 2020). Although many cities house extensive collections of data that are freely available, much of it is not accessible to policy-makers and community representatives without having prior data literacy (D’Ignazio, 2017; Williams, 2020). Too often, individuals who want to use data are, instead, the subjects of data, and they are not able to harness its power to effect tangible change (D’Ignazio, 2017; Rosan et al. 2022). In seeking to address and reverse spatial inequity, data access, data transparency and data literacy are critically important to building knowledge convergence amongst urban decision-makers and citizens, and to empowering individuals to advocate for and enact policy-level solutions (D’Ignazio, 2017; Hagen et al. 2019; Williams, 2020; Rosan et al. 2022).

This roundtable invites participants to discuss the concept of spatial equity, as both a process and an outcome (Buhangin, 2013), and consider tools that have been deployed in identifying, measuring, and evaluating equity in the public realm (Kuruppuarachchi et al. 2017; Finio et al. 2020; Zrzavy et al. 2022). Participants will discuss current barriers to spatial equity tools (Zrzavy et al. 2022), reflect on a recently launched tool, Spatial Equity NYC, and discuss an in-progress tool for community knowledge building in Philadelphia, PREACT (Planning for Resilience and Equity through Accessible Community Technology). These will serve as case studies for the ‘critical making’ of community equity narratives developed through data-informed equity tools. The capacity for equity tools to inform and influence policy-making (Hagen et al. 2019), evaluating if and how socio-spatial inequalities exposed by spatial equity tools contribute, or could contribute, tangibly to advocacy and policy-level changes, will be a key discussion point for this roundtable. Additionally, the discussion will focus on the critical role of community participation in driving and directing the creation of data-informed equity narratives that have the ability to inform urban policy changes. Discussion will include the importance of inclusivity in participation, and the representation of diversity (race, class, gender, socio-economic status) in tool development. Roundtable participants will conclude with a discussion of the validity, applicability and scalability of action-oriented, knowledge-building equity tools, such as Spatial Equity NYC and PREACT, and collaboratively explore tool development best practices in building data transparency and citizen empowerment through community co-production, in the fight for spatial equity in the public realm.

The expertise of this roundtable in environmental justice, transportation advocacy, urban planning and design, data visualization, and community engagement and education will be invaluable to building a collaborative assessment of existing spatial equity tools, and a consensus on best practices for creating community-driven, data-informed equity narratives. The outcome of this roundtable will be the genesis of a practicable guidebook for community co-produced spatial equity tools.

Case study projects
Spatial Equity NYC, a publicly-accessible digital platform, seeks to foster data transparency and increase data literacy through visualizing open-access transportation, health and environment data in an easily navigable tool that both reveals spatial inequities and offers solutions for city council leaders and community board representatives across the city. Through Spatial Equity NYC, Transportation Alternatives (TA) and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) at MIT processed and visualized spatial equity metrics such as Park Access, Traffic Fatalities, Noise Pollution and Asthma Rates, to build a picture of the inequities evident across the city and how they interrelate to one another. Through mapping at various scales Spatial Equity NYC has offered council and community board leaders a clearer image of the specific challenges faced by their district, as well as how their district ranks across metrics in comparison to others. Revealing connections across the data has allowed council leaders and community representatives to recognize where investment is most critical, and where inequities have proliferated. As Spatial Equity NYC also proposes multi-scale spatial and policy-based solutions to these inequities, users are further able to advocate for and implement policy changes as a direct result of the spatial inequities exposed by the platform. With TA’s extensive outreach to partners all over New York City, including council district leaders as well as community advocates, the Spatial Equity NYC project was informed by TA’s deep knowledge of existing spatial equity metrics, influenced by community input and advocacy through years of activism in the transportation and public space sectors. Following a considered post-launch user analysis of Spatial Equity NYC, evidence has demonstrated that this tool supports efforts toward policy change by moving decision-makers, advocates, and residents in advocacy for spatial equity.

PREACT (Planning for Resilience and Equity through Accessible Community Technology) is a spatial equity project underway in Philadelphia that is working to develop a co-produced tool for community knowledge building on issues of spatial equity across Philadelphia, working closely with community partners in identifying inequities and then developing an informative and interactive tool to support policy change. PREACT will be a multipurpose and multi-scalar climate preparedness and neighborhood planning software application informed by community values, needs and assets. While most planning tools are designed and built in a top-down manner, centering software developers and planners, this project will articulate a framework for technology co-production that fully takes into account the needs and experiences of community members and allows for the integration of social and scientific data for more informed and equitable decision-making.

Roundtable Discussion Agenda (90 minutes)
15 minutes - What is spatial equity? A discussion (debate) on the concept and its relationship to public space; spatial equity tools and barriers to use
10 minutes- Reflecting on Spatial Equity NYC; data transparency and social equity
10 minutes - Planning for PREACT; community knowledge-building in Philadelphia
15 minutes- Spatial equity tools and policy change; If/how spatial equity tools influence tangible policy change; Why is this significant?
15 minutes- The critical role of community in building equitable data narratives; Community-informed data metrics for measuring equity; Co-production of data literacy tools; Reversing a top-down approach; Best practices in data transparency, data for empowerment, and community co-production
25 minutes- Discussion with attendees

References
Buhangin, J, “Spatial Equity: A Parameter for Sustainable Development in Indigenous Regions.” In The Sustainable City VIII, edited by S.S. Zubir, 1343–50. Putrajaya, Malaysia: WIT Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.2495/SC131142.
D'Ignazio, Catherine. “Creative data literacy: Bridging the gap between the data-haves and data-have nots,” Information Design Journal 23 (2017): 6-18.. 10.1075/idj.23.1.03dig.
Hagen, Loni, Thomas E. Keller, Xiaoyi Yerden, and Luis Felipe Luna-Reyes. 2019. “Open Data Visualizations and Analytics as Tools for Policy-Making.” Government Information Quarterly 36: 101387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2019.06.004.
Rosan, Christina D., Megan Heckert, Russell Zerbo, and Erykah Benitez Mercado. 2022. “Building a Vision for More Effective Equity Indices and Planning Tools.” Frontiers in Sustainable Cities 4 (September): 947452. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2022.947452.
Williams, Sarah. Data Action; Using Data for Public Good. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020.
Zravy, Arianna et al. 2022 “Addressing Cu

Moderators

Sarah E Williams

Director of the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, MIT

Sarah Williams is currently an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and the Director of the Civic Data Design Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) School of Architecture and Planning School. The Civic Data Design Lab works with data, maps, and mobile technologies... Read More →

Speakers

Christina Rosan

Temple University

Jessie Singer

Staff Writer & Marketing Manager, Transportation Alternatives

Daniela Coray

Research Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Niko McGlashan

Research Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

JUAN CAMILO OSORIO

Pratt Institute

Alia Soomro

New York League of Conservation Voters

Thursday June 8, 2023 3:30pm - 5:00pm EDT
ARC E-02

Panels/Roundtables

Keywords digital humanities, design, data, community, participatory methods, social justice, spatial equity, data transparency
Area Data

3:30pm EDT

Storytelling Across Media and Critical Making and Social Justice

This panel will be a conversation drawn from the graduate seminar and production workshop, “Storytelling Across Media” taught in the School of Media Studies at The New School. As a course with a focus on critical making and social justice, “Storytelling Across Media” engages with mediums such as audio, video, electronic literature, and new media platforms juxtaposed with addressing intersectional differences such as race, gender, class, ability, and citizenship. Through constructionist learning--learning through creating--students participated in creative media workshops grounded in theory with an exploration of "Storytelling Across Media." Social justice topics explored include New York City, food, incarceration, gender and racial justice, HIV/AIDS, and other social issues as students write and create across media. Media visibility and the centering of alternative voices confronting structural inequities was a key component behind the design of “Storytelling Across Media.” Students channeled their diverse voices into media-making with a syllabus that was equal parts course, workshop, and collaboratory.

While the predicted outcomes for the course included a website featuring individual graduate student projects as well as presentations and a celebration, the New School PT faculty strike disrupted these plans and led to a different outcome - a stronger “classroom as community.” The course participants did not cross the digital strike line and stood with part time professors during the Part Time Faculty strike. Despite the strike (or possibly in part because of it) - the actual outcome was a stronger classroom community of media makers & artists, also collaborating on a conference panel, not just as classroom colleagues, but as close interlocutors, collaborators, and friends.

In this panel graduate and faculty media makers from The New School Media Studies will discuss and reflect on storytelling across media through their respective projects, and the experience of creating and convening during the Part Time Faculty Strike at The New School. Sarah Wilson will discuss interactive documentaries as methodology for practice based research. Margaret Rhee will discuss her digital poetry and pedagogy projects on socially engaged justice issues. Jeff Sweeton will discuss his long time media practices in technology pedagogy and gamifying “We Are Having This Conversation Now” by Alex Juhasz and Ted Kerr (Duke UP). Andrea L. Fernández will present a pair of multi-media paintings integrating course theory and perspectives on the Part Time Faculty strike.This panel will demonstrate how the engagement with creative design and social justice approaches to technology, education, and movement building can be illustrated in a variety of media such as I-Doc, data visualization, digital poetry, HIV/AIDS media, gaming, and the politics of academic labor. In doing so, we aim to reflect on the course that was designed centering social justice and critical making, and how creating media and storytelling during an academic labor strike lends itself to strengthed bonds of community, solidarity, and criticality within and outside the classroom setting.
Key Terms: polyvocality, non-linearity, algorithms, methodology, world building, idocs, Korean drama, decolonizing practice based research, chatbots, HIV/AIDS, Gender equality, Data Visualization, Academic Labor strikes

Key Terms: polyvocality, non-linearity, algorithms, methodology, world building, idocs, Korean drama, decolonizing practice based research, chatbots, HIV/AIDS, Gender equality, Data Visualization

Speakers

Margaret Rhee

Assistant Professor, The New School

Sarah Wilson

The New School, United States of America

Andrea L. Fernandez

The New School, United States of America

Jeff Sweeton

The New School, United States of America

Thursday June 8, 2023 3:30pm - 5:00pm EDT
Main 212

Panels/Roundtables

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, digital humanities, education, media studies, participatory methods, idocs, critical making, HIV/AIDS, gender equality, data visualization
Area HASTAC Scholars, Critical Making

3:30pm EDT

Willful Interventions: Community Engagement and Critical Making

Sara Ahmed suggests that the way to transform an institution is through practice, rather than through theorizing. In this panel we discuss resistant practices through the invocation of bodily presence and ethical representation, asking what it means to intervene in spaces not necessarily designed for us.

Virginia Kuhn and Selwa Sweidan begin the panel by discussing their project, Sacred Poses: A Cross-Cultural Movement Analysis Using Motion Capture. Repurposing the tools of the entertainment industry, the Sacred Poses project examines embodiment as expressed through three distinct movement traditions: a) Muslim prayers (salat); b) Tai Chi; and c) Yogic sun salutations (Surya Namaskar) with the goal of comparing the ways in which each disciplines the body in addition to the mind. In concert with a group of advisors that include subject matter experts, choreographers, and an expert in haptics and computer vision, a dancer was trained in each of the three traditions, after which her movements were captured by the fifty cameras in the performance capture stage of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Kuhn and Sweidan will present the early results of this endeavor, arguing for the value of epistemologies concerned with embodied knowledge, that which is considered non-academic. Indeed, as Audre Lorde maintains, in patriarchal systems, women have “come to distrust that power that rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge,”--those ways of knowing that have been vilified in western culture. By reclaiming such knowledge structures and considering them in conjunction with more traditional epistemologies, we might embrace multiple ways of knowing without the immediate judgment of our preconceived notions. In this way, Kuhn and Sweidan maintain, we can more fruitfully intervene in dominant ideologies and challenge oppressive knowledge regimes, opening up a space for a radical type of praxis.

Next, Alexandrina Agloro discusses opportunities and challenges of critical making, justice, and our current funding structures. She addresses ethical considerations for community-based tech research by looking at projects in the early phases of development and prioritizing lived experiences as research. In particular, she discusses 2 projects: collaborative work with a self-professed low-tech historian to develop a video game with migrants, and digital tool development with a national collective of birthworkers of color as ongoing research landscape changes including doing research during the onset of COVID-19, and what the fall of Roe vs. Wade means for health research. Agloro details theoretical grounding and practical how-to’s, including aspects that still need to be considered while doing virtual research: real bodies are still on the other sides of our screens.

Viola Lasmana then explores the practices, ethics, and creative nuances of collaboration across different communities in transnational and global contexts. Drawing from multimedia and transmedia productions by women’s collectives, artists, and media makers, Lasmana emphasizes the significance of the collaborative process and calls attention to roots of the word collaboration; it is more than just working together, but also about making the labor visible: collaborate comes from the Latin laborare, to work. In considering the transformative and at times complicated elements of working together across disparate spaces, Lasmana asks what community means and how community is created through not just an intersection of different identities, but also various media forms and platforms, thereby making what Sara Ahmed calls a “willful archive,” borne out of a feminist and radical practice.

Together these speakers respond to Ahmed’s notion that theory is only as useful as its potential impact on practice. Relying on abstraction, theory tends to “drag away, attach, pull away or divert.” As such, “we may have to drag theory back, to bring it back to life” This panel is an attempt to do just that: bringing theory back to life via critical making, reflection and, above all, an intense care for the world in which we live and the people with whom we interact. It is only through this process, we contend, that we might transform the institutions in which we labor.

Speakers

Virginia Kuhn

Professor, University of Southern California

Alexandrina Agloro

Arizona State University , United States of America

Viola Lasmana

Rutgers University

Selwa Sweidan

PhD Student, University of Southern California

Thursday June 8, 2023 3:30pm - 5:00pm EDT
Room D

Panels/Roundtables

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, design, cultural studies, media studies, activism, algorithms, community, technology, resistance
Area HASTAC Scholars

3:30pm EDT

Rebuilding the Future Together: Subverting Standards of Practice with Speculative Design

What are the limits of professional standards and best practices? Though often useful, when do such standards begin to hinder creative growth? How can we learn from visual practitioners to challenge orthodoxies within our areas of expertise, and envision alternative futures? This 90-minute workshop will consider the limits and opportunities of professional standards and, collaborating across fields, explore approaches such as critical design and avant-garde art movements, and ultimately challenge conventionality by posing troublesome problems that encourage reflection and prompt consideration of alternative futures in education.

The Association of College & Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016) is a set of six threshold concepts that aim to help learners understand information production, use, and value. Though primarily used by library practitioners teaching information and media literacy, the concepts outlined in the Framework support learning about the use and creation of information across disciplines. This learning is most effective when facilitated by library practitioners in close collaboration with course instructors, and to ensure a rich conversation the workshop facilitators (all academic librarians) encourage broad participation from beyond the library field.

Facilitators of this workshop have utilized the Framework in concert with non-traditional structures and methods, to envision an alternative future for informational professionals. As part of the Speculative Library Futures Post-Pandemic Libraries, a yearlong exploration of speculative design and libraries, they collaborated to create a Speculative Card Deck of prompts and actions to generate situations that disrupt the traditional use value assigned to the library. Using this deck in professional spaces has opened up new avenues for inquiry, critical conversations, and a reimagination of how we approach information literacy in higher education.

While claiming to emphasize the ethical use and creation of information through critical self-reflection, the ACRL Framework implies a passive, individualized learning agenda that maintains a focus on textual media. By applying the perspective of critical information literacy (“a theory and practice that considers the sociopolitical dimensions of information and production of knowledge, and critiques the ways in which systems of power shape the creation, distribution, and reception of information”), the workshop facilitators will guide participants in collectively re-imaginingthe ACRL Frames to assert social responsibility, to acknowledge critical making as information seeking, and to grapple with how emerging technologies are shifting the information economy.

The workshop will begin with an introduction to the ACRL Framework, critical information literacy, and manifestos and principles created by art and design organizations such as Design Justice Network, BlackSpace, design studio Dunne & Raby, and the Fluxus movement. A review of critical design and the Situationist International idea of the dérive will position our workshop practice as a disruption to information literacy. Participants will then work in small groups to discuss the Framework through their disciplinary perspectives and according to their own pedagogical practices.
Inspired by the futurities envisioned by these manifestos, designers, and artists, the groups will engage in ideation and serious play through the creation of a card deck. Decks are used in art and design fields as a game-based methodology for stakeholder participatory collaboration. They function both as a tool for speculation and as a set of illustrations that visualize creative thinking. A classic example is the deck Oblique Strategies, designed and originally published in 1975 by musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt. Each card in the Oblique Strategies deck offers suggestions such as “Ask your body,” “Try faking it!,” and “Use an old idea” that are intended to help users break through a creative dilemma. In the introduction to the 5th edition (2001), Eno and Schmidt explain, “These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognised in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.”

Many decks now emphasize practices like social justice or equity and they require no particular skill or specialized knowledge to use. The objects and stories derived from these practices act as prompts for discussion and debate about hypothetical, but perhaps possible, realities. For instance, The Black School, which is an experimental art school teaching radical Black history, created a Process Deck that helps activists brainstorm projects, considering how art can prompt local change. Similarly, the Instant Archetypes Deck from design firm Superflux, responds to "the world of tech-saturated late capitalism" through reimagined tarot cards.

The card prompts generated in this workshop will derive from participants’ reflection about how the information literacy Frames are typically applied in their own disciplinary contexts. They will consider the standards and assumptions underlying how information is created, used, valued, and shared by practitioners in their respective fields of study. For example, one of the Frames, Scholarship as Conversation, asserts that learners who are developing their information literate abilities “identify barriers to entering scholarly conversation via various venues.” In the context of a visual art practice, interrogating this assertion might entail identifying what a “scholarly conversation” looks like in a given visual arts field, and if barriers to entering it might look differently from those that impact conversations in more text-oriented disciplines. How can visual arts scholars and practitioners creatively re-envision these conversations, and identify participatory barriers in order to collectively dismantle them? When re-formulated as card deck prompts, these standards and assumptions become imaginative exercises that can disrupt traditional information literacy principles and imagine alternative approaches.

At the conclusion of the workshop, participants will share their card prompts with the facilitators, who will collate them into a Speculative Information Literacy deck that will be shared digitally. This will enable participants to use, remix, and share their prompts beyond the workshop space.
1. Speculative Library Futures: https://www.derekzoladz.com/project/tedsig_futures/
2. Drabinski, Emily, and Eamon Tewell: "Critical information literacy."
3. Oblique Strategies: https://www.enoshop.co.uk/product/oblique-strategies?filter=Oblique%20Strategies
4. Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework

Speakers

Mackenzie Salisbury

Information Literacy Librarian, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Ashley Peterson

Research & Instruction Librarian, Media & Data Literacy, UCLA

Shannon Robinson

University of Southern California

Thursday June 8, 2023 3:30pm - 5:00pm EDT
PS 311 (Design Center)

Workshops

Session Title Design Workshops
Modality In Person
Keywords library and information studies, design, pedagogy, literacy, design-based approaches, critical information literacy, speculative, social justice

3:50pm EDT

Plague of Athens | an XR learning experience (emerging tech for education)

Based out of Northwestern University in Qatar—and involving a talented, interdisciplinary team from around the world—Plague of Athens is an XR learning experience designed to enhance student understanding of the role of pandemics in world history. The Plague of Athens web app features advanced web animation, digital storytelling, and interactive learning. The VR version, built for the Oculus Quest 2, pushes new boundaries in terms of immersive history education.

Historical Context for COVID-19
Plague of Athens provides historical context for students about the challenges COVID-19 has presented to people around the world. The design of Plague of Athens is positioned at the nexus of innovative pedagogical, theoretical, and technological practices—including narrative studies, multimodal literacies, and game-based learning research. Synthesizing the best of history games, visual learning, interactive textbooks, and history apps, Plague of Athens introduces novel features, design elements, and affordances—demonstrating the effectiveness of applied educational research to enhance learning outcomes. The central question posed is whether—and to what degree—the innovative digital learning design of Plague of Athens will result in a measurable increase in student interest, engagement, and understanding of key concepts in epidemiology as well as the role of pandemics in world history. A secondary question is how to iterate product design to improve engagement and successful learning outcome metrics even further.

Plague of Athens immerses and engages students through meaningful choice and multimodal interaction design; provide systems-based interpretations that emphasize complexity, interdependencies, and causal connections; played out within a problem space that encourages students to perceive connections between past and present—making that understanding more visceral, tangible, and real—and in the process sparking enthusiasm for learning about the past. Plague of Athens offers an innovative solution for engaging millennial students and inspiring curiosity for learning about history--conecting to the conferenc theme of "creative, educational, and social implications of emerging technologies, including extended reality (AR/VR/MR)." This immersive, cross-platform digital learning experience introduces multiple novel technologies, including:

3D Motion Design to Recreate History
Advanced Web Animation to Simulate Pathogens
Immersive 360 Panoramas of Historical Locations
Animated Historical Timeline & Maps
Choice-based Narrative Design
Interactive Original Historical Documents
Media-Rich Adaptive Assessments

Chapter 1 is called “To Do No Harm” and tells the story of Nikos of Athens, a physician during the Plague of Athens, 429 BCE, who struggles to treat the multitude who fall ill during this world-upending ordeal, causing him to question everything he holds dear, from his faith in Apollo, healer under the gods, to the meaning of his Hippocratic Oath, and what is truly at stake in medical ethics.

The Chromebook web app features cutting-edge digital learning design, web animation, interaction design, and digital storytelling: https://pandemics.historyadventures.app

The video walkthrough of the Web App for Chromebook can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/wZ-HVOJvqSs
Meanwhile, the VR version takes things to another level by guiding students through the streets of Athens during the worst of the ancient plague. The video walkthrough for the VR dev build can be found here: https://youtu.be/pTN2msFABaU

Speakers

Spencer Striker

Associate Professor of Digital Media Design, Northwestern University in Qatar

Thursday June 8, 2023 3:50pm - 4:10pm EDT
ARC E-13

Papers & Talks

Session Title Mediating the Ancient World
Modality In Person, Online, Hybrid
Keywords history, education, design, AR / VR / MR, design-based approaches, digital, learning, immersive
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

3:50pm EDT

Playful Armor: Defining and Designing Safe Learning Spaces

This paper narrates the iterative assessment process conducted over the course of ten years regarding the school design project as a core component of the master of architecture professional program pedagogy. This work took place within three contexts that informed each new iteration of the school design project: the national professional requirements by the accrediting body, the National Architecture Accrediting Board (NAAB), particularly regarding the role of stakeholders; the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood that is the local urban context of Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture; and the research conducted at New York City (NYC) K-12 schools with students, teachers, and administrators. The final iteration of this school design project pedagogy, described as a “playful armor,” was the result of navigating the ambiguous territory of the school building typology, one that demands to be simultaneously open to its community and closed to all that is external or disruptive. Having set out to make “safe learning spaces,” the work led to increasingly nuanced definitions of what constitutes a safe learning space.

Describing a place as “safe” means it affords security or protection. It follows that designing a safe space for learning involves making a boundary that effectively keeps out whatever would interfere with a school’s internal activities. What is considered safe can be defined by what it is not: not likely to cause harm, not likely to lead to injury, not involving danger. Keeping dangers out of learning spaces leads to conceptualizing the building’s skin as a kind of armor, and the history of architecture is full of examples of these armor-like skins in education buildings. For example, when Eero Saarinen built a dorm for the University of Pennsylvania, he angled the window cuts so that the exterior wall appeared thicker and more impenetrable. The impenetrability of school buildings has new relevance in the face of increased school shootings in the United States over the last decade, now tracked by several organizations, including The Washington Post. The NYC Department of Education (NYC DOE) emergency drills now include lockdowns, further emphasizing the importance of making the school building be and seem impenetrable. For architecture students at Pratt, these concerns necessitate understanding the urban context of their own architecture school’s location. According to data published by NYC’s Mayor’s Office, a limited number of neighborhoods account for half of gun violence in NYC. One of those neighborhoods currently identified by the city’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence (OPGV), Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, is adjacent to Pratt Institute. But “safe” can also refer to something that is so averse to risk it stagnates in unenterprising approaches. The OPGV is not “safe” in this sense because, in an enterprising way, it looks beyond traditional law enforcement strategies to engage community-building strategies. Research regarding progressive approaches to gun violence that start with the community can also be found in psychology publications, including a 2013 report by the American Psychological Association, “Gun Violence: Prediction, Prevention, and Policy.” Similarly, in the development of design pedagogy, “safe” is also defined more comprehensively, teaching future architects how to design spaces in holistic ways. Good design pedagogy shifts the focus from the impenetrable building envelope to an architecture of community engagement. The “armor” becomes “playful armor” as it necessarily continues to control access, but in a way that simultaneously invites community participation.

Regarding the first context for the development of this learning space design pedagogy, the professional training of architecture students: A design exercise involving institutional typologies such as the school project focuses on understanding the role of the stakeholder. It also focuses on its social justice counterparts of accessibility (in all senses, physical and socio-cultural), and inclusivity. Strategies for the development of the school design curriculum in this context included one-on-one interaction between architecture students and multiple K-12 age groups in a range of classroom activities, from building bridges to designing reading nooks; conversations with teachers and administrators; inviting thirty fifth-graders to final architecture presentations at Pratt; watching documentaries about progressive school practices that featured students, including Approaching the Elephant (2014) by Amanda Wilder; interviewing students regarding their existing school spaces; and introducing films that enable architecture students to empathetically inhabit the complex world of childhood such as, for example, Céline Sciamma’s 2011 film Tomboy. Studying a film with the visceral power of Tomboy and being able to spend time with K-12 students, the actual occupants of the building they are designing, gave the architecture students the confidence to propose ambitious formal-programmatic schemes. A safe learning space is one that is accessible, inclusive, and reflecting true knowledge of its stakeholders.

Regarding the second context for the development of this design pedagogy, the specific context of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, and the greater NYC urban context, there are several formulaic approaches developed since the 1970s regarding making urban spaces safe. The architect Oscar Newman’s “defensible space,” and the criminologist C. Ray Jeffery’s “crime prevention through environmental design” or CPTED are attractive because they offer easily understood and enacted guidelines. Their positivist approach toward the creation of safe spaces, however, tends toward the reductive and works against holistic design approaches. Directives such as “make everything well lit” and “make all areas of the space visible” may sound right, but actually work against a design approach that benefits from varied lighting and cozy nooks. Footcandles and sightlines are easier to measure than the holistically assessed design quality of a space, but such a simplistic approach to design cannot lead to cohesive and nuanced design work. In order to make urban spaces that are conducive to community building, the more nuanced understanding of “safe,” the students’ study of their design project’s urban context was bracketed between fully developed urban design narratives and specific neighborhood urban knowledge from planners brought into the classroom. Exercises included, for example, inventing a dialogue between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses about urban design approaches to the site. Site-specific conversations with planners included the neighborhoods of Williamsburg/Greenpoint, Red Hook, Hunter’s Point, Bay Ridge, and Sunset Park. Instead of a paint-by-number approach to the making of urban spaces, students devised urban fabric interventions through Socratic, dialogue-based approaches.

The third and final context for the development of this design pedagogy is the research conducted in NYC K-12 schools with students, teachers, and administrators. This research paralleled the development of the pedagogy for architecture students and relied on established teaching practices such as those in Montessori schools, as well as newer approaches such as Stuart Brown’s argument for the benefits of free play, Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence, and the compilations of school design strategies found in The Third Teacher. The most important components of this research, however, were the collaborations with teachers and administrators and the direct observation of students in classrooms. The years following the 2010 New York State’s adoption of Common Core Learning Standards provided excellent opportunities for the documentation and critical evaluation of how progressive teaching and learning practices were enacted in a variety of school environments, from the humble double loaded corridor to the extravagant auto-closing glass fire door. Best practices for the design of learning spaces were develope

Speakers

Maria Sieira

Adjunct Associate Professor CCE, Pratt Institute

Thursday June 8, 2023 3:50pm - 4:10pm EDT
PS 405 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Addressing Gun Violence
Modality In Person
Keywords architecture, gun violence, new york, schools, play, pedagogy, design
Area Design

4:10pm EDT

A Philosophy of Gun Violence: Guns and Critical-Making

The late- philosopher Bruno Latour said that “You are different with a gun; the gun is different with you holding it.” This proposal for a traditional paper presentation centers on my recently published book, A Philosophy of Gun Violence (2022), which examines the affordances and technological intentionality of guns to explain the growing gun violence epidemic in the U.S. This talk will be framed by the works of technology philosophers like Winner, Latour, Verbeek, and Postman and their associated theories. This talk emphasizes both critical-making and social justice (or lack thereof), as they apply to gun ownership and gun-carrying in public spaces.

Indisputably, there is a strong correlation between access to guns and the resulting gun violence that disproportionately affects marginalized and vulnerable populations. Compared to its peer countries, the U.S. has a significantly higher rate of gun ownership and gun deaths per 100,000 people. Mass shootings plague the news cycle almost daily. Meanwhile, the gun lobby advocates for loosening gun laws and restrictions as a way to combat gun violence, often relying on the instrumentalist refrain that “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

In this proposed talk, a dialogue will be used to explore how guns - and more specifically, gun-carrying - affects and distorts the perceived reality of the gun citizen. This talk is particularly suitable for the scope of this conference because of its focus on the critical-making, or poiesis, activity, of gun designers and manufacturers and the ethics and values that are baked into their gun designs. Included in this discussion is a proposed model of gun reform, which leans on ethical frameworks like Value-Sensitive Design (VSD), Design for Wellbeing (DfW), and Responsible Innovation (RI) in order to highlight the features and affordances of guns that promote killing and connects this with social contract theory (Rousseau) and the legal protection for prima facie rights.

Gun-carrying also plays a central role in social justice. Aside from the high-profile cases of police brutality and killings of unarmed Black men, we might also consider the privileges of gun ownership for different racial and economic groups, as evidenced by the differences in the presence of guns at rallies like Unite the Right and the January 6th insurrection in comparison to the largely nonviolent Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 and beyond. Simply put, the gun creates a power imbalance in the social hierarchy and is a privileged right for some groups while incriminating others.

Critical-making and social justice are undeniably connected. This is translated by our technological artifacts, and the gun is perhaps one of the most emotionally-charged examples of this. It is important that we have hard discussions about our technologies – like the gun – that are non-neutral and value-laden.

Speakers

Alan Joseph Reid

Associate Professor, Coastal Carolina University

Thursday June 8, 2023 4:10pm - 4:30pm EDT
PS 405 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Addressing Gun Violence
Modality In Person
Keywords affordance theory, design, design for wellbeing, design-based approaches, digital humanities, gun violence, values
Area Critical Making

4:10pm EDT

Accessible Augmented Reality and 3D Printed Objects at Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy

Museums have long been under-resourced and underfunded, especially in the areas of digital innovation and accessibility practices. A fear of "getting it wrong" is also an immobilizing force that prevents innovation. This paper explores the design and implementation of three student-led and student-created digital modules for visitors with diverse motor, cognitive, sensory, and behavior-emotional disabilities for a historic house museum located in Florence, Italy. The prototypes utilize aspects of open-source software, and low-cost, sustainable solutions. In this paper, existing technology-based accessible initiatives employed in NYC-based historic houses provide the basis for effective practices. By outlining and describing three student-built working prototypes developed for a small historic house museum called Villa La Pietra located on NYU's campus in Florence, Italy, the author aims to illustrate new ways that cultural workers in small historic houses can build ground-breaking accessible technology projects themselves.

The student-built prototypes include the design and development of an augmented reality platform to digitally integrate historical and archival photography of Villa La Pietra using image descriptions, a relational database of the Acton guestbook with digitized signatures that trace the connected histories of visitors to the Villa over the last century, and the design and implementation of a 3D printed object from Villa La Pietra's collection so that it becomes accessible beyond the bounded regions of a visual field for visitors that are blind or have low vision. This paper explores some of the creative, educational, and social implications of emerging technologies for small historic house museums, including extended reality (augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality) and 3D printing. The research and pedagogy outlined in this paper are designed to build a greater understanding of digitally-based accessibility practices in historic houses and inspire future generations of technologists, students, and cultural workers, enabling them to lead the future of museum access.

Speakers

Rosanna Flouty

Director | Clinical Associate Professor, Museum Studies, New York University

Craig Kapp

Clinical Professor, Computer Science, New York University, United States of America

Thursday June 8, 2023 4:10pm - 4:30pm EDT
ARC E-13

Papers & Talks

Session Title Mediating the Ancient World
Modality In Person, Hybrid, Online
Keywords arts, computing & computer science, design, AR / VR / MR, accessibility, museums, technology, prototyping
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

4:20pm EDT

Intersectional Feminist Epistemologies, Provenancial Fabulation and Diffractive Analysis: Storytelling as Knowledge in the Digital Humanities

This paper emphasises the centrality of storytelling and embodiment as modes of intersectional feminist epistemologies within the practice of digital archivists, artists and scholars, who were interviewed as part of the research project, Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities (FSFDH). The aim of FSFDH, which is jointly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK and the Irish Research Council, is to create more inclusive DH practices by applying feminist approaches that link cultures, communities, and repositories, and to embed intersectional feminist praxis, as a critical methodological approach, across DH environments. “Full Stack” is invoked here as a metaphor to account for the comprehensive nature of the project.

Collaborative approaches include interviews, a community archives forum, coding workshops, public talks and an open call for artists, with representatives of communities traditionally marginalised within DH on the basis of their sexuality, gender, race, class, ability, or intersecting identities. The goal of these collaborations is to identify the biases, exclusions and limitations, as well as the transformative potential, of the digital tools, platforms, infrastructures and methodologies these practitioners employ in their practice, which will ultimately feed into an online toolkit that they and others can use to ensure that their digital project is as inclusive and diverse as possible.

Prioritising storytelling and embodiment is one way in which the project actively serves to decentre dominant perspectives, histories, technologies and practices and is also reflected in the findings from our community engagement interviews. Archiving oral histories; documenting dance practice; utilising virtual reality as a space to disrupt the gender binary through playfulness; and animating archival artefacts using numerous creative methods including 3-D modelling, represent some of the ways in which the interviewees foreground embodiment through processes of digitally-mediated storytelling to centre marginalised lives, experiences and knowledges.

To account for this disruption of dominant knowledges and claims to objectivity within traditional institutions, analysis of the interview transcripts draws from Barad’s “diffractive” methodology (2007) and Lapp’s articulation of “provenancial fabulation” (2021). A diffractive analysis involves reading data and theory through each other in a decentred way, rather than applying a hierarchical category of codes to an interview transcript, for instance. (Barad 2007; Taguchi 2012; Mazzei 2014). In addition, “provenancial fabulation…serves to decentre “the archival gaze,”” which is understood to be white, cis, powerful and male (Lapp n.p. 2021).

Furthermore, this paper broadens the concept of provenancial fabulation beyond the archive to include the artistic and scholarly practices of our interviewees. Similar to a diffractive methodology, provenancial fabulation also disrupts notions of “singular, central creator bodies—to instead account for difference, contention, and the entangled nature of feminist lives and histories” (n.p.), thus undermining claims of a singular, objective truth or origin. Instead, these concepts allow for the foregrounding of storytelling and embodiment, not just as a means of reimagining lost or partial accounts of marginalised lives, or misrepresentations of the past, but also as a way of imagining alternative intersectional feminist futures, based on creativity, playfulness and diversity.

Speakers

Izzy Fox

Postdoctoral Researcher, Maynooth University

PD Researcher on Full Stack Feminism in DH @fullstackfem

Thursday June 8, 2023 4:20pm - 4:30pm EDT
Online

Papers & Talks

Modality Online
Keywords digital humanities, gender studies, data, archives, participatory methods, intersectionality, embodiment, provenancial fabulation, diffractive analysis

4:30pm EDT

Treating Legacy Colonial Data as Data Error: Decolonizing data through participatory data collection and storytelling at Mohenjo-Daro

Mohenjo-Daro (27° 15’ N, 68° 05’ E), is located in contemporary Pakistan in Sindh Province and is considered one of the main urban centers on the Harappan landscape, extending well over 100 hectares, with some arguing for the extension of the site to up to 250 hectares (Jansen 1994: 270; Possehl 2002: 185; Tosi, Bondioli, and Vidale 1984: 15). This third millennium BCE ancient city was first documented and excavated in 1922. For a hundred years this site has lived within Sindhi cultural memory through song, poetry, literature, and internationally through archaeological work. First reported by Sir John Marshall in the 'Illustrated London News' in 1924, MohenjoDaro became part of the international public, specifically part of the British public. Due to this practice a distinction was created between what was considered locally relevant and what was of international significance. Utilizing excavation reports from the first two decades of work at the site as colonial legacy data, this paper addresses the multiple ways by which the documentation of colonial work at this archaeological site violates ethical sensibilities around information, data management, and accessibility. As a way to decolonize this practice, we will present ways by which participatory data visualization can undo some of that violence by making the archaeological data accessible to local populations, thus providing the possibility for it to sit alongside the song, poetry, and literature related to the site.

This is part of a larger project by the Laboratory for Integrated Archaeological Visualization and Heritage (liavh.org) around making Mohenjo-Daro data accessible to broader publics through data visualization. The project of documentation and visualization begins with creating data sets. extracted tables and converted narrative text from excavation reports to create searchable data. The source data was primarily the original, print-format excavation reports in the books 'Further Excavations at Mohenjo-daro: Volumes I and II' by Ernest J. H. Mackay, from the excavations in 1927-1931. These books present the data through long-form narrative, list structures, images, and hand-drawn neighborhood plans, along with Mackay’s interpretation of what might have been ancient life on site. These interpretations are embedded in the data sets as we digitize them. Rather than digitizing data in a critical vacuum, the authors of this paper present alternative methodologies in the effort to decolonize the legacy data set.

Much work done on decolonizing data is situated within settler colonial contexts (for example, Quinless 2021). Within postcolonial spaces, like Pakistan, there is also a dire need to reexamine how data is made and maintained. This project considers how we might make data differently. This paper will present the results of participatory work conducted in December at MohenjoDaro. Rather than us informing communities on how data is made, we will be working with and alongside folks as research collaborators to figure out how we might consider data making differently. We anticipate this will allow us to integrate how local communities understand the data already through storytelling, song, poetry, and folklore.

Speakers

Itzamna Huerta

Pratt Institute, United States of America

Uzma Rizvi

Associate Professor, Pratt Insitute

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, and a Visiting Faculty at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (2007), followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University (2008... Read More →

Mahnoor Fatima

Pratt Institute, United States of America

Thursday June 8, 2023 4:30pm - 4:50pm EDT
ARC E-13

Papers & Talks

Session Title Mediating the Ancient World
Modality In Person, Hybrid, Online
Keywords digital humanities, archaeology, data, participatory methods, mohenjodaro, storytelling, decolonial, heritage
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

5:00pm EDT

Opening Reception

Join us for an reception in the Student Union celebrating the opening of the conference and the exhibition in the Steuben Gallery. Refreshments will be served at this opening reception. The exhibition will remain open through the duration of the conference.

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - 7:00pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Main Events, Reception

Modality In Person

5:00pm EDT

Feel the ghosts hanging around in the shape of love: an immersive AR poetry suite

Speakers

Caitlin Fisher

Director/Chair, Immersive Storytelling Lab/Cinema and Media Arts York University

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Activity

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, LGBTQ+ studies, gender studies, AR / VR / MR, performance, poetry, writing

5:00pm EDT

Archiving Artist-Run Spaces

Archiving Artist-Run Spaces is a workshop and an archival project to preserve images, oral history and activity of precarious artist-run spaces as well as online creative communities. These communities, especially those connected to exhibiting physical works, may exist in a physical space such as 'alternative spaces,' places that artists convert into public exhibition space other than traditional commercial galleries such as warehouses, lofts and storefronts. Other artist-run communities may exist solely online, never having inhabited a physical space. But both may have community members who engage in discussion online in a forum, host a website, share images, post online videos, among many other activities. These communities build websites or use platforms like Flickr, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and others to share and document their activity. These platforms are also where visiting guests who may take photos, screenshots or otherwise engage with the works may post their own documentation. When DIY artist communities come together in a community of practice, they contribute writing, images, poetry, memes, music, videogames and other media depending on the platform and the media of the community. As these spaces wish to preserve their activities, events, and creative works they brush up against the limitations of using platforms as their main broadcast channels. They may lack documentation; sites and platforms may restrict access, shut down, or change business models; volunteers may disappear, get burnt out, or move on. Archiving Artist-Run Spaces will present the unique challenges faced by these communities, present examples of producing digital archives and a toolkit of possible tools and workflows for selecting and preserving and sharing these works. Participants will be led through a process to identify, collect, collate and start the process to present a digital archive of their own or to contribute to building a selected artist-run community's archive. Guiding questions include: What are the ways these communities (which may exist only on Discord, a forum, a Facebook group, or a GitHub repo for example) can preserve their work outside of the closed platform? What does preservation mean when we are talking about documenting ephemeral media? What is the role of oral history in documenting these spaces and communities? And how do we consider sharing this work as research, for exhibition and for the communities themselves? This work will be informed by looking at current examples of building digital archives and oral history of DIY artist-run communities and several models of "preservation." Examples of digital archives by DIY artist-run communitities include The Glorious Trainwrecks Software Collection, KCHUNG Radio in conjuction with Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Experimental Archive Space for Space 1026, Little Berlin online, Babycastles Archive and others.

Archiving as a practice has evolved enormously and in recent years a number of scholars have written about, critiqued and experimented with new forms and approaches to archiving. Approaching the idea of the archive means one must deal with discussions of power, and who gets to tell and ‘preserve’ a community’s story and who has access to the archive itself. An important question each community must address is who they are building their archive for. Looking at archives and archival practices of communities concerned with justice and equity provide insight on concerns when building an archive. Examples examined includeMukurtu Indigenous Archiving Tool andInterference Archive, dedicated toexploring the relationship between cultural production and social movements, and the practices of digital archives such as Open Research Archive at NSCAD.

Ultimately, the success of long term preservation (in addition to access) of a web archive is dependent on the location it is stored. The archives are currently stored on a non-corporate web server space with backups, as well as GitHub, and local copies given to the artist-run spaces. An exhibition of physical archives is part of the proposal, which shows physically stored copies of these digital archives. A cooperative agreement with the Internet Archive to serve as an institutional steward of web archives and server is currently in discussion, and additional partners for longterm stewards of these archives is being sought.

Artists

Lee Tusman

Assistant Professor of New Media and Computer Science, Purchase College

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, library and information studies, archives, public engagement, open access / open knowledge, community, diy, alternative space, digital zines, platforms
Area Arts

5:00pm EDT

bb is a video game which questions the mainstream framing of climate crisis solutions being aimed at individuals versus the lack of corporate onus. Individual emission levels are dwarfed by the amount of destruction that is being caused by corporate malpractices, yet many green initiatives are aimed at consumers. Framing the climate crisis as an issue which is the individual’s responsibility is unproductive in reaching sustainable solutions and harmful towards the mental well-being of these individuals. bb mimics mechanics of a 2D side-scrolling, survival/community-building game. In bb you play as a child born into the climate crisis where you must negotiate a balance among your own desires, the environment’s needs, and how much responsibility you have the mental fortitude to take on.

Artists

Chelsea Brtis

Assistant Professor, UNC Charlotte

Chelsea Brtis is an Assistant Professor of Digital Illustration at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. They received a Bachelor of Architecture from Iowa State University and an MFA in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication from the University of Texas at Dallas. In... Read More →

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits, Creative Futures

Modality In Person
Keywords climate change, video game, environment

5:00pm EDT

Body Utilization, Body Grief

This interactive piece explores how to body is lost to different systems, especially public facing, capitalist, work systems. It is easy to loose one’s self to the larger institution both internally and externally-with those who are served. Please remove the piece and wear it for a period of time to experience the loss of self to the piece.

Artists

Leah Dudak

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits, Creative Futures

Modality In Person
Keywords bodies, capitalism, fiber art

5:00pm EDT

Bug square

In my project bug square, I used game engine to create a digital world that have many biological bugs (insects). And I use the aesthetics of computer bugs, glitches to construct the visual effects and environment. The sounds of the project is based on my daily feelings of bugs. In the project development process, I think a lot about balance, at the beginning was the balance between biological bugs and computer bugs, and later I need to balance my own feelings in the project. At the beginning, I was not thinking about symbiotic or the ecosystem. It’s more of the exploration of the term “bug”. And while I am making the world, and think about all the elements of this project, I feel I am explore “symbiosis”, I try to explore how digital systems and biological systems coexist in the same space, and how people might be affect by it.

You can view a working in progress video here: https://youtu.be/cdKfyYYlal0

My decision to make my master thesis on computer and biological bugs started in the summer of 2020. While I was isolated in New York working on computer projects, my roommates asked me to go upstairs to deal with some actual biological bugs. Since then, I want to make a project for them both to live. I have many stories about each of them. I recorded those feelings with bio-sensors and I used them to build some visuals of the virtual world. At both the graduate and undergraduate levels, a lot of my works were about capture, and now, at this time, I am still trying to create and capture bugs. But for the mechanism I built in the program, I will never capture them with my virtual hand. In my thesis development process, I have come to believe that both computer bugs and biological bugs have the right to stay. For us as humans, it’s okay to make human errors, and we should be less human-centered with the planet we are living in. I hope the viewers create their own narratives after watching the simulation. In the end, we should all go out and enjoy everything we have.

The process of making of this project is critical making. From the concept to have the finished artwork, it's a lot of experiment, failures. Like I mentioned before, it about learning from the process, and think out of the human side. Have a world build by the bugs, and have the work for the bugs. When I had this concept, I think too much, but it's not about the thinking, in the end, it's about how I can make it.

Artists

Haoyu Wang

Creative technologist, Alt Ethos

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, computing & computer science, data, gaming, sustainability, ecology, experience, glitch art

5:00pm EDT

Disordering the DSM

This piece reshapes the DSM through the experiences of neurodivergent people. Autistic people’s descriptions of engaging in their interests and passions become the most legible source of knowledge, highlighting autistic joy and challenging the DSM’s authoritative status. The DSM is disordered through the autistic maker’s practice of knitting, which the DSM would identify as an example of "restrictive and repetitive behaviors." Through autistic techniques, the DSM itself is shown to be restrictive, twisted, and fragile. Using the DSM as creative material demonstrates how neurodivergent people craft forms of knowledge that might draw on diagnostic terms but do not leave neuronormative categories or descriptions intact.

For more information about this research project: www.craftingautism.com

Artists

Rebecca-Eli Long

PhD Candidate, Purdue University

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits, Creative Futures

Modality In Person
Keywords autism, psychology

5:00pm EDT

Earth Fortunes

Earth Fortunes is an augmented reality (AR) installation developed collaboratively by artists and engineers, and created as part of the multi-year project, Speculative Energy Futures. The installation generates energy fortunes based on the computer model GCAM: the Global Change Analysis Model and serves scenarios responsive to the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways or SSPs. Users shuffle and deal with beautifully-illustrated fortune-telling cards and access the AR via a QR code. The large triptych, itself a form of data visualization of the engineering data, launches the AR fortune-telling experience encouraging questions around sustainability, equity, social justice and the kind of futures we want or can imagine.

Created by: Caitlin Fisher (York), Evan Davies (University of Alberta), Wallace Edwards (independent artist)
Student researcher at the University of Alberta: Evan Arbuckle (Engineering)
Studetn Researchers at the Immersive Styorytelling Lab: Sharon Musa (Engineering), Joo Park (Digital Media), Michaela Pňaček (Cinema and Media Arts)

Artists

Caitlin Fisher

Director/Chair, Immersive Storytelling Lab/Cinema and Media Arts York University

Evan Davies

Michaela Pňaček

Sharon Musa

Student, York University

Wallace Edwards

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Keywords arts, engineering, data, AR / VR / MR, sustainability, earth fortunes, speculative, gcam, energy transition

5:00pm EDT

FSGS: from Seabed to Pressbed

The Field Studio Geontological Survey (FSGS) is a design research collective assembling and extending Ochre dimensions to address Human/Nonhuman inter-subjectivity and the ontological reconciliation between Life and Nonlife. FSGS is an alternative practice in resistance to the colonial, capitalist influence of the USGS and its products. It expands potential through design methodology and critical making as material knowledge production. (Ratto) The geontological survey is concerned not-only with the ontology of geological beings but also the agency and entanglements that surround them in more-than-human worlds. I am proposing an exhibition of Ochre bodies, pigments, swatches, and resulting maps from FSGS surveys at the East Tintic Mining District in so-called Utah. This proposal is directly relevant to the conference theme as an example of critical making for social justice and intersects with multiple aspects of the identified conference scope.
Field Studio Geontological Survey
FSGS works in three modes to survey and report: Field, Studio, and Community Operations. In the act of surveying, Ochres are assembled in field operations in their original form as Ochre bodies, that are later ground to produce Ochre pigments and swatched to extend Ochre dimensions through the materiality of color. In the act of reporting, as designers and makers we are becoming-with Ochre in studio and community operations—the work is communal and involves a public audience through participation and workshops, as well as public exhibitions, publications, and archive. FSGS products include the pigments and swatches as the expressions of Ochre bodies, as well as prints, maps, atlases, and tools that communicate stories of their entanglements in ecologies, in politics, and in movements towards social justice. FSGS centers ethical practices in assembling Ochres with proper permissions and respect for sites. FSGS ochres are only assembled from existing washes, road cuts, and mine tailings where materials are already in a state of flux.

FSGS: Tintic Mining District
The Tintic Mining district is located 60 miles southwest of Salt Lake City at the eastern most edge of the Basin and Range. The district is named for the East Tintic Mountains, which in turn are named for Chief Tintic (1820-1858), a resistance leader of the Timpanogos who retreated to the mountains after losing in battle to the Mormon invasion of his ancestral territory known as the Tintic War. The region including so-called Utah Lake, Utah Valley and the adjacent Goshen, Tintic, and Cedar Valleys, is the ancestral territory of Timpanogos, Ute, Paiute and Shoshone.

Exhibition
I return to the district regularly for FSGS field operations in an ongoing relationship to place and it’s enclosed narratives. For this exhibition I propose including ochre bodies, pigments, and swatches from Tintic, as well as FSGS printed works that illustrate and explore alternatives to the colonial history of the region. Ochre bodies and pigments are displayed on physical constructions I design and fabricate based on vernacular mining precedents. The proposal includes new works as well as the Stellar Corpse Atlas which is a 7-plate atlas describing plural origins and human/nonhuman meanings of the district. Each 12”x18” atlas plate is printed on a Vandercook No. 3, with Ochre from the site applied in a gum arabic binder. I am interested in the multiplicity that emerges in the edition through the variation that occurs in the Ochre application, challenging traditional notions of competence found in consistency. Each print becomes a map, not a tracing. Varying methods of binding media also produce potentials parallel to the phenomena Barad describes when different apparatuses for measurement find light to be either particles or waves: “what we're talking about here is not simply some object reacting differently to different probings but being differently.” (Barad, 2012, p. 6) In different binders and media, Ochre is “being differently” — each print becomes an alternative dimension or reality mapped on the page.

Each product and map produced from surveys at Tintic are only a beginning, a prologue, a point and a line towards further unraveling of past, present, and future. At Tintic, multiple worlds enfold human stratifications intersecting mineral strata. Cartesian notions of time and space—nature or culture—are inadequate to reconcile the plural universes within our earthly landscapes. To navigate multiplicity, we must engage new epistemological tools and return to knowledge embedded in relationship between human and nonhuman. By including Ochre bodies, pigments, and swatches, with their resultant products, participants are engaged in a heuristic experience of the materiality of geological memory, site, and color.

Artists

Elpitha Tsoutsounakis

Assistant Professor, University of Utah

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords design, public engagement, design-based approaches, ochre, critical making, posthuman

5:00pm EDT

Gota: Lineage of Adornment

Gota is an ornamental embroidery technique which originates in pre-colonial India. It traces its lineage through a cross cultural fascination between the Mughals and the Persians, both being uninvited guests to the land. This shared interest in embellishment created a fertile ground for the development of gota in India where materials and labor were of access. Gota as an articulated technique and craft was pursued by the local artisans of Rajasthan. Overtime, it became prevalent across the subcontinent as a form of adornment made of gold and silver ribbons that was often used by the royalty and the rich. The use of precious metal and intricate hand work made it accessible only to the wealthy class, where the technique was used on elaborate dresses for occasions, especially weddings. For those of less wealth, these dresses would cost a lifetime’s savings and possibly even debt to its owners. They were typically bought as a wedding dress for the bride that would eventually become a precious object of inheritance for many generations. Gota here becomes an object that is encoded with power as it is typically handed from woman to woman, sometimes maintaining hierarchies, occasionally disrupting them.

Gota is an appliqué in embroidery using gold and silver ribbons onto fabrics such as cotton, chiffon and silk. It has distinct pleating, twisting or folding style markers which make up its visual language. Elements such as peacocks, paisleys, and floral features are often pre-made before being applied to the fabric. This image-making creates a continuous form that is unique to its location on the fabric such as corner, border, edge, and/or centerpiece. The technique of designing individual forms prior to hand stitching them on fabric allows for easier maintenance and repair. The threads of ribbons are made of precious metals and do not lose their sheen for long periods of time. These qualities promote the artifacts to live across generations with care and shared cultural memory.

This installation will explore gota through the practice of critical object making. Being gifted gota by our mothers, we are amidst learning and finding our personal relationships to these artifacts of history and inheritance. Gota, in this context can be defined as a boundary object (Star and Greisemer): identifiable and fluid. Gota as an artifact is flexibly concrete enough to connect us across space, time, consciousness, memories and borders. Through this critical making we aim to unlearn the relationship between our geographical affiliations and our sense of being; and rather seek that inner common body that learnt this skill generations ago. Our aim is to explore shared cultural anxieties surrounding nationhood and borders, both real and imagined, imposed and inherited in the neo-colonial Indian subcontinent.

Artists

Nida Abdullah

Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute

Swati Piparsania

Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Design Center (2nd Floor)

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, design, cultural studies, archives, performance, gota, embellishment, adornment, generational knowledge, narrative dissonance

5:00pm EDT

Handmade Data: Volume 1

Handmade Data: Volume 1 is part of a project that brings emerging scholarly research on data in conversation with the quotidian through popular, accessible media like web comics and zines. As a scholarly project, Handmade data is built on my own research and uses careful, generous citation practices to create high-quality, citable material that challenges professional silos and invites working engineers to engage in new ways with the social and cultural implications of their work. Handmade Data is an ongoing project that will continue to explore ways to offer rigorous scholarship in playful, engaging, and actionable contexts.

Artists

Nikki Stevens

HASTAC/Dartmouth College

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits, Creative Futures

Modality In Person
Keywords data, zines, citational politics

5:00pm EDT

Leporello Library: An Academic Zine of Scholars and Scholarship

Using Indigenous and intersectional feminist approaches to consent, critical making, technologies, and liberatory pedagogies, I created a zine that advances collective / collaborative scholarship. The expanding leporello book form structures this library archive of project exemplars to support an expanded citation practice. This work emphasizes the presence of underrepresented scholars and projects while reimagining research as a generative, liberative, collective process. This zine also works as a methods tool for users as a model of rigorous scholarship existing in contemporary research. Participatory components position readers as collaborators who respond and extend the collection.

Artists

Nikki Fragala Barnes

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits, Creative Futures

Modality In Person
Keywords zines, feminism, technology, pedagogy

5:00pm EDT

Life is Elsewhere

Dho Yee Chung calls attention to a dehumanizing process of Fordism originally raised from the massive automotive plants in the 1930s–1960s. It continuously serves as a backbone of the current platform economy in the digital space. Similar to how Fordism engineered the system of mass production to increase profits and workers’ productivity, the platform economy encodes systematic control over human labor into user experience and interface design. Rather than following traditional information architecture, this work intends to break a standardized order and automation, allowing viewers to disassemble and reassemble the content of the work as a process of unmaking Fordism.

Artists

DHO YEE CHUNG

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
TBA 207 Ryerson St, Brooklyn, NY 11205

Exhibits, Creative Futures

Modality In Person
Keywords labor, capitalism, platforms

5:00pm EDT

Making the Desert Island Discs Dataset: Data Visceralization and How We Don’t Know What We Know

Making the Desert Island Discs Dataset: Data Visceralization and How We Don’t Know What We Know (MDIDD) explores the use of alternative modes of representing data such as materialization and sonification as a means of connecting critical making to a more visceral understanding of the data itself. This project was conducted as coursework for the class “Advanced Projects in Digital Humanities” and is a collaboration of Master’s students in the Pratt School of Information and the professor. As a group of mainly students entering the Information Science field, we were interested in the experimental, reflexive process of working with data to enhance our individual and collective practice as digital humanists.

The Desert Island Discs Dataset, compiled and posted by Andrew James Gustar of the Open University (UK) on Humanities Commons in 2020, served as the underlying information for our research (Gustar, 2020). Desert Island Discs is a long-running BBC radio program that was first “recorded in the BBC’s bomb-damaged Maida Vale studio on 27th January 1942 and aired in the Forces Programme at 8pm two days later. It was introduced to the listening public as ‘a programme in which a well-known person is asked the question, if you were to be cast away alone on a desert island, which eight gramophone records would you choose to have with you, assuming of course, that you had a gramophone and an inexhaustible supply of needles.’”(BBC Radio 4 - Desert Island Discs - The History of Desert Island Discs, n.d.)

We explored five different methods of representing this resource: a 1:1 map, a textile, a musical composition, a physicalization of the data as weights, and a material network with integrated sound. Together these projects, which attend to critical concerns of data literacy and data feminism, were driven by the hypothesis that such experimental approaches to data representation can demonstrate the importance of process in determining an output and highlight the often invisible, feminized labor of processing. Through MDIDD, our “visceralizations” convey information in a variety of forms that engage more of our senses. Making these representations gave us the opportunity to engage more thoughtfully with the dataset, connecting our decisions with our insights as we worked. We hope that by presenting these different modalities, our audience can engage with, reflect, and discuss the experience of data, furthering a collective understanding of how these experimental formats might enrich digital humanities research and inquiry.

While each sub-project is a unique transformation of the data, together they illustrate how modes of critical making enrich knowledge production. We approached the rows, columns, and cells of the Desert Island Discs dataset as a terrain of absent, present, and problematic data to visualize as a map to convey the extent of processing labor and failures of data collection common in data research. From there, each of us pursued a further line of inquiry: How can we make the dataset into a textile that conveys its scale and nature? How can we quantify and materialize the labor that goes into data cleaning? Can sound be used to better understand the age of the radio program’s guests? How can we depict patterns of connection in the musical choices across the dataset through a multi-sensory network graph experience? Working through these questions, we discovered the limits and possibilities of our chosen methods: a process not just of making, but of making mistakes and failing–aspects of academic research that are traditionally overshadowed by the value put on a solid conclusion or visual output. This project foregrounds the continual labor of processing data and the discoveries made when using nontraditional methods to represent information. By both illuminating the human intervention needed in computational processes and engaging the audience through different modalities, we aim to expand the developing canon of Digital Humanities and encourage critical approaches to knowledge creation across the field.

https://studentwork.prattsi.org/data-visceralization/introduction/

Artists

Ava Kaplan

Pratt Institute

Carol Choi

Pratt Institute, United States of America

Carol Choi, MLIS, MSc, is an information professional whose practice is grounded in critical librarianship and critical approaches to data and technology. She also holds an Advanced Certificate in Digital Humanities from Pratt Institute.

Jessika Davis

Graduate Student, Pratt Institute, United States of America

Currently seeking MS in Museum and Digital Culture at Pratt Institute

John Decker

Departmental Chairperson, Pratt Institute

Lubov McKone

Pratt Institute, United States of America

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Design Center (2nd Floor)

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, computing & computer science, data, participatory methods, literacy, data visceralization, sound, data literacy, data feminism, critical making

5:00pm EDT

OnlyBans

Artists

Lena Chen

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits, Creative Futures

Modality In Person

5:00pm EDT

Open Water

This participatory project demonstration / artwork explores the complex, extractive relationship we have to urban waterways and the situated politics of open water swimming. My project will include an interactive installation with photography, audio, and video components as well as a pop up oral history and counter-mapping station. HASTAC conference attendees will be invited to anonymously contribute to an ongoing conversation about land use, water access, urban ecology, flooding, and swimming.

Open Water is a public art and research project that began as part of the NEA funded Works on Water Program in spring 2022. An initial iteration of the project focused on two communities--Red Hook residents and Brooklyn-based swimmers--and two tidal waterways in Lenapehoking, one swimmable and the other unswimmable (as defined by the NYC Health Code assessment criteria published in the 2021 NYC Comprehensive Waterfront Plan). My goal was to create a space for conversations about water that include the perspectives of people who swim, who can’t swim (or were unable to swim during COVID), who have survived floods, who are interested in the 2021 NYC Comprehensive Waterfront Plan and what it means for their community, who are interested in urban wildlife, and who have observed changes to local waterways and waterfronts introduced by climate crises, industrial pollution, and land use changes.
Between March and June 2022, I conducted oral histories and facilitated counter-mapping activities and somatic shoreline encounters in collaboration with the interdisciplinary artist andrea haenggi, one of my students from the New York City College of Technology, a group of open water swimmers, and Red Hook residents. Through these experiences, we generated alternative criteria for assessing what makes a body of water swimmable; the culmination of the project was an embodied shoreline assessment and group solstice swim at Brighton Beach. Our community swimmability assessment references and exposes gaps in the 2021 NYC Comprehensive Waterfront Plan and considers the conditions of post-industrial and ecologically disturbed waterways as well as racial and economic disparities in swimming education and water access.

Central questions at the heart of this project include:

Who has access to urban waterways during a time when coastlines are increasingly privatized and physically inaccessible?
How have climate change, ecological degradation, and flooding events impacted people’s relationships with urban waterways and perspectives on coastal development?
What ecological, economic, cultural, physiological, and political factors influence who swims, who can swim, where we swim, and when we swim?
Does open water swimming, as an embodied research methodology, influence our relationship to urban waterways and knowledge of marine ecology?
Can open site specific field work and oral histories produce “data” that impacts political and ecological futures?

This project demonstration / installation at HASTAC will provide context for and serve as an invitation for conference attendees to respond to components of the 2021 NYC Comprehensive Waterfront Plan and share personal water and swimming histories.

Pop-up Oral History and Counter-Mapping Station Concept
Conference participants will be invited to contribute to the Open Water oral history archive and annotate a large map. At the end of the conference, the map will capture what waterways people see most often, interact with, have ecological concerns about, or participate in community stewardship activities around. Ideally, this pop-up and accompanying installation will be accessible for the duration of the conference.
Installation Components

The multimedia installation will include: photographs, a listening station with audio collages compiled from oral histories conducted with Red Hook residents and urban swimmers, excerpts from the 2021 NYC Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, ephemera, and excepted video footage from facilitated somatic shoreline encounters in Red Hook and Brighton Beach.

Artists

Nora Almeida

Instruction and Outreach Librarian, New York City College of Technology (CUNY)

Nora Almeida is an urban swimmer, writer, performance artist, librarian, and environmental activist. She’s an Associate Professor at the New York City College of Technology and a long-time volunteer at Interference Archive. She has organized media-making workshops, public events... Read More →

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords activism, community-based work, participatory methods, sustainability, oral history, environmental, swimming, municipal planning, placemaking

5:00pm EDT

Pay Attention: Slow Looking with Black Lives Matter Murals

The “Black Lives Matter Murals: Downtown Raleigh, NC” collection features photographs of murals and street art in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. These murals were crafted by various artists, creators, and makers on brick and plywood in 2020-2021. While made of various materials with different styles, these pieces of community-generated art, as well as those created and seen across the United States and the world, all illustrate and amplify the important message that Black Lives Matter. With this collection of photographs, Slow looking is coupled with the murals to equip viewers with the opportunity to experience greater intentionality in sitting with these images, their messages, and the lived realities that they reflect and convey by slowly viewing the entirety of the mural and art.

Slow looking, developed by Cogapp Labs, is an application that provides a “relaxing full-screen immersive experience." Cogapp further expresses: “This relaxing full-screen immersive experience will slowly show your chosen image in detail. It takes a few rejuvenating minutes to complete, best enjoyed without distractions.” But how can Slow looking give us an opportunity to sit with images and art that was created with temporary materials with messages that carry a long and painful history? How can Slow looking, if at all, provide us with the opportunity to grapple with how that history and socio-political inequalities are still present and dangerous today?

The Slow looking experience equips us with a greater intentionality in sitting with these images, their messages, and the lived realities that they reflect and convey by slowly viewing the entirety of the mural and art. As Cogapp suggests, we should view and experience these images without distractions. But instead of passively observing this immersive experience, pay attention to what you are seeing, thinking, and feeling. How do these images surprise, shock, challenge, ignite you?

This demonstration will illustrate the process and construction with Slow looking as an application (as well as invite attendees to reflect and respond to the practice and experience of the application), but it will ultimately focus on and feature a mural through the method of Slow looking -- allowing attendees to critically engage with the mural, the method/s, and the message.

Website: https://kvdufresne.github.io/Black-Lives-Matter-Murals/

Artists

Kelsey Dufresne

PhD student, North Carolina State University

My background is rooted in English education – specifically for secondary edu – and English literature with a focus in 20th century American poetry and digital humanities. I am extremely passionate about community, education, and accessibility. With that, I enjoy (and hope to... Read More →

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, activism, community, public engagement, murals, experience
Area HASTAC Scholars

5:00pm EDT

Portrait of Matt Piazza From Ages 24-26, 2022

This sculpture is part of a larger series titled Archive of Digital Portraits Cast in Concrete. Each sculpture is composed of a piece of discarded technology (sourced from people in my life) cast in concrete, then uncovered through hammering and chiseling. These sculptures are portraits of the person that owned and used the piece of technology.

Artists

Blair Simmons

adjunct faculty and staff, NYU

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, computing & computer science, cultural studies, archives, sculpture, technology, concrete, time

5:00pm EDT

Prediction XR - False Negative Or The Computer Says Nah

Artists

Michaela Pnacekova

PhD candidate, York University

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, media studies, data, gaming, AR / VR / MR, risk assessment, facial recognition, voice, activism

5:00pm EDT

Queer City

Artists

Mohammed Rashid

The University of Texas at Dallas

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, LGBTQ+ studies, media studies, activism, participatory methods, twine, critical making, resistance, storytelling, public
Area HASTAC Scholars

5:00pm EDT

Remembering Le Temple de l'Amitié / The Temple of Friendship

These digital paintings make use of 3D modeling technologies and layering techniques to remember, reimagine, and (re)narrativize the queer histories surrounding the Temple of Friendship. Situated at 20 rue Jacob in Paris, France, this temple is located at the former residence of Natalie Clifford Barney (1876 – 1972), a lesbian author and salon hostess. The temple still stands today but is inaccessible to the public. The ephemerality of salon culture and queer spaces highlights the challenges of documenting and preserving queer history, and underscores the importance of creative approaches, such as speculative 3D modeling, to address the erasures of queer histories. Speculation involves using creative practices to fill in gaps in the historical record and to envision queer futures.

Artists

Donna Langille

Community Engagement and Open Education Librarian, UBC Okanagan Library

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits, Creative Futures

Modality In Person
Keywords 3D modeling & printing, friendship, LGBTQ+ studies, queer feminist spaces, futures

5:00pm EDT

Social Prosthesis

Social Prosthesis is a moving appendage designed as two headpieces made from rigid and soft structures. The soft skin of the prosthesis curls and contracts when triggered by touch on the face.

Referencing the definition of prosthetic sociality, written by Mimi Thi Nguyen in the 2003 essay Queer Cyborgs and New Mutants, Social Prosthesis is an exploration of how technologies enhancing the human body create meanings that extend past the merging of biological and artificial—that must contest with the social and political contexts of its time. Specifically, Social Prosthesis asks the question of beauty: Who do we determine as the beautiful in our society? Why do we deem beautiful things as worth protecting and preserving over others?

We alter our appearances in attempt to protect and preserve ourselves, and we recognize each other socially through these presentational physical identities.

In Mimi Thi Nguyen’s 2003 essay “Queer Cyborgs and New Mutants,” Nguyen posits that prosthesis is a social concept, and that technologies enhancing the human body have social and political contexts that extend past the merging of biological and artificial. The essay deconstructs the Marvel comic character of Karma, a queer Vietnamese “mutant” with a prosthetic leg, and Nguyen suggests that the true nature of Karma’s “mutant” identity is due to her race and sexuality, rather than her cyborg prosthesis.

To me, physical beauty—especially cosmetic—is a “social prosthesis” to identity, and one in which I have often contested my Asian-ness and American-ness. This social prosthesis determines how I communicate with others, and how others communicate with me. We alter our appearances in attempt to protect and preserve ourselves, and we recognize each other socially through these presentational physical identities.

Social Prosthesis questions the sociality of physical beauty and appearance—the change and movement that happens when we alter our appearances in contact with others. When we add technological wearables and digital enhancements to the mix, how does that build or mask identity?

Prosthetic makeup (also known as special effects makeup) is the use of prosthetic materials for cosmetic or makeup effects to extend the skin and features. Common materials used in prosthetic makeup include latex, foam latex, silicone and gelatin, and these materials are often colored and painted to look in conjunction with a model or character’s existing skin and features. Most existing prosthetic makeups serve to add a 3D structural element to the face or body, but they stay static and in-place once applied.

Social Prosthesis is a research project that explores the possibility of moving, robotic skin in cosmetic prosthetics. In this project, 3D resin printed structures suspend a dyed cosmetic “skin” on the face. When a capacitive touch sensor is triggered, an embedded shape memory alloy in the silicone will contract, causing the skin to curl and move. The shape of the prosthetic will be visibly altered, creating a new appearance or style through the bunching of the silicone.
Social Prosthesis was created at the Hybrid Body Lab at Cornell University, as an artist residency research project which merges makeup technique and on-body miniaturized technology. Social Prosthesis is a starting point for further research on moving prosthetics and robotic makeup using new materials and different methods of creating movement in prosthetics.

Artists

Morgan Chen

New York University

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Keywords arts, design, cultural studies, 3D modeling & printing, media arts, wearables, prosthetics, silicone circuit, capacitive touch

5:00pm EDT

Storymaps for Social Justice

Storymaps for Social Justice features digital compositions centering on issues of social justice. These compositions were a culmination of critical inquiry projects created by pre-service teachers who are enrolled in Dr. Suriati Abas's EDUC 3001: Diversity & Teaching courses at State University of New York (SUNY) Oneonta.

Artists

Suriati Abas

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits, Creative Futures

Keywords storytelling, pedagogy, social justice

5:00pm EDT

Terms of Service Fantasy Reader is a multimodal dramatization of Terms of Service agreements as an inquiry into the opaque conditions of digital consent. It is generated from a series of ad hoc collective participatory performances with the purpose of interrogating the relationship between the regulation and negotiation of digital selfhood in contemporary interface culture. Participatory performance in this space acts as a site of interrogation for addressing extractive principles in user experience design applying the action based performance method of sociodrama (Moreno, 1965). By locating and enacting instances of ambiguity, misleading or for any reason striking language in the regulating language between app and user, the collection of reenactments serves to expand the landscape of dark patterns, the practice of unethical user experience design implemented in order to enforce a desired user behavior based on concepts from behavioral economy. Building and broadening the collective end user voice into a polifonic assemblage, this project explores how the method of reenactment provides contexts in which the affective space between users and their services can be performed and subsequently studied through the opaque mechanisms behind the act of everyday user consent.

Terms of Service agreements are legal documents that define the grounds upon which someone can engage with a certain service, but they are conceptually demanding, long and often hermetic to read. In fact, the Pew Research center found in a 2017 study that 91% of people don't read TOS agreements. At the same time, they are one of the main battlegrounds for user rights. These legal difficult-to-read documents get "signed" on a daily basis, when downloading and installing an app, with their default settings often unquestioned. With options to either accept all the conditions and participate in a world of affordances of platform selfhood, or decline and be left out of social circles, these formats effectively facilitate a consensus based on a lack of choice. Terms of Service Fantasy Reader is a devoted space to allow the "luxury" of time to collectively explore our unspoken relationships to technology. It provides a framework for perceiving these underlying documents as scripts that both define and reinforce the invisible borders of the user's options for self expression and consequently, definitions of the self, creativity, and freedom.

During HASTAC The Terms of Service Fantasy Reader will be contextualized as an action based research method for broadening the ethical landscape of contemporary user experience design applying a critical new materialist framework to lived experiences of end users on the panel Performance landscapes: Exploring the affordances of reenactment for reconfiguring the dominant interface design paradigm Friday 2:45-4:15PM . It will also be held as a performance/workshop on Saturday 1:30-3PM, in which we will be creating new sonic social sculptures.

Artists

Darija Medić

University of Colorado Boulder

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
PS 202 (Design Center)

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, design, community, participatory methods, performance, terms of service, weaponization of affect, ethics, dark patterns
Area Platforms & Technology

5:00pm EDT

The Corrections

A brief overview of the Troubled Teen Industry. This includes recent cases of abuse and deaths that have occurred in TTI facilities as well as the ongoing work of activists to protect children currently being held in these programs
Situating the TTI within a centuries-long history of imprisoning individuals considered socially undesirable by the dominant culture. This includes women displaying gender nonconforming behavior, alternative gender expressions, and people with disabilities– particularly mental illness and substance use disorders.
Placing the TTI in context with our present-day carceral systems that profit from the surveillance and confinement of human beings
How visual mediums give voice to survivors and the ways in which activists are using participatory creative campaigns to amplify their message
The power of branding and design to create a cohesive organizational voice for activists. Design carries implicit emotional messages and helps legitimize survivors’ work
Sustainable and effective organizing practices when working with disabled people in disparate locations who face challenging life circumstances. I will reference the importance of collective care, resource-sharing and harm reduction

Speakers

Samantha Fein

Artist, curator, and community organizer, Independent Artist

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, gender studies, disability studies, activism, community, participatory methods, art as activism, decarceration, institutional abuse

5:00pm EDT

The Linguistic Errantry

The Linguistic Errantry is a stochastic sound environment and social experiment in a virtual setting. The viewers are invited to operate a first-person character with a game controller. 14 giraffes are set to randomly roam a surreal land full of symbolistic landscape and omnipresent surveillance cameras. Each giraffe is set to sing a measure constituting 2-4 notes and nonlinguistic lyrics deconstructed from L'Internationale. When two giraffes collide, they adopt each other’s measure to add to their own array. Giraffe 0 as the only exception, is set to speak “Control / Your / Soul’s / Desire / For / Freedom” by default, instead of singing—a propaganda phrase from a government official during the totalitarian lockdown in Shanghai, when the whole country entered an Agambenian “state of exception.” Each word occupies one slot in its array and will be gradually replaced by fragments from L'Internationale as giraffe 0 encounters the others of its kind. Other characters like the Goldfish, on the other hand, repeat their measures without interacting with one another every 3-7 seconds. The time between each repetition is randomized.

The state apparatus’s invention of new terms and phrases resonates with Victor Klemperer’s depiction of Nazism’s long-lasting influence on the German language in Lingua Tertii Imperii, that it “permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.”

As a lesser recognized fact, the lyrics of L'Internationale have different translations in different countries. While most parts remain accurate, the Chinese version has removed the third refrain and below, which begins with “The state represses, the law cheats / Taxes bleed the poor / No duties are imposed on the rich / The rights of the poor are empty words” for considerations of both simplicity and the potential inducement of questioning the state power. The fragments of L'Internationale in the piece were drawn from the erased refrain.
Due to the randomized routes in the program, the content of the audio array and the spatial relationship between each sonic element in the piece are also indeterminate with close-to-infinite combinations. The viewer can also move in the virtual environment to experience the piece from different perspectives. At a certain point, they will encounter a mirror and see the reflection of their own virtual body. In this piece, the goldfish in custody who jump higher and higher, crying for water, who are still unable to break through their invisible cages, represent the powerless civilians. Upon the recognition that their own body is a goldfish with a surveillance camera as its head, the viewer situates themselves in a dilemma; they’re both the oppressor and the victim—or they could be either, as in the Stanford prison experiment.

The Linguistic Errantry reimagines the Tower of Babel in a way that manifests the arbitrary nature of history: the consolidation and disintegration of sovereigns, an anticipated revolution to be generated by mere chance, or a parallel universe where nothing ever happens and only entropy reigns supreme. Contingency here serves as a passive approach of resistance, with a silver lining that in theory, like the infinite monkey theorem, the giraffes could sing complete lines of L'Internationale if given an infinite amount of time.

Please view the webpage for the visual documentation, score and other details: https://tansyxiao.com/the-linguistic-errantry

Artists

Tansy Xiao

Independent Artist

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, media studies, AR / VR / MR, performance, sound

5:00pm EDT

To Have & To Hold

To Have & To Hold is a body of socially engaged practice, commissioned in 2019 by the Arts Council England and Chester Council. The work is informed by three almost-forgotten regionally specific pieces of folklore that offer perspectives on gender and power. This work was initially conceptualised as a public art project to engage a diverse local audience in a non-conventional public setting. Within this body of work the concept of marriage is used as a multifaceted device: to marry the past with the present, as a plot anchor in the original folklore and more allegorically in the practice itself where virtual, augmented reality (AR) and internet interactions are intentionally married with the materiality of analogue artworks.

The COVID-19 pandemic meant that the planned opportunities for Chester based situated activities became increasingly limited, creating an interesting tension as more broadly our connections became progressively virtual whilst social conditions became more precarious. This resulted in a dynamic rethinking as the practice needed to negotiate what forms of social participation would be safe, inclusive, meaningful and stimulating. As a result, the work took a more participatory turn, in which I worked with local community groups during 2020 - 2022 to deliver different micro related projects. The lifespan of the work has now been extended with a post-pandemic final programme of community workshops and public exhibition, these will conclude late 2023.

The primary aim of this work was to create conditions for new social participation with three increasingly overlooked historical narratives, both for a local and wider audience. Folklore gives us the ability to consider past realities and re-experience and potentially learn from past practices, problematic representations, and expressions of community knowledge. As a collection, the folklore that is Impossible Stairs, Hobby’s Well and Charlotte Lucy bring together fascinating rituals, strange tales of hope, self-sacrifice, and demonstrate embodied female power and as such deserve to be explored and examined as cultural heritage.

In terms of methods, I used critical design practice, as a way to open up space for participants to more experientially access the broader themes of gender and power. A key approach was to elicit visual motifs as a way to bring forth and agitate the issues normalised in the original narratives. Lungs (and breath) are used to connect the tales of Charlotte Lucy’s drowning and again in Impossible Stairs. The image of disembodied body parts is used in Impossible Stairs as a comment on the abstraction of personas of the past, whereas the image of an isolated female ankle talks to charged sensuality and the riskiness contained in the Hobby’s Well ritual. The associated participatory workshops re-use the AR and visual motifs along with procedural creative techniques such as printmaking and frottage. These processes create a group space and discursive condition to actively reflect on these past practices and unpack any perceived issues. Some of the project workshops specifically promote the creation of new ideas, associations and fictioning with the source texts. These motifs as critical prompts intentionally function at multiple levels. In the eye of the beholder these have potential to become either provocative or defamilarised carriers of new meaning. A surface read will offer up a fragment from the narratives. Whereas time spent with the motifs or exploring the expanded materials, offer the potential of a more analogical function. Analogical metaphors are known to function within a social space – in as much as they need to be contextually relevant, and furthermore like folklore itself metaphors are often passed down, inculcated as we move through life and experience. This critical approach is used to reveal our personal understanding and feelings in response to these motifs. For example the image of a naked female ankle would be understood differently through the intersections of gender, age and socio-cultural experience. Furthermore, this personal meaning will be changed and contrasted when re-considered in the context of the supplied source narratives, bringing forth our own associations to entangle with the historical context of the folklore. These are not only stories from the past but stories that allow us to consider past realities where gender inequality and injustices were more manifest. The aim of the practice is to support and challenge the viewer to become more socially engaged with these themes and narratives, not only to consider how far we have been able to (or failed to) journey from the conditions of the past but to engage in discourse around what is gained and by whom by the existence of these tales, as cultural heritage and beyond.

This installation presents selected outcomes from the project, including a sample of the visual motifs, QR codes are available to launch the AR animations.

Footnotes
1. To Have & To Hold (2019 - ongoing) available: www.6amhoover.com
2. Hobby’s Well - this piece of folklore claims that if a ‘love struck’ girl stood with one leg in the wishing well and one leg outside then their wish for a husband would come true. Impossible Stairs - formulated on the Wishing Steps, built into Chester’s Roman city defence walls in 1785. Folklore claims that if an unmarried girl can run up these steps three times without drawing a new breath, then the man of her dreams would propose to her within the year. Lastly, Charlotte Lucy was purportedly drowned in Rostherne Mere on the eve of her wedding in 1845. However official records cite she died in her sleep as a consequence of bronchial disease.
3. Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.
4. Thompson S, (1955) Motif-index of folk-literature. Indiana University Press.
5. Buwert, P. (2016) Defamilarisation, Brect and Criticality in Graphic Design. https://modesofcriticism.org/defamiliarisation-and-criticality/

Artists

Donna Leishman

Associate Professor, Northumbria University

Donna is an Associate Professor in Communication Design at Northumbria University. Prior to this she was Head of Communication Design at The Glasgow School of Art and at Dundee University. She is a digital media practitioner and interdisciplinary researcher. In her career she has... Read More →

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, digital humanities, design, AR / VR / MR, public engagement, world-building, heritage, sentipensar, socio-cultural imaginaries, othering

5:00pm EDT

Tower: Framing Displacement

For HASTAC Critical Making & Social Justice at Pratt Institute in 2023, I will exhibit “Tower: Framing Displacement," a photomontage installation, that reflects on climate change through interviews and creative data visualizations. The installation highlights interviewees of multilingual backgrounds sharing their personal experiences with climate change and their photographs of nature from around the world. Most of the interviewees have been immigrants and refugees, some displaced due to climate change impacts. With data I want to help visualize the impact of climate change in displacing people around the world.

 I have developed "Tower" project since 2019 and interviewed more than 60 people speaking in 35 different languages. The multidisciplinary installation reflects on climate change and the biblical story of the Tower of Babel—a story of arrogance and the creation of linguistic differences. To overcome the vicissitudes of linguistic and cultural differences "Tower" project seeks to unify people to achieve a common goal of protecting nature. In “Tower: Framing Displacement" the viewers will have an opportunity to interact with the work and consider solutions for stopping climate change.

 "Tower" project has received significant recognition and has enacted public pedagogy through organizational support (residency and grant support), open-call interviews, volunteer work, exhibitions, guest artist and panel discussions, and in the press. The project has been developed with support from The Amsterdam Collective Casa de Cultura, Bearnstow Artist Retreat, Catwalk Institute and NYU, Finlandia Foundation National, Flatbush Nostrand Junction BID, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Laajasalon opisto (a language school), New Dance Alliance, The Puffin Foundation, RaumArs AiR, Rauman Seudun Työnhakijat (employment services for immigrants) and Tohmajärvi Residency. All of the 60 interviewees in the “Tower” project have been volunteers. The multidisciplinary installation has previously been exhibited at Flatbush Nostrand Junction BID at Hillel Plaza, Brooklyn, Jamaica Flux of Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning at King Manor Museum in Jamaica, Queens and at Performance Mix Festival at Community Space 122, New York. I have discussed the process in publications such as, Art Spiel and BK Reader, and in panel discussions at COAL + ICE at the Kennedy Center, Hunters Point Library Environmental Education Center and Creative Art Works.

Artists

Sari Nordman

Artist, Sari Nordman

I am a Finnish interdisciplinary artist who creates public art projects, video works and dance performances. I create socially engaged art that incorporates film, metal work, fiber arts and dance. My process is rooted in long hikes in nature where I reflect on nature, its persistence... Read More →

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, data, activism, environment, climate change, participatory methods, data visualization

5:00pm EDT

Tuberscopia

Tuberscopia addresses a problem of consent in the history of medicine through an exploration of visual practices in scientific research. The installation uses images from tuberculosis research at the turn of the twentieth century. Coming from a period before the codification of informed consent, the installation asks viewers to consider the different kinds of images which support medical research. On one hand there are images of sanatoria, of happy patients, and diagrams for treatment (the images on the slides in blue) and on the other hand there are images which are the result of extracting data from the bodies of sick, dying, or dead patients (the images on the slides in red).

Viewers are encouraged to look at each of the microscope slides using the magnifying glasses provided.

Artists

Sean Purcell

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits, Creative Futures

Modality In Person
Keywords medicine, sciences, bodies, research, ethics
Area HASTAC Scholars

5:00pm EDT

Unleashing the Future

Unleashing the Future is a critical design project and design research that explores the relationship between an individual and AI as a creative tool. It is a FICTIONAL social media campaign for a FICTIONAL AI–led protest movement against the unethical use of AI. This campaign broadcasts activism rhetoric generated with publicly available AI models.

Image prompts, captions, and hashtags: generated with ChatGPT and Bard.
(No changes were made to the prompts generated by the LLMs.)
Images: generated with OpenArt.ai.
Colors and fonts: generated as a list of options with ChatGPT.

Acknowledgments:
I want to express my appreciation to the following individuals for their valuable advice and moral support: Creative Futures folks, Inna Alesina, Yeva Rotberg, Derrick Schultz, and Ruru-Cat.

Artists

Michal Rotberg

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits, Creative Futures

Modality In Person
Keywords AI, protest, ethics, technology

5:00pm EDT

Words Matter 3.0

In December 2017, media outlets reported that the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had prohibited seven words from appearing in budgeting proposals. The words were: diversity, entitlement, transgender, vulnerable, science-based, and evidence-based (Sun and Ellperin). Later reports suggested that the words were not banned, but merely listed as possible red flags for reviewers (Kaplan and McNeil). These later reports, which attempted to assuage anxiety about censorship under the Trump administration, are indicative of a wider misunderstanding of the nature of censorship. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault challenges the narrative of Victorian repression by drawing the reader's attention to the veritable explosion of legal and medical discourse about sexuality during the 19th century. During this time discourses about sexuality multiplied, while “repression operated as a sentence to disappear, but also an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know” (Foucault 4). In the 21st century, a range of social identities are similarly situated within a Foucauldian multiplicity of force relations that includes both an amplification of juridic discourse and discursive erasure.

Discursive erasure may take the form of outright prohibition, such as forbidding indigenous language usage in schools (McCarty) or the recent uptick in “Don’t Say Gay” legislation (Sanders). It may take more subtle forms, such as the argument that concealed weapons on college campuses will have a chilling effect on expression (Wolcott). It may take the form of mediated aphasia as in the case of device dictionaries that do not contain words like vagina or rape, as though un-naming something could erase it (Jackson). The relationship between language, reality, and materiality is complex (Hekman). There is power in recovering, naming, renaming, unpacking, and screaming against attempts at erasure (Self and Hall). To explore these complexities, we have developed an ongoing project centered on the premise that words matter. For HASTAC 2023, we are proposing an installation of work from the latest iteration of this project, Words Matter 3.0.

The installation is organized by Fashioning Circuits, a public humanities project that began in 2011 as an investigation into wearable media and technology. Fashioning Circuits is now a place where we also engage with the rich histories and practices of computational craft, domestic technologies, soft activism, and so forth. These practices, often hyper-feminized and located within homes or community collectives, are an important and often unacknowledged pre-history of “maker culture.” We both study and engage in these practices in our scholarship, creative practice, and community partnerships.

We first organized a workshop on the concept that words matter in February 2018. In this space we used embroidery, a slow medium, to evoke reflection on the seven words from the CDC. In 2019, we continued workshopping and expanded our approach to include a range of domestic and material technologies, computational craft, and physical computing. Work from this process was curated into the first Words Matter installation at HASTAC 2019 in Vancouver, BC. In 2020 – 2021 Words Matter 2.0 took various forms as we negotiated the connections, constraints, tensions, and traumas of the pandemic. For Words Matter 3.0, we propose to return to the curated installation format, bringing a variety of work/words to install at HASTAC 2023.

It our hope that remediating words, often considered ephemeral, into material forms will prompt viewers to consider the materialities of language and censorship. We assert through this project that words are not just important; words matter.

Our participating artists and makers have selected words on which to center their projects, including “safety,” “visibility/invisibility,” “incident,” “normal/abnormal,” “real,” “cancel,” “gay,” and so forth. Sample material forms include embroidery, 3d fabrication, papercraft, and more. Participants include faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates, both advanced and first year.

Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I. Pantheon, 1978.
Hekman, Susan. The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Routledge, 1981.
Kaplan, Sheila and Donald G. McNeil Jr. “Uproar Over Purported Ban at C.D.C. of Words Like ‘Fetus.’” New York Times. Health, 16 Dec. 2017.
McCarty, Teresa L. “Dangerous Difference: A Critical-Historical Analysis of Language Education Policies in the United States.” Medium of Instruction Policies: Which Agenda? Whose Agenda? Taylor and Francis, 2003, pp. 71 – 96.
Sanders, Chris. “Fighting Back in a Red State: Tennessee’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ and ‘License to Bully’ Legislation.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. Inaugural issue, Fall 2013, pp. 141 – 147.
Self, Rico and Ashley R. Hall. “Refusing to Die: Black Queer and Feminist Worldmaking Amid Anti-Black State Violence.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. Vol. 8, no. 1, Spring 2021, pp. 123 – 130.
Sun, Lena H. and Juliet Ellperin. “CDC Gets List of Forbidden Words: Fetus, Transgender, Diversity.” Washington Post. Health and Science, 15 Dec. 2017.
Wolcott, Christopher M. “The Chilling Effect of Campus Carry: How the Kansas Campus Carry Statute Impermissibly Infringes Upon the Academic Freedom of Individual Professors and Faculty Members.” Kansas Law Review, vol. 65, no. 4, 2017, pp. 875 – 911.

Artists

Kim Brillante Knight

Associate Professor and Director of Fashioning Circuits, The University of Texas at Dallas

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, cultural studies, media studies, makerspaces, languages & literatures, censorship, materiality

5:00pm EDT

Write to Me: Exploring implicit and cultural biases through letter writing

Technologies have politics and exercise power (Winner). The discourses in the field of critical data studies and critical algorithm studies have echoed this argument while extrapolating it to the modern technologies operating on Artificial Intelligence. The politics reflected in and enacted by the Artificial Intelligence Technologies are visible through their discriminatory and biased outputs (Nobel; Benjamin). The biases reflected by them comprise of all complex power structures seen in human society, including but not limited to race, gender, complexion, sexuality, nationality, caste, class, etc. These biases are engrained in the AI systems not only through the data and algorithms used to build them, but also through the internal and systemic biases of the humans who interact and work with them, which include both makers and users of these systems (Bucher; Roberge & Seyfert). The biased outputs of these systems are thus used to re-enact the power structures and enable the privileged, which is inherently problematic.

One of the ways of reducing these biases in AI systems is by increasing awareness about their implicit personal presence within humans. But generally, the people associated in building and using these systems are neither aware nor have access to tools which can be used to reflect on the implicit biases shown and faced by them. The project Write to Me, in its first iteration, is an attempt to address this issue. The process of this project is an invitation to reflect on the biases within ourselves (humans).

Write to Me takes a conversational approach of excavating cultural and implicit biases faced and showcased by people. These are people who are somewhere linked with the AI systems, at least in using them, if not building them. This project stemmed as an alternative to Project Implicit (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/) that addresses a similar issue. Project Implicit uses generalized Association test based on quickness of pressing keys on your keyboard to answer multiple choice questions, that isn’t inclusive, and can give test takers an anxiety of not wanting to be falsely associated with biases. Thus, Write to Me decided to steer away from generalization techniques and used personalized conversational method of letter writing (inspired from Anhert & Anhert).

Write to Me asked the participants to reflect on biases experienced by and exhibited within them. The project began with a first general letter as an open call addressed to fellow academicians. After the first set of responses, they were replied to individually, in order to engage in a deeper conversation and request a second round of responses. This process gathered 17 responses from 10 respondents, collected between September to November 2020 through email. Based on the analysis of these responses a final letter was written that included the analysis and conclusion of the project and sent it out to the respondents.

The exploratory analysis techniques included two approaches:

First was quantitative analysis performed by feeding the information from letters to online tools Voyant Tools (https://voyant-tools.org/) and Two Tone (https://twotone.io/) for data visualization and data sonification based on word frequency. This was a frequency-based analysis that just reported on words most frequently associated with the prompt.

Second was a qualitative analysis performed by manually reading the letters and making a concept map using CMAP Tools (https://cmap.ihmc.us/). The concept map was color coded based on different respondents keeping their privacy intact. This was an abstraction of real-life experiences that mapped together human thought and feelings. It did not provide an insight into how biases are formed but unfolded an insight around their reflections, which were mostly summarized as questions.

Write to Me worked as a personalized tool for the respondents to address and raise questions around their own implicit and cultural biases. The results of this first iteration of project are available.

The second iteration of the project, which is still underway, is to extrapolate the project to reflect biases within algorithms. The project Write to Me, does not aim to completely solve the problem of biases and their presence in AI systems; but provides a reflective lens to increase the awareness about their presence, variety, and impact within the users of these systems. It is a collective reflective process of questioning biases as a culture and formulating connections and shared knowledge amongst people. The hope behind this project is that the awareness and questions produced by it prompt its participants to question their biases and thus reduce their infliction on AI systems.

References:
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Newark, New
Jersey: Polity Press, 2019.
Bucher, Taina. If ... Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press,
2018.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New
York: New York University Press, 2018.
Roberge, Jonathan, and Robert Seyfert. “What are Algorithmic Cultures?” Algorithmic Cultures:
Essays on Meaning, Performance and New Technologies, edited by Jonathan Roberge, and
Robert Seyfert. London, UK: Routledge, 2016, pp.1-25.
Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 19-39.
Ahnert, Ruth, and Sebastian E. Ahnert’s article “Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach.” ELH vol. 28, Johns Hopkins University Press, Spring 2015.

Artists

Nishanshi Atulkumar Shukla

PhD Candidate, The University of Texas at Dallas

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Keywords digital humanities, cultural studies, data, algorithms, participatory methods, AI, bias, cultural biases, letter writing, shared knowledge

5:00pm EDT

You Are Invited

Abstract
Using visuals and sound that draw upon our research on whiteness as global and national colonial formation enacted at the interpersonal and structural levels, the video installation ‘You Are Invited’ explores the production and ramifications of hetero-patriarchy, violence, gendered exclusions and marginalization in white spaces, and the embodiment of differently racialized and gendered identities crossed through with discomfort. Through the video/installation, we investigate how feminist decolonial knowing through the body can be produced via critical making and the direct experience of the artwork by the conference participants.

Affecting racialized and gendered bodies in discomfort
‘You Are Invited’ builds on the arts-based research practice of Halász (2017, 2021) such as the performance installations ‘The Blush Machine’ (Bolivia, 2013), ‘Chamber of White’ (Denmark, 2014) and ‘Freeing Up Shame’ (Brazil, 2012) and the exhibition ‘Visualising Affect’ (UK, 2013) [1] and Hunter’s (2015, 2017, 2021) feminist psychosocial work on the affective production of institutional life as fundamental to the enactment of broader national and global coloniality which sustains whiteness as a neoliberal institutional ideal. Both expose the role of bodies and affects in the lived enactment of whiteness as a way of tracing and interrupting the rational-emotional split fundamental to the cis-heteropatriarchal reproduction of coloniality (Lugones 2010, Wynter 2003). Together they are developing ‘imaginactivism’ (Haran 2017) as an interference with white institutional and public life. This installation constitutes the aim of producing one such imaginactivist intervention through “extending critical social reflection (Hertz).

Relationship to the conference theme
With the video installation we zoom in on racial justice and feminist struggles “as intellectual and political force[s] for freedom” (Mama 2020, p. 362) in historically ‘unfair, unequal and corrupt’ global justice systems. We extend the provocation of George Yancy’s question of “How Does it Feel to Be a White Problem?” (2015) with a specific focus on the potential of social justice through reinforced criticality and re-politicizing. The video installation examines Yancy’s question both at the interpersonal and systemic levels, but instead of responding to this question, the artwork opens aesthetic and conceptual spaces to think through how whiteness is known in the body in discomfort, and the epistemological and methodological potentials that ‘staying with’ (Haraway 2016) discomfort holds. The video explores how the relationally produced ‘affective intensity’ and ‘epistemic resource’ of discomfort can open up or close down inquiry on whiteness because of the dis/orientation it induces in differently gendered and racialized people experiencing it (Chadwick 2021). Whereas much of the consideration of white discomfort views it as the property of white people (Diangelo 2018), our approach challenges this via a relational understanding of discomfort as an event produced through/in gendered and racialized bodies entering in relation. The video installation examines the psychosocially embodied experience of discomfort as collectively produced and holding open a dynamic space for a relation of depth rooted in dis-ease which has the potential to disrupt the power of whiteness and the global injustices it is dependent on.

The benefit of this event
As per the deliberately open-ended nature of forms of imaginactivsm, critical making and arts engagement, the individual benefits of this event cannot be assumed in advance, and they will be multiple depending on the positioning of people experiencing it. The anticipated benefits relate to the collective “process relationship between imagining and acting to make a change in the world, and the ways in which it depends on working actively and collaboratively with a shared vision” (Haran 2017, p. 11). We hope that participants will take away the energetic benefits of participating in imaginactivism as a mode of organising as well as increased knowledge around the potential for and confidence in working with discomfort as an intervention into the unequal politics of public life. We also hope the energetic benefits nourish future collaborative activity as an extended network of an academic-intellectual-artistic-activist community of care.

Part of the decolonial contention underpinning this event is that we are all differently and complicatedly entangled in global colonial whiteness (Erasmus 2017, Rodríguez, 2016, la paperson 2017). There are no claims of innocence from within our current global coloniality. However, we recognise the contentious and potentially re-traumatising nature of situating whiteness at the heart of race-resistant activism, including the risks in bolstering white innocence through the critical interrogation of whiteness (Ahmed, 2004). Therefore, the framing will be conducted with care and according to principles of intersectional safety and respect rooted in a combination of learning in practice with and from a range of Black, brown, queer, feminist decolonial and anti-racist activist spaces [2]. Given the focus of our installation on the violence of whiteness, we prioritise attention to the safety of those positioned as marginalised in/through whiteness.

Notes
[1] See https://www.katalinhalasz.com/ for details of these and other works. [2] See https://www.whitespaces.org.uk/post/process for details

Artists

Katalin Halasz

Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, Brunel University London

Shona Hunter

Leeds Beckett University

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
ARC F-09

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords activism, arts, arts-based research, critical making, discomfort, embodied knowledge, gender studies, race/ethnic studies, sociology, whiteness
Area Accessibility

5:00pm EDT

‘She Is Not Alone!’ Afrofuturist Wearable Devices For Speculative PTSD Treatment in Kenya

This research explores speculative wearable technology to reimagine Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) treatment for female-identifying domestic abuse survivors in Kenya. The speculative wearable devices are envisioned to aid in continuous monitoring of PTSD associated with domestic abuse as well as aid in self-directed PTSD treatment. The development of the wearable devices employs mixed methodologies that combines Health Design Thinking, Design for Wearability, Speculative Design, and Modular Design to imagine the form, functions, wearability, and design of the wearable prototypes. Drawing design inspiration from Kenyan culture situated within Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism frameworks, aims to convey symbolism of empowerment for female-identifying domestic abuse survivors and in a much larger context highlight the importance of raising awareness of domestic abuse in Kenya.
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic watching the news had been especially difficult. With the daily tally of COVID cases and deaths projected on the screen, and all the unknowns about this new disease it had been a tough time not just for me but everyone around the world. Aside from global news about the pandemic there had also been several stories about domestic abuse in the Kenyan news. The stories highlighted were not just about GBV but also included child and elder abuse. At the time of watching these news stories back home in Kenya, I did not realise the impact it had on me or that it would lead me to my thesis project. Domestic abuse in Kenya had been happening long before COVID-19 but the pandemic exacerbated the cases. According to a survey by Kenya’s Department of Gender “more than 5,000 cases were reported between 2020 and 2021, nearly five times the number of reported cases in 2019” (Amunga 2021). Now more than ever there is a growing concern about the magnitude of GBV in Kenya. With the growth of awareness on GBV in Kenya, I had this innate urge to be part of the conversation and gain further understanding on domestic abuse and its effects. My specific interest was geared towards the psychological effects associated with domestic abuse and investigating what interventions exist. My research led me to PTSD which is prevalent in domestic abuse survivors (American Psychiatric Association 2013). PTSD is a “psychiatric disorder that may occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event.” (American Psychiatric Association n.d.) According to the American Psychiatric Association, PTSD “is more prevalent among females than males with increased risk attributable to a greater likelihood of exposure to traumatic events, such as rape, and other forms of interpersonal violence” (2013). PTSD symptoms include intrusive thoughts and reexperiencing of the traumatic event, negative alterations in cognition and mood, persistent arousal and reactivity associated with the traumatic event, and avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event (2013). 5 PTSD is a relatively recent diagnostic construct and is considered to be different from other psychiatric disorders in that, diagnosis requires that symptoms are caused by an external traumatic event (Jenkins et al. 2015). While effective interventions to treat PTSD like psychotherapy and medication are available, these interventions typically require expert mental health professionals providing treatments that are usually lengthy and costly to the health service (Sijbrandij et al. 2016). Hence my research investigates wearable technology as a complementary or additional Speculative PTSD Treatment. With my background in Industrial Design and my interest in Afrofuturism, I was drawn to the idea of designing an Afrofuturist wearable device to aid in speculative self-directed PTSD treatment. With the understanding that domestic abuse is both a sensitive and important topic it was crucial for me to highlight both facts within my research. Hence the objectives of this thesis are:
➢ To explore wearable technology as a complementary or additional PTSD intervention for female-identifying domestic abuse survivors in Kenya
➢ To leverage Afrofuturism as a design lens to empower domestic abuse survivors in Kenya ➢ To design a wearable device rooted in Kenyan culture to raise awareness of domestic abuse in Kenya

Artists

Patricia Mwenda

Research Assistant, OCAD U

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords design, race/ethnic studies, 3D modeling & printing, physical computing education, wearables, domestic abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), gender-based violence (gbv), afrofuturism, Kenyan culture, speculative

5:00pm EDT

“AMA Constructing Memory - Interactive Art Book”

This interactive art book uses Augmented Reality components to access the stories of 100 victims of state violence in Nicaragua and their families' demand for justice. Through QR codes you can access testimonies, maps, and 3D replicas of altars created by the victims’ relatives to honor their loved ones. This AR experience is part of a larger transmedia digital project titled “AMA y No Olvida”, trans.“Love and do not forget: Memory Museum against Impunity” created in collaboration with the families of the victims, supporting their organizing work to protect, mobilize and share the stories of the victims with a wider audience.

Artists

Emilia Yang

Assistant Professor of Art and Design, University of Michigan

Thursday June 8, 2023 5:00pm - Saturday June 10, 2023 7:00pm EDT
Steuben Gallery

Exhibits

Keywords design, AR / VR / MR, activism, community, archives, dictatorship, state violence, transmedia, participatory methods, mapping, visibility, witnessing, embodiment, trauma, digital media, race/ethnic studies, gender, feminism, rights, memory

8:30am EDT

Closet

Artists

Abhishek Viswanathan

University of Pittsburgh

Maria Ryabova

PhD student, University of Pittsburgh

Friday June 9, 2023 8:30am - 5:00pm EDT
East 2nd Floor Corridor

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, anthropology, gender studies, participatory methods, performance, closet, immigrant, alien, unmaking, art exhibit

8:30am EDT

Registration open

Check in at the Student Union to receive your conference badge, swag, and housing information (for those staying at Emerson Place).

Friday June 9, 2023 8:30am - 5:00pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Registration/Breaks

8:30am EDT

1055113200

Artists

Molly Morin

Artist in Residence, Dartmouth College

Nikki Stevens

HASTAC/Dartmouth College

Friday June 9, 2023 8:30am - 5:30pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords HASTAC, data, text analysis, community, weaving
Area Data

8:30am EDT

Crafting Connections: Creating a Network of HASTAC 2023

Artists

Chris Alen Sula

Interim Associate Provost; Visiting Associate Professor, Pratt Institute

Claudia Berger

Digital Humanities Librarian, Sarah Lawrence College

Friday June 9, 2023 8:30am - 5:30pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Exhibits

Modality In Person
Keywords conference planning, data visualization, digital humanities, data visceralization
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

8:45am EDT

Breakfast

Friday June 9, 2023 8:45am - 9:00am EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Registration/Breaks

Modality In Person

9:00am EDT

The Placemats Project

Artists

Atanur Andic

The University of Texas at Dallas, United States of America

Kasif Rahman

Doctoral Student, The University of Texas at Dallas, United States of America

Kim Brillante Knight

Associate Professor and Director of Fashioning Circuits, The University of Texas at Dallas

Friday June 9, 2023 9:00am - 5:00pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Activity

Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, media studies, data, participatory methods, weaving, data visualization, Covid

9:00am EDT

Co-Working Space

This large corridor room, joining Steuben Hall and Pratt Studios (PS) in the Design Center, is open all day Friday as co-working space, particularly for attendees who want to join online sessions from campus.

Friday June 9, 2023 9:00am - 5:30pm EDT
Steuben 417 (Design Center)

Registration/Breaks

9:30am EDT

The Embedded Creative: the role of a creative practitioner in the Name.Narrate.Navigate (NNN) Program at Frank Baxter Youth Justice Centre.

This research project sought to evaluate the role of the creative researcher/practitioner in an Australian social justice initiative for young people. The project adopted an approach where the visual communicator was regarded as a key investigator who uses visual communication systems and approaches in the context of research to stimulate dialogue, elicit opinion and reveal insights (Gwilt, 2011, p2). The project is centred around the Name.Narrate.Navigate (NNN) program for youth violence. NNN intentionally merges the neuroscience of trauma with Aboriginal ways of knowing and doing by using creative methods as the ‘elicitor’ of narrative storytelling to build connection and understanding. To date, Photovoice methods (Fitzgibbon & Healy, 2019), involving a combination of photography and focus group discussions have been used to gain rich multi-dimensional understandings of violence from the perspective of justice-involved young people in the program. With expansion to custodial settings and restrictions on the use of cameras therein, the NNN program sought to collaborate with cross-disciplinary partners to explore other visual methods for this important aspect of the work. This project asked:
1. How does an embedded creative practitioner enhance the elicitation of narrative story telling for young men in youth justice detention?
2. How do graphic storytelling and visual communication strategies improve dissemination of key research insights gained in restricted environments?
3. How can drawing assist in facilitating complex conversations?

The objective of this cross-disciplinary project was twofold. Firstly, the research team endeavoured to adjust the NNN program for restricted juvenile detention environments by embracing alternate creative methods. The project sought to develop a strong narrative of how scaffolded drawing can be used to help facilitate conversation and engagement with young men aged 15-21 who use violence and for the workers who support them. It did so by developing a visual system/cultural probe kit consisting of tactile drawing stimuli, guided drawing activities and exploration of symbols for the contextual meaning. This cultural probe kit was newly developed and untested in social justice settings.

Secondly, reportage illustration, drawing and studio practice was used to communicate the important role of this program more broadly. Looking at the creative practitioner as ‘observer of the program’ alongside and assisting in the facilitation of NNN program activities from the perspective of an illustrator alongside visual recordings of the program. Illustration functions in this context as serving society, commentating, documenting, and bearing witness. It explains and constructs a visual experience of societal reflections, in which pictures, language and meaning are entwined in the evaluation of a complex preventative intervention for youth violence. Developing an insider perspective through design ethnography, reportage illustration (Embury 2018) and drawing this project looks at the restricted environment of juvenile detention.

Increasingly alternative methods of inquiry are needed to enhance contemporary approaches to broader research, impact and engagement, and dissemination in traditional academic disciplines This project was the first of its kind to explore the potential for the embedded creative as more than a facilitator of an artwork-based intervention in justice settings, but as a story-teller capable of both eliciting and documenting unsaid moments in the group process that lend new understandings to youth violence, and the experience of custody. In new cross-industry settings, graphic storytellers are likely to be increasingly valued for interpersonal and interpretive skills. These artists explain how they can work ‘a kind of magic’ through live drawing while abstract, complicated, or formless discussions unfold. (Grant et al 2021).

https://www.namenarratenavigate.com/

Bibliography

Embury, G. and Minichiello, M., 2018. Reportage Illustration: Visual Journalism. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Grant, P. and Clark, G., 2021. Graphic Storytellers at Work. Australia Council for the Arts. file:///Users/Ajc704/Downloads/Graphic-Storytellers-at-Work-GSAW-Report_WEB%20(4).pdf

Gwilt, I.D. and Williams, J., 2011. Framing futures for visual communication design research. Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal.

Researchers acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land in which the University resides and pay respect to Elders past, present, and emerging. We extend this acknowledgement to the Worimi and Awabakal and Darkinjung people of the land in which we work.

Speakers

Ari Chand

Doctor, University of South Australia

Tamara Blakemore

University of Newcastle, Australia

Friday June 9, 2023 9:30am - 9:50am EDT
ARC E-02

Papers & Talks

Session Title Community Co-Design
Modality In Person, Online, Hybrid
Keywords arts, sociology, participatory methods, design-based approaches, drawing, creativity, youth, social work
Area Design

9:30am EDT

“Does the Data Speak for Itself?”: Gendered Mobility, Safety, and Crowdsourcing in India

The heightened discourse around safety and sexual harassment in public spaces after the hypervisible #Nirbhaya sexual violence and murder case in Delhi and the subsequent Criminal Amendment Act, 2013 which criminalized sexual harassment in public spaces saw an increase in feminist activism around these issues. The need for safer public spaces, and access to justice mechanisms in cases of sexual harassment in public spaces led to the rise of initiatives like the toll-free police helpline to report crimes in various states (such as the Dial 112 facility in New Delhi), increased use of surveillance technologies like CCTV cameras by citizens’ groups, and activist interventions such as safety audits (Jagori and International 2010) and crowdsourcing applications (Liu 2019; “Safecity.in” n.d.; Seltzer and Mahmoudi 2013; Viswanath and Basu 2015). But what does “safety” mean in a deeply stratified society like India? What role can crowdsourcing play in this context to inform policy action on building safer public spaces? These are some of the key questions our research paper is concerned with, especially since crowdsourcing has grown to be one of the key modes utilized by activists to record women’s safety perceptions of public spaces and crime hotspots to inform gendered mobility choices. However, biases proliferate in the data pipeline (Eickhoff 2018; Marda and Narayan 2020; Olteanu et al. 2019; Sambasivan, Hutchinson, and Prabhakaran 2020; Sambasivan et al. 2021; Solymosi, Bowers, and Fujiyama 2018) especially in how the data is collected, who collects/reports the data, and how the data is interpreted and visualized - which in turn affect how the data is perceived and used broadly. For crowdsourced data to be used meaningfully for on-ground change, it is crucial to uncover the underlying heterogeneity of street safety perceptions based on socio-demographic characteristics of respondents.

Using critical feminist approaches to data (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020), our paper employs qualitative methods to identify the various facets including sociocultural, platform access, gendered mobility and safety factors which influence the collection and interpretation of crowdsourced street safety data in New Delhi, India. We conduct a systematic literature review and participatory photo mapping exercises combined with safety audits (Dennis et al. 2009; Jagori and International 2010; Natarajan 2016) with women in two low-income communities in Delhi. Further, we utilize feminist grounded theory analysis (Charmaz 2006) of structured interviews with key stakeholders working on the issues of gender, mobility, and safety. Interviewed stakeholders range from academics and community organizers to policy researchers and crowdsourcing platforms. Our analysis allows us to a) examine the complex discourse on the many meanings of safety, and the notions of surveillance as safety, b) to understand who is left out and whose voices are counted in conversations around safety in public spaces, and c) to offer insights into the potential and challenges of using crowdsourced data for imagining inclusive, safer cities. While the focus of our study is on urban women’s safety in public spaces through stakeholder interviews and participatory photo mapping in low-income communities, we recognize that the implications of data bias and gendered mobility go beyond the context of gender and class in urban cities. Some of our stakeholder interviews point to the layered complexities of rural-urban, class-caste, and other broader contexts which we hope to address in future research.

Speakers

Riddhima Sharma

PostDoc, Indian Institute of Technology - Delhi

Friday June 9, 2023 9:30am - 9:50am EDT
PS 308 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Place and Narrative
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords digital humanities, gender studies, data, participatory methods, gendered mobility, crowdsourcing, data bias, safety
Area Data

9:30am EDT

“Eight Steps to Long-Term Survival”: Making Grassroots Health Infrastructure Through Information Media in the Philadelphia AIDS Crisis

The work of early AIDS organizing efforts remain visible in contemporary health infrastructures. The impact of AIDS activists and community health workers can be traced across cities: from needle exchanges and syringe laws, through still operational health centers, the design of experimental drug trials, and the work of the AIDS activists that continue to fight the still present crisis. At the same time, many structural conditions which produced HIV/AIDS as a deadly epidemic remain the same – exploitative global commodity chains, mass incarceration, commercialized medicine, and neoliberal medical systems (Cooper, 2017 and Shabazz, 2012). In this paper, I discuss the real and imagined health infrastructures created through the Philadelphia-based AIDS information project Critical Path, the parts of the project that have been worked into today’s AIDS service networks in Philadelphia, and the more radical imaginaries of medical design that were lost or abandoned over time. I argue that these absent infrastructures both continue to haunt the present and offer important ways for reimaging collective health and liberation in unevenly deadly neoliberal cities.

Critical Path was founded as a Philadelphia-based newsletter, using the utopian design visions of Buckminster Fuller’s theory of critical path planning. (Fuller, 1981). Contributors created extensive lists of local health and social service services, drug distributors, research updates, and political manifestos. The project was eventually extended online, and also served as a major dial-up internet provider and web host for HIV+ Philadelphians. In 2000, limited parts of the project were incorporated into a digital education program by a local LGBT health nonprofit. I work from the starting place that modes of media production play an important role in shaping perception (Parikka, 2013). This infrastructure “making” is something created in the work of information media production, which connects resources, drugs, scientific information, technologies, political ideas, and people in new relationships, articulating new connections and ways of knowing that are profoundly political (Haraway, 1997). These reworked configurations also provide important ways for people to navigate across patchy and sometimes violent health and social service infrastructures, creating a new kind of “shadow care infrastructure” (Power et al, 2022) and concretizing it through the infrastructure-building work of serving as a major internet provider and web host.

Attending to infrastructural presences and absences in the present, I explore the infrastructures taken up by major nonprofits and “ghost infrastructures” that were never implemented or discarded, seen in the never implemented founding demands and in archives of now-defunct hosted sites and their campaigns. Ultimately, the project offers a case study for considering the role of grassroots AIDS information work, and how the lost or discarded visions embedded within them haunt contemporary AIDS infrastructures mediate the extant crisis. It offers a way of understanding information media-making as infrastructure building and looks grassroots information media archives to both understand the infrastructural contours of contemporary urban health systems and as vitally important speculative design with the potential to produce more liberatory imaginaries of health infrastructure that can promote collective survival in the contemporary AIDS crisis and beyond.

Speakers

Sid Feinberg

graduate student, University of Kentucky

Friday June 9, 2023 9:30am - 9:50am EDT
PS 401 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Design Interventions I: Health; Housing; Criminal Justice
Modality In Person
Keywords LGBTQ+ studies, media studies, archives, HIV/AIDS, information media, infrastructure, queer geographies
Area Design

9:30am EDT

Media Literacy Relationships: The Social Contract of the Media with a Lens on Justice

A social contract may be seen as the tacit consent between communities and their representatives so that individuals within communities’ natural rights may stay protected. Empirical evidence suggests that institutions are shifting responsibility to individuals. In turn, tacit agreements between those institutions and the authorities they answer to may also be suspect.

The news media have practiced two functions—as a representative of the people and as the truth-telling informer to those people. The role of the expert has emerged within this system, where the user implicitly substitutes the media for the source. Moreover, as so-called right-wing news channels compete in the same arena as so-called left-aligned ones, this paradox is clearer: With agendas and evidence that point to convenient sides, they exploit the media user’s trust in the unwritten contract. At the very least, that social contract may need rewriting.

Several questions warrant unpacking. First of all, what is the social contract of news and the media? Secondly, is it being breached in the age of digital and social media? As such, what public policies around media literacy are being hastily drafted to follow this convenience? What are the implications of the steadily declining public trust and increase in selective avoidance of news mean for media literacy practice and scholarship? How does the future of technologies evolve into the practice of media literacy education? Where do issues of peace and justice fit into the dialogue of media and media literacy? Where do schools fit into this construct as well as social contract?

Further this panel seeks to examine, as media literacy makes efforts to instill the ability to analyze and examine media texts, the operation of news may collide with it. Hence, can media literacy’s effort to help in critical analysis justifiably and reasonably help learners scale the opacity and the logic of news media?

Speakers

Belinha De Abreu

Media Literacy Educator, Sacred Heart University

Meredith Baldi

Lead Educator/Teacher, George School, United States of America

Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

ABD, Southern Illinois University

Media literacy and illiteracy scholar; Teacher of journalism and media studies; Media practitioner; Columnist.Interests: Political rhetoric and news, Aesthetics of news, Media and the modernization project, Media ethics and social justice, Visibilization and invisibilization, Technology... Read More →

Renee Cherow-O'Leary

Education for the 21st Century, United States of America

Prescott Seraydarian

George School, United States of America

Friday June 9, 2023 9:30am - 11:00am EDT
Main 212

Panels/Roundtables

Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, education, media studies, participatory methods, media literacy, justice, futures, news, technology
Area Platforms & Technology

9:30am EDT

Telling Crucial Stories: Social Justice, Data, and Interactive Art in Student Projects

The projects presented in this panel session showcase the power of critical making as a response to pressing contemporary social justice issues. The panelists will present three distinct bodies of student work that use creative data visualization, media art, and critical play to explore multifaceted issues in mental healthcare, HIV/AIDS media activism, environmental justice, and violence against women. Through their projects, the presenters have envisioned and enacted radical care for marginalized communities, encouraging viewers to think deeply about these issues and take action. The panelists will also discuss the importance of creative interventions as a tool for challenging oppressive structures and advancing social justice praxis.

Welcome to Crisis Care University (CCU): A Visceralization of Undergraduates’ Mental Healthcare
Sarah Whitcomb Laiola, Celina DeCordova, Gianna Casey
Coastal Carolina University

Content Warning: This work addresses issues of mental health and college students (in)ability to access appropriate care, through a narrativization of research in the form of a visual, interactive novel. Topics of disordered eating, suicidal ideaton, self-harm, anxiety, and depression may be present in the audience's experience of the work, so attendees are asked to engage the work with care and awareness.

In response to the conference theme of critical making and social justice, we propose to exhibit Welcome to Crisis Care University (CCU): A Visceralization of Undergraduates’ Mental Healthcare. Welcome to CCU is a series of digital and physical critical making projects that have been created as a response to student-led research about mental healthcare, access, and wellbeing on Coastal Carolina University’s campus. Designed by Gianna Casey and Celina DeCordova, two undergraduate students at Coastal Carolina, working under the research guidance and advisement of Dr. Sarah Laiola, assistant professor of Digital Culture and Design at Coastal Carolina, Welcome to CCU imagines and, through experimental making and critical play, enacts a world committed to radically caring for the mental health, anxiety, and stress of today’s undergraduate students, who face the challenges of college in simultaneity with the increasing uncertainty, even impossibility, of a future. Consider that this generation of undergraduates’ collective higher education experience is temporally anchored by the COVID-19 pandemic on one end, and an increasingly unmanageable climate crisis on the other; in the middle of these anchors, that is, their present, they face all the economic, social, and political upheaval attendant with these phenomena. Thus, envisioning, enacting, and making space for radical care for this generation of students is a matter of social justice praxis.

AIDS/ART/NOW: A Media Response to “We Are Having This Conversation Now”
Margaret Rhee, Andrea L. Fernandez, Sarah Wilson
The New School

This media art exhibit includes artwork, creative data visualizations, performances, project demonstrations, and other critical interventions in response to an author class visit to the graduate course “Storytelling Across Media” from School of Media Studies at The New School by AIDS activist authors Alex Juhasz and Ted Kerr. Alex and Ted spoke on their new book “We Are Having This Conversation Now” (Duke UP, 22) and led a discussion on AIDS media, and media graduate students in turn created media art responses to their visit and the book through creative interventions in technology, education, and critical making. With a variety of media created, this exhibit demonstrates the engagement with the newly published book, and an example of a critical making approach to the necessary continuing conversation on HIV/AIDS Media Art Activism.

Digging Multifacets of Social Justice through a Methodological Proposition
Hatice Server Kesdi
Eskişehir Osmangazi University, Turkiye

Design is a political act. It creates value in economic paradigm while examining its relationship with society, politics and ecology. Because designers take their share of creative destruction and critical design emerged on this foundation, as an antidote to affirmative design.

Different types of critical design exist (Malpass, 2017), though it cannot be reduced to a methodology. Critical design is a position so it only demands a discursive yet flexible methodology which is the purpose of this study: present a theoretical framework draws from the four theories below as a methodology proposition to explore different stages of a critical design project.
1. Critical Design and Everyday Life
2. Object-Oriented Ontology and New Materialism
3. The Public and Construction of Publics
4. Strategy-Tactics

Student projects examined include WATERDROBE, SEVERITY OF VIOLENCE, and HEIMATLOS.

Moderators

Nick Dease

User Experience Librarian, Pratt Institute

Speakers

Margaret Rhee

Assistant Professor, The New School

Sarah Laiola

Assistant Professor, Coastal Carolina University

Celina DeCordova

Coastal Carolina University, United States of America

Gianna Casey

Coastal Carolina University, United States of America

Sarah Wilson

The New School, United States of America

Andrea L. Fernandez

The New School, United States of America

Hatice Server Kesdi

Asst. Prof. Dr., Eskişehir Osmangazi University

Friday June 9, 2023 9:30am - 11:00am EDT
Main 210

Panels/Roundtables

Session Title Telling Crucial Stories
Modality Hybrid, In Person, Online
Keywords design, activism, social justice, critical design, care, digital humanities, data, student-centered teaching and learning, participatory methods, critical making, pedagogy, mental health, arts, LGBTQ+ studies, media studies, gender studies
Area HASTAC Scholars, Pedagogy

9:30am EDT

The Anti-Colonial DH School: A Virtual Roundtable

Many digital humanities (DH) workshops and centers are situated within high cost Global North campuses, rendering these spaces inaccessible to precariously employed educators, community organizers, autodidacts, international students, disabled community members, and those residing outside of Western nation-states. These institutional defaults perpetuate colonialism and border imperialism in DH by centering elite, white, Brahmanical, and Western-centric knowledge production within resource-rich infrastructures, preventing the building of transdisciplinary learning communities committed to queer feminist, non-ableist, and anti-colonial goals at the intersections of technology and society. Against this cycle, the objectives of this roundtable are to plant the seeds for a global, free, and ongoing anti-colonial DH virtual school.

At this online session, we approach DH as a method to support praxes rooted in public scholarship and critical making involving three fields: media archaeology; community-focused digital storytelling; and online public knowledge writing. The questions that drive the formation of this school include:

What are the possibilities of building and sustaining a digital pedagogical infrastructure that offers a counterpoint to hegemonic infrastructures we find ourselves tethered to?
What are the tools and techniques for anti-colonial DH critiques grounded in translocal and transnational solidarities?
What are the constraints that we may act on to build inclusive, accessible, and sustainable knowledge-sharing in DH?

We take inspiration from various contemporaneous initiatives that seek to build more just otherwises to digital learning practices [1]. We also find ourselves thinking with longer histories of collective educational organizing that led to the formation of teach-ins, crowdsourced anti-oppression reading lists, and mutual-aid networks for community healing [2].

This proposal brings together folks working on digital pedagogy from an array of geographic and disciplinary locations, who are committed to the process of developing this school together. We will discuss not only the hopes of this school, but also what will be necessary to form it ethically, including its design and topical content and how to fund it in long-term ways. In our bios, we unpack our positionings and how we see ourselves entering this conversation.

Anne Cong-Huyen (she/her) is Director of Digital Scholarship at the University of Michigan Library, and affiliate faculty in the Digital Studies Institute and Asian Pacific Islander American Studies. She was previously the digital scholar and coordinator of the Digital Liberal Arts Program at Whittier College, and a Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA. She holds a PhD in English from UC Santa Barbara. She is co-founder of #transformDH, the SCRAM collective, and is currently the chair of the Digital Humanities Caucus of the American Studies Association.

Arun Jacob (he/him) is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Arun's doctoral work unites media genealogy, intersectional feminist media studies and critical university studies to explore how contemporary university data management techniques and information management systems shape our sociocultural relations, experiences, and knowledge.

Ashley Caranto Morford (she/her) is a Filipina-British settler whose work is in relationship with Filipinx/a/o studies, Indigenous studies, anti-colonial practices, and DH. Ashley aims to foster learning communities that challenge oppression, center systemically marginalized perspectives, practice anti-colonial ways of knowing/being, and provide skills to bring these teachings into the broader world. Ashley is an Assistant Professor in Liberal Arts at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA).

Kush Patel (they/he) is a queer feminist educator and public scholar, working at the intersections of architecture and the digital public humanities. Their “alt-ac” and academic career paths have constantly asked: what pedagogical and archival forms might campus-community projects in and with the digital take to engage infrastructural struggles in our deeply unequal and violent contexts of heteronormative and casteist patriarchy. Currently, they serve as Head of Studies for the Postgraduate Arts Program in Technology and Change at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology in Bangalore, India.

Latoya Lee’s (she/her) areas of specialization include Critical Race Theory, Critical Media Studies, Black Feminisms, Women of Color Feminisms, digital communities, digital social movements, and identity constructions. Specifically, her research centers around the ways BIPOC have used digital and social media, to first, (re)define their bod(ies) outside of dominant media perceptions; next, to challenge white supremacy and institutionalized racism; and lastly, to build digital communities of support and empowerment. Currently, Latoya is an Assistant Professor in the Women, Gender and Queer Studies Department at California State University, Fullerton.

Michelle Lee Brown (she/they) is the Assistant Professor of Indigenous Knowledge, Data Sovereignty, and Decolonization at Washington State University. A recent Eastman Fellow at Dartmouth College in their department of Native American and Indigenous Studies, she completed her PhD in the Indigenous Politics and Futures Studies programs in the Political Science Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. More about her practice and praxis is at www.michelleleebrown.com. Euskalduna from Lapurdi (Biarritz), she now lives on Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla lands and waters. She strives to uphold her relational commitments to these communities and imagine and build otherwise.

Palashi is a PhD Candidate in Information Science at Cornell University. An engineer turned feminist scholar and writer, her research interests lie at the intersection of science and technology studies, feminist studies, socio-cultural anthropology and information sciences. Her award-winning research on gender and caste in the computing industry has been published in leading Associated Computing Machinery venues like CHI and CSCW. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council-Mellon Foundation, Microsoft Research, University of Siegen and Cornell University. She tweets at @lapshiii and you can find her ongoing and published work on https://palashi.xyz.

Speakers

Anne Cong-Huyen

Director of Digital Scholarship, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Kush Patel

Faculty Member and Head of Studies (MA in Technology and Change), Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, MAHE

Ashley Caranto Morford

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA

Arun Jacob

PhD candidate, University of Toronto

Latoya Lee

Assistant Professor, California State University, Fullerton, USA

Michelle Lee Brown

Tri-Cities Campus of Washington State University, Pullman, USA

Palashi Vaghela

Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

Friday June 9, 2023 9:30am - 11:00am EDT
Online

Panels/Roundtables

Modality Online
Keywords digital humanities, cultural studies, pedagogy, community, transnational organising, solidarity
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

9:30am EDT

The Puerto Rican Literature Project: Social Justice through DH

The Proyecto de la literatura Puertorriqueña (PLPR)/Puerto Rican Literature Project is a forthcoming public-facing digital portal that makes poetry available through the gathering, transcription, translation and publication of poetic materials that until now have been physically archived in different collections, or not archived at all. The project was conceived as a means of consolidating, reflecting and responding to grass-roots community exchanges by Puerto Rican poets across all regions, as well as a means to make these voices available to poets and reading communities at large. Because the PLPR team understands that access should not be equated with the erasure of difference, they seek to actively decolonize the archive by recovering the voices and histories of Puerto Rican writers and by making thousands of poems available bilingually to scholars, educators, students and community members. Poetry in the portal covers a range of topics important to social justice, including culture, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, colonialism, language and environment. This panel will provide an overview of PLPR, its mission for social justice, and decolonial approaches to creating the portal, the use of bilingual metadata to increase discoverability and the elaboration of visualizations.

“Puerto Rican Literature and Institutional Marginalization”
As Megan Ward and Adrian S. Wisnicki point out in “The Archive after Theory,” physical archives are often framed by imperialist narratives and therefore limited in perspective, language and scope (201). This is especially pressing since Puerto Rico continues to struggle against the violence of US colonialism, and the diaspora grows exponentially in population size. In addition, the majority of Puerto Rican literature is still overlooked, understudied and under-published on the mainland . Many of the same barriers that existed for Puerto Rican writers in the seventies still exist today: lack of reviews, infrequent publication; and erasure of Puerto Rican history in the US history curriculum. At this moment, very few textbooks explore the history of Puerto Rican literature from the diaspora and the archipelago together over the last century. This presentation focuses on the cultural significance of Puerto Rican literature, how institutional racism has marginalized Puerto Rican literature, and the role PLPR plays in decolonizing the archives and literary canon.

“Decolonial Methods and US Latinx Digital Humanities”
This presentation focuses on the stakes of conducting digital humanities projects through the lens of US Latinx digital humanities in order to create decolonial methods that contest colonial narratives. Institutional archives have appropriated knowledge, mislabeled, and de-contextualized the histories of people of color, perpetuating a generational trauma that informs the representation of Latinx people in the United States. PLPR, as a public-facing project, has the potential to create a more inclusive understanding of literature and history. Furthermore, applying digital tools to underrepresented archives can amplify the complex voices of multiethnic histories and languages; exemplify the tensions between communities and formal institutions; recover ancestral voices; and offer the opportunity to re/write marginalized histories into the national discourse.

“Reaching Communities: Access, Metadata and Language”
In many instances, the US colonization of Puerto Rico has obscured or even erased Puerto Rican literary histories by prioritizing Western European writers and the English language. The PLPR portal disrupts this closed circle through centering the community as its audience. This presentation will focus on the use and challenges of employing bilingual metadata, keywords, translations and developing a public-facing portal. In order to help combat colonial displacement and invisibilization, poems and biographical entries about the poets will be published on the PLPR portal in both English and Spanish, while paying careful attention to those aspects that make each language incommensurable. As Virginia Held explains in The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global (2006), the application of an ethics of care to archiving ensures that researchers view the subjects in the archives, not as mere objects of study that serve academic purposes, but rather as people to whom we have a responsibility, whose emotions are acknowledged, valued, and appreciated. Thus, the project’s protocols also include responding to the needs of the community, such as display on different devices, focus group feedback and communicating with poets about translations and information included on the portal. Together, these approaches to data allow us to connect, rather than remove ourselves from the archive, and to value the differences between the private and public spheres. It creates a connection and produces more meaningful and respectful scholarship.

“Latine Digital Oral History Archives: Amplifying the Voices of Underrepresented Communities”
This presentation delves on the importance of conducting oral histories with underrepresented communities including best practices. It will provide insight on how to plan and conduct ethical oral histories collections in communities of color and highlight the importance of cultural awareness to maintain a respectful space at all stages of the interview process. The audience will consider the complexities and diverse nature of communities of color, for example Latina/os/x peoples, interviewing techniques in English and Spanish, transcribing, and archiving.

Works cited
Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Ward, Megan and Adrian S. Wisnicki. “The Archive After Theory.” Debates in the Digital Humanities
2019 edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. University of Minnesota Press, 2019: 201.
wa Thiong'o, NGugi. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Curry Ltd, 1986: 384.

Speakers

Gabriela Baeza Ventura

Associate Professor & Executive Editor, University of Houston, United States of America

Gabriela Baeza Ventura is Associate Professor of Hispanic Literature in the Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston, where she teaches courses on US Latina/o literature for graduate and undergraduate students. She is also Executive Editor for Arte Público Press, where she... Read More →

Lorena Gauthereau

Digital Programs Manager, University of Houston

Dr. Lorena Gauthereau is the Digital Programs Manager for the US Latino Digital Humanities program at the University of Houston’s Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage. She teaches interdisciplinary courses through UH’s Center for Mexican American Studies and served as... Read More →

Elena Foulis

Assistant Professor, Texas A&M San Antonio

Elena Foulis is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M, San Antonio and Director of the Spanish for Heritage Learners program. She has been directing the oral history project, Oral Narratives of Latin@s in Ohio (ONLO) since 2014. The project is an ongoing collection of over 130 vid... Read More →

Claire Jimenez

University of South Carolina

Friday June 9, 2023 9:30am - 11:00am EDT
PS 405 (Design Center)

Panels/Roundtables

Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, languages & literatures, race/ethnic studies, archives, community, Puerto Rican literature, metadata, decolonial, bilingual, poetry

9:30am EDT

What Should be Next for the Chandigarh Chairs?

Constructed as a new capital for the post-partition Indian Punjab, the city of Chandigarh is known for its Le Corbusier designed city plan and Capitol Complex. Recently, Chandigarh’s fame has also extended to the modernist furniture produced for the city’s municipal buildings, courthouse, colleges and a select few private homes. Today these pieces are sold as the exclusive work of Swiss/French designer Pierre Jeanneret, and can be found taking top billing at the world’s premier auction houses, in the collections of at least three museums on two continents, and as decor in the homes of the rich and famous.

Despite the seemingly liberal approach to these objects taken by many popular authors, dealers, collectors and commentators, the overarching popular narrative and understanding of Chandigarh Chairs remains firmly rooted in neo-colonial attitudes. As pieces of Chandigarh’s furniture has been removed from India, refurbished and re-sold at auction these now-iconic objects have been transformed from Chandigarh chairs to “Jeanneret Chairs”, from utilitarian furniture to pieces of high design, and from embodiments of Indian design to items residing solidly in the European modernist design canon.

The Chandigarh Chairs research project has been documenting the construction of this elitist, colonial narrative over the past two years, tracking the trajectory and sale of individual pieces of furniture at auction, and observing first hand the current state of the furniture within the city of Chandigarh itself.

Instead of dwelling exclusively in the errors of the past, this panel turns its attention toward the future; toward a manifold array of possibilities for treatment and understanding of Chandigarh’s modernist furniture moving forward.

From local issues of use, access, and repair to international issues of movement, sale, and repatriation, this panel seeks to present a robust and all-encompassing array of viewpoints as to what the future of Chandigarh Chairs will and should be.

Speakers

Petra Seitz

PhD Candidate, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

Gregor Wittrick

British Museum

Nia Thandapani

Independent Designer

Vikramāditya Prakāsh

Professor of Architecture, University of Washington

Christopher Wilk

Keeper of Furniture, Textiles, and Fashion, Victoria & Albert Museum

Ravi Sandhu

DRONAH

Friday June 9, 2023 9:30am - 11:00am EDT
PS 406 (Design Center)

Panels/Roundtables

Modality Hybrid, Online, In Person
Keywords art history, history, design, open access / open knowledge, design history, chandigarh, India, furniture, art crime
Area Design

9:30am EDT

Em(body)d Pedagogical Practices with the CUNY Peer Leaders: An Innovative Approach To Leadership Programs in Higher Education

When we think about the concept of “Critical Making and Social Justice,” we reject the traditional, dated models and practices of western education and instead underscore examples in academia in which innovative teaching practices have been successfully implemented. This holistic and interactive workshop will focus on student-centered pedagogical practices, and how they are applied when working with diverse undergraduate students, many of whom are from marginalized and underserved communities.

We will spotlight a leadership and mentorship program entitled “The CUNY Peer Leaders Program,” in which the founding principles center on non-hierarchical learning structures that emphasize peer learning, and embedded components of social justice, student agency, and emotional wellness. The CUNY Peer Leaders (CPLs) engage and participate in a variety of community building exercises, skill shares, and enrichment opportunities designed to explore their perspectives and strengthen and uplift their voices. The program also works with critical and creative thinking, examination of sociopolitical issues and their impacts, various historical and cultural perspectives, aesthetic appreciation, and human connection. Through their work, individually and collectively, CPLs further develop their skills in research, oral and written communication, collaboration, project management, and digital literacy, which help prepare them for success as students in college, participants within their communities, and as future professionals.

Next, we will transition into a brief framework and then hands-on activity used in this program that has and can be adapted for many different areas of study and disciplines. This activity is entitled “Body-Mind Mapping,” which is an indigenous based/inspired practice of understanding the experiences of communities and peoples. Body-Mind Mapping aims to have participants ask themselves what their bodies are experiencing in forms of pain, pleasure, anxiety, and self-acknowledgement. This practice began within the Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange in Edmonton and Psychosocial Support Initiative in South Africa. Body-Mind Mapping became a collective activity and form of data collection in order to counteract stigma and fear by recognizing stories of those living with HIV/AIDS. The City of Edmonton’s Artist-in-Residence Ted Kerr and Education Coordinator Lynn Sutankayo organized a body mapping retreat in August 2008.

For the 2008 retreat, three outlines of the bodies of three artists were traced (Brett-Maclean, 2009). Each artist explored his identity through images and text superimposed on the outline of his body. The artists began by writing down their names and places of birth, and followed with representations of significant personal memories including those related to living with HIV, all in abstract ideas and visual aesthetics on their body map. Body mapping offers both a metaphor and means of recognizing the fluidity of the personal, social, geographical, political, and emotional experience of journeying through life with illness. Participants have described experiencing a heightened awareness and appreciation of the various threads and storylines making up their lives. They noticed the sometimes limiting ways in which they had narrated their stories, and they found a renewed appreciation of all that helped them to sustain their courage, integrity, and hope. In addition, they experienced a renewed commitment to promoting increased acceptance and understanding that would help reduce the stigma of HIV, a fundamental goal of the exhibit (Brett-Maclean, 2009).

In a research setting for humanities and social science disciplines, Body-Mind Mapping offers an opportunity for scholars to understand the communities they collaborate in a non-invasive way. It places the autonomy and embodiment acknowledgment in the hands of the participants by asking them to interpret and describe what they are feeling based on their current state of mind. These practices dive into indigenous methodologies from which collective and personal experiences are prioritized by marginalized communities, which are too often ignored or misrepresented in scholarly research. Academic Kelsey Milian Lopez was inspired by Body-Mind Mapping as an engaging activity through which participants could reflect on their own identities and desires. Participants are engaged with questions not often asked concerning experiences involving pain or pleasure.
As a motivating leadership exercise, students have a life-sized body map traced using a 48x200 sheet of white poster paper. For students who might prefer to not trace their bodies, a handheld 8x11 size paper is available so they may participate and engage equally. Milian Lopez developed a series of guiding questions that aim to have students ask themselves who they are, how they would describe where they come from, what their aspirations and desires entail, and more. For our workshop at HASTAC 2023, we will have the CPLs participate in developing a new set of guiding questions to pose to the participants. Having conducted this activity in various academic classroom settings that range from elementary to undergraduate education, Milian Lopez has noticed the intrigue and energetic engagement Body Mapping has with its participants.

The workshop will allow for creative and artistic expression. Participants are encouraged to use mixed media materials and tools to demonstrate their answers to the guiding questions in the exercise. Scrap pieces of paper, magazine clippings, ribbons, colorful construction paper, beads, feathers, and thread are among the materials that can be used. This practice offers hands-on expression often lost in the collegiate academic setting, and connects strongly to the conference theme of critical making. At the end of the workshop, participants may place their body maps against a wall for others to see in a “gallery walk style,” where they may engage with viewers and provide context to their maps or leave it up to artistic interpretation. Overall, Body-Mind Mapping acts as a reminder to participants that reflection on embodied experiences should not be neglected. Kelsey Milian Lopez thinks about it like this: “Our bodies speak to us, both about ideas and aspirations for the future or the kinds of generational traumas we have faced from the past. How do we show that and describe that with creative materials and tools?”

Citations
Brett-Maclean, Pamela. “Body mapping: embodying the self living with HIV/AIDS.” CMAJ :
Canadian Medical Association journal = journal de l'Association medicale canadienne vol. 180,7 (2009): 740-1. doi:10.1503/cmaj.090357

Speakers

Lauren Melendez

Director, CUNY Peer Leaders Program and Administrative Specialist, The Futures Initiative, CUNY Graduate Center

Jerome Campbell

CUNY Peer Leaders Program, John Jay College, City University of New York

Kelsey Milian

Futures Initiative, CUNY

Jackie Cahill

CUNY Graduate Center, United States of America

Shehnija Afrin

CUNY Peer Leaders Program, Queens College, City University of New York

Brian Garrett

CUNY Peer Leaders Program, Medgar Evers College, City University of New York

Violet Doolittle

CUNY Peer Leaders Program, The City College of New York, City University of New York

Onyekachi Okeke

Friday June 9, 2023 9:30am - 11:00am EDT
PS 407 (Design Center)

Workshops

Session Title Pedagogy Workshops
Modality Hybrid, Online, In Person
Keywords pedagogy, mentoring, student-centered learning and teaching, Indigenous/Native studies
Area Pedagogy

9:30am EDT

My body is a data visceralization: Exploring environmental data through embodied performance

Overview
This interactive workshop aims to surface new practices for using the body as a way of understanding environmental data by focusing on representing data with the body—through voice, gesture, walking, or movement. This workshop is for anyone who is curious about doing fun and strange things with data: analysts, designers, artists, and researchers who work with data are all welcome, and data newcomers are especially encouraged to join. Through a series of activities that engage all of the senses to explore and represent data through embodiment and performance, participants will come away from this bodies-on, activity-based workshop with new ideas and techniques for moving beyond traditional data communication strategies. In these activities, we will use data sets that relate to the conference theme of sustainability and environmental justice and that encourage people to reflect on how their individual bodies and actions are connected to larger sociotechnical systems: for example, data about the environmental impacts of food, travel, and digital technology. We propose a remote, 90-minute workshop, which allows us to also explore how embodied activities can help establish presence among remote, distributed data and creative teams.

Motivation
Analyzing and consuming data does not need to be restricted to numbers, tables, and charts—data can be experienced by senses other than sight. Engaging sensory modalities such as sound and touch can help break down barriers between data ‘beginners’ and data ‘experts’: Sensory data explorations tap into the expertise beginners have as long-term residents of their own bodily-sensory worlds; they also turn experts back into beginners, encouraging them to view data through fresh, bodily-sensory lenses. By embracing embodied ways of interacting with data, we strive to make data more approachable, leveraging the concept of “creative data literacy” [1] as well as the data feminist technique of data visceralization [2].

Maxene Graze is a data designer who is fascinated by representing data through senses other than sight. Jordan Wirfs-Brock is an assistant professor at Whitman College whose research focuses on how we can use data and sounds as creative materials to expand the kinds of interactions we can have with data. Together, we have collaborated to develop design practices centered on understanding data through multisensory experiences—using sight, smell, touch, taste, and even smell to create sensory data representations. This workshop builds off of previous participatory activities we have facilitated, such as the AQI Human Synthesizer [3], a participatory event where we conducted a live data chorus, and Sketching Across the Senses [4], a workshop at CHI2022 where we created activities for sensory translation as a data sketching practice. Whereas these past activities have focused on surfacing metaphors and new data representations, the workshop we are proposing for HASTAC 2023 has a goal of elevating the body as a way of knowing and understanding environmental data. While we can physically feel the impacts of environmental change, whether that be the air quality we breathe in, or worsening heat and drought, the numbers and charts that represent these changes are rather sterile. By employing a somatic method to understand data, leveraging on the knowledge we can gain from our bodies, we hope to inject empathy and a deeper understanding into this critical data.

Workshop Activities
As this workshop emphasizes the diverse perspectives that we can all bring to understanding data by celebrating the unique, situated perspectives we have in our own bodies, the activities will be designed to be inclusive of all bodies and abilities.

The workshop will start with a group icebreaker activity aimed at getting participants comfortable with expressing data as well as aspects of their identity through multisensory and bodily expression. Next, participants will all engage with a dataset, on their own, through a series of activities where we invite them to express the data through different parts of their bodies—for example, using their voices, gestures, or movements through space to represent different aspects of the data. We will then split participants into small groups, where they will spend time brainstorming new activities that others can do to explore data with their bodies. Then, the groups will exchange their new activities and perform them, providing feedback and refining the activities before documenting them. We will close the workshop with a discussion about how we can continue these kinds of embodied data practices in our own work beyond HASTAC.

Anticipated Outcomes
Our hope is that participants will come away with an intuitive, physical understanding or “sense” of the data by directly embodying the data during our workshop. While having fun, they will also come away with: techniques for using the body to explore data; new connections to a community of like-minded people excited about doing strange things with data; and activities and practices that they can apply in their own data work to break out of their normal day-to-day learned data practices.

References
[1] D'Ignazio, C. (2017). Creative data literacy: Bridging the gap between the data-haves and data-have nots. Information Design Journal, 23(1), 6-18.
[2] D'ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data Feminism. MIT press.
[3] Graze, M., & Wirfs-Brock, J. (October 20, 2022). Human Synthesizer: Reinforcing data with our bodies. Data the Senses. https://buttondown.email/datathesenses/archive/human-synthesizer-reinforcing-data-with-our-bodies/
[4] Wirfs-Brock, J., Graze, M., Devendorf, L., Desjardins, A., Goudarzi, V., Friske, M., & Keegan, B. C. (2022, April). Sketching Across the Senses: Exploring Sensory Translation as a Generative Practice for Designing Data Representations. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (pp. 1-7). https://sensorysketching.com/

Speakers

Jordan Wirfs-Brock

Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Whitman College

I'm a human-computer interaction researcher, educator, and designer exploring how to bring data into our everyday lives as a creative material by developing participatory data representations that engage all of our senses, especially sound. I've also researched using data that streaming... Read More →

Max Graze

Friday June 9, 2023 9:30am - 11:00am EDT
Steuben 410 (Design Center)

Workshops

Session Title Data Workshops
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords design, data, performance, design-based approaches, data visceralization, embodiment, data feminism
Area Data

9:30am EDT

Executive Orders Public Writing Session

Click here to contribute to Executive Orders: bit.ly/executiveorders4u

After the election of Donald J. Trump, a group of poets and activists conceived of a project wherein we could respond to the sudden and seemingly relentless barrage of Trump’s dystopian executive orders with a series of our own. The project, titled “Executive Orders,” was envisioned as a collaborative, freeform, emergency prose poem that would unfold real-time responses to current events and the U.S. socio-political landscape. Published between 2017 and 2020 in a series of three volumes by the Organism for Poetic Research and The Operating System, Executive Orders is a record of one literary community’s efforts to cope with and respond to the tidal wave of reactionary policies enacted or proclaimed during the Trump years. But it is also an experiment in digitally-crowdsourced collaborative making that will be among the first literary works to employ online tools to such ends. Crowdsourced projects such as Executive Orders provide an alternative to norms of authorship that valorize individual genius and thereby serve the ends of marketing conventions. They also tell stories about the ways we can—and can’t—come together to form virtual collectives that may have a voice in political deliberations.

Please join us and contribute your own words to this ongoing project, which will be published in final form in 2024. Stop by our location and contribute in person, or do so online here: bit.ly/executiveorders4u

The text of already published versions of the project can be found here: https://organismforpoeticresearch.org/opr/executive-orders-opreditions/

Speakers

Andrew Gorin

Lecturer, New York University

Rachael Guynn Wilson

Friday June 9, 2023 9:30am - 5:00pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Activity

Modality In Person
Keywords languages & literatures, community, public engagement, collective authorship, poetry, environment, social justice

9:50am EDT

Co-designing narratives: Reimagining a safe Gainesville for our future

This short talk and poster will introduce Co-designing narratives, a collaborative project between students of the Design and Visual Communications MFA at the University of Florida and representatives of the City of Gainesville under the nation-wide artistic initiative One Nation/One Project (ONOP). Gainesville and eight other cities in the United States were selected for the first ONOP cohort, with the goal of using the creative potentials of art and culture to promote community well-being in the post-COVID era.

The focus of ONOP in Gainesville is to address youth’s perceptions of gun violence, and how to reimagine a safer Gainesville for future generations. Since September 2022, we have collaborated with Anne Wolf, the Community Engagement Manager at the City of Gainesville, in co-designing a series of workshops that center Gainesville youth as change-makers, explore the role of design as a powerful tool for change, and use artistic expression as a driver for trauma healing (Lynn 2012, Richman 2013). This builds from scholarship that recognizes the value of individual and collective lived experience as subject expertise (Hill Collins 2009), and how to decolonize design by expanding who gets to be a designer of social change (Tunstall 2020, Caroll 2017).

As co-designers, we aim to amplify the voices and experiences of marginalized communities on social and systemic issues. Through participatory action and collaborative design, we have partnered with community experts and local organizations to create safe spaces for critical conversations and making. We have partnered with Project YouthBuild, a local AmeriCorps branch, to host workshops with students about their perceptions of safety in the community, and the current structures of society that foster inequality across cultures. Through creative making and special emphasis on the how and why of making, the students were able to express complex emotions towards racism, violence, mental health, and have their perspectives inform the foundations for upcoming community initiatives. Our visual outputs for this collaboration were exploratory mood boards about perceptions of safety, booklets with prompts on how to re-imagine pop culture into a culture of wellness, and a collaborative poster session where students collectively reflected on the mood boards and expanded on the conversation about safety and culture with visual input materials. At the end of the semester-long project, these visual outputs were collected in a zine to show our process and the students’ outcomes. Through this process, our team learned how to communicate our individual and collective goals, unlearn biases, lean into co-design with mutual respect, and delegate tasks to our strengths. Together, we aim to better serve the local community by building trust and creating long-lasting partnerships with diverse community members.

Taking inspiration from the work of designers and activists such as Antionette Caroll and Dori Tunstall, we understand that redesign is the key to subverting existing systems of oppression, inequality, and inequity, and that the power to enact change is not individual, but collective (Caroll 2017). ONOP Gainesville will run until 2024, and we hope to continue to collaboratively expand what it means to be a designer for social change.

Speakers

Isabella Arrazola

University of Florida, United States of America

Hien Phan

Graduate student, University of Florida

Friday June 9, 2023 9:50am - 10:00am EDT
ARC E-02

Papers & Talks

Session Title Community Co-Design
Modality In Person, Online, Hybrid
Keywords arts, design, activism, community, participatory methods, design-based approaches, co-design, youth, gun violence, future building
Area Design

9:50am EDT

Locative Media and Do-It-Yourself Activism

Repurposing locative technologies (such as GPS, GIS, AR) as tools for cultural critique and activism gives students the chance to produce meaningful interventions that connect physical locations to memory, history, collective identity, and civic engagement. The ongoing critical making projects from my classes covered in this presentation propose new ways of using augmented reality (AR) apps and other locative media (such as GIS mapping tools) to expand collaborative activity beyond the classroom through a type of educational and activist geocaching, where students “hide” virtual AR messages in specific NYC landmarks and/or cultural events that relate to the course (e.g. street art, gentrification, gamification, feminist monuments, experimental architecture) and then share clues online (hinting at the location of their AR) before embarking on a quest to uncover each other’s real-world hidden messages; this provides a playful way of “testing” students’ applied knowledge of the course material, and was inspired by our cinematic exploration of psychogeography and Situationist-influenced urban drifts (dérives). The dérive provides a productive metaphor for experimental pedagogy that is more focused on process-oriented praxis rather than fixed expectations.Another critical making project I would like to discuss took place during the turbulent post-election period (and inspired subsequent projects that took place during other periods of sociopolitical turmoil). The desire to utilize technology for political activism became even more pressing for many students in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and several members of my class found it cathartic and liberating to repurpose the technology at their disposal for sociopolitical reflection. The subversive use of AR (Augmented Reality) and locative media for social critique and historical preservation is becoming more commonplace as an artistic counter-cultural practice, as evidenced, for instance, in projects I teach in class, such as the FutARist movement and Mi Querido Barrio (My Beloved Community, Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, NYC, 2016), an augmented reality tour of East Harlem that aims to make visible gentrification’s unseen implications of cultural erasure. In the next class project I will discuss, I challenged my students to embark on a scavenger hunt around campus, where they used their mobile phones and the customized form we created on Fulcrum (a locative Geographic Information System database) to document –through images, audio, text, and video –the various instances of activism and protest during the post-election period of 2016. Through this and other critical making projects, not only did students learn more about locative media such as GIS and GPS through practice, but they also created their own archive that makes visible and virtually permanent the multiple efforts for civic participation and free speech. The ability to capture ephemeral moments of protest further added to the meaningful aspects of the project, and helped the students experiment with different ways of documenting and sharing transient experiences. The scavenger hunt also gave them a chance to interact with their community (e.g. through interviews with protest organizers and participants) and become more aware of how their seemingly neutral surroundings become politically charged in times of crisis.

Speakers

Marina Hassapopoulou

Assistant professor, New York University

https://marinahassap.wordpress.com/

Friday June 9, 2023 9:50am - 10:00am EDT
PS 308 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Place and Narrative
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords digital humanities, cultural studies, AR / VR / MR, activism, praxis, hybrid teaching
Area Activism

9:50am EDT

United States for Abortion: Generating a New Visual Rhetoric for Reproductive Justice

For decades, the majority of Americans have supported the right to safe and legal abortion, yet it has been continually under attack in the United States. The Dobb’s decision ended guaranteed access in June 2022, leaving access abortion to be determined by the states. Public support for legal abortion remains largely unchanged, with 62% saying it should be legal in all or most cases, yet more than half the states in the country now partially or completely ban access to abortion.

Abortion is stigmatized, despite being a remarkably common experience. Nearly one in four women in the U.S. will have an abortion by the age of 45. People who receive abortions often hide their experiences due to stigma. Secrecy obscures the frequency and perpetuates the stigma. A major contributing factor to the stigma is the visual rhetoric of anti-abortion factions, which have dominated public discourse on abortion for decades. Misleading claims about the science of human life coupled with graphic images of developing fetuses are intended to produce shame and fear in the viewer, propping up a reductive and narrow moral argument.

Visual rhetoric of the pro-choice movement has been similarly reductive. This short talk will discuss exclusionary, insufficient, and counterproductive rhetoric in the pro-choice movement. For example, outdated images of hangers spread the misconception that illegal abortions are unsafe, which creates fear among people who may want to manage their own abortion. The visual rhetoric of the abortion rights movement must shift and expand to acknowledge the contemporary mechanisms of abortion, to address the wide range of reasons why people get abortions, and to speak inclusively about who gets abortions.

The United States for Abortion project was created in 2022 to generate a design community-sourced visual rhetoric for abortion rights that features diverse and nuanced perspectives. Through an open call that is still ongoing, designers in all 50 states plus Washington D.C. and the colonized territory of Puerto Rico are invited to design artwork in support of access to legal abortion. Recruitment has an emphasis on including diverse identities, with regard for gender, race/ethnicity, age, religion, political affiliation, parental status, sexuality, citizenship status, etc. The artwork is sold on t-shirts, prints and stickers, with 100% of profits donated to the National Network of Abortion Funds. The artwork is also shared publicly on social media. The collection will be on view for the public in exhibit installations.

We are building a pluralistic collective of voices that speak to the nuance and complexity of abortion today, addressing critical issues such as trans rights; abortion as reproductive healthcare; and reproductive justice as social, racial and environmental justice. Rather than simply persuade, the project aims to normalize abortion, increase the visibility of support for it, and combat mis/disinformation. By enlisting contributors based on state, we also aim to bring attention to abortion as a state-specific issue, and place critical emphasis on regional political contexts. Through this project, we hope to build solidarity across identities and borders in the collective fight for abortion justice.

Speakers

Alison Place

Assistant Profesor of Graphic Design, University of Arkansas

Kathy Mueller

Associate Professor, Temple University

Kathy Mueller is an award-winning designer, practicing and teaching in Philadelphia. She is a co-founder of the United States for Abortion, which aims to reflect Americans’ majority support for abortion rights using tee shirts created by designers from every corner of the nation... Read More →

Friday June 9, 2023 9:50am - 10:00am EDT
PS 401 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Design Interventions I: Health; Housing; Criminal Justice
Modality In Person
Keywords design, media studies, activism, community, reproductive justice, abortion, visual rhetoric
Area Design

10:00am EDT

Accounting Loss: The Telling of Jamlo Makdam’s Story

At the heart of this paper is the—arguably avoidable—suffering and death of Jamlo Makdam, a twelve year old migrant labourer from the tribal village of Aaded in Chhattisgarh, India. Jamlo’s collapse and death due to exhaustion during her long trudge home from the chilli fields of Telangana (where she worked as a child labourer), was reported in some of the national dailies at the time of her death during India’s initial COVID-19 Lockdown. Jamlo's is one of few stories that emerged out of the statistical morass marking the early days of lockdown in India. She was constructed, in death and in memoriam, as the face of India's abject: a digital exile trapped in virtual amber on the way home.
Jamlo's vulnerabilities are cumulative and intersectional: a child in a world designed for adults; poverty-stricken; Dalit-tribal; female; injured. Newspaper reports of her gruelling journey towards home and death arguably abjectify her, thereby adding epistemic violence to the systemic violence of state negligence resulting in her death. Stuart Hall describes representation as an act of meaning-making that both reiterates an existing meaning, even as it creates a new, stand-alone iteration of it. Seen in this way, Jamlo, her life, and especially her death, as discursively constructed by these narratives, are textbook examples of Hall’s understanding of representation. One in thousands of tales of migrant labourers’ arduous trek home in the first lockdown, one of the most self-evident ways to unpack the discursive construction of Jamlo’s life and death as representation is through the filter of biopolitics and thanatopolitics. Storytelling frames how events are mediated, and the politics of mourning—especially for Jamlo, whose entry into mainstream discourse is predicated on her death—is crucial to study our post-pandemic sensibilities regarding violence and loss.

This paper seeks to examine the representational politics of Samina Mishra and Tarique Aziz’s Jamlo Walks: An Illustrated Book about Life During Lockdown (Penguin: 2021) vis-a-vis existing digital reports from mainstream Indian newspapers like India Today, and the digital article published by People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) to examine the implicit gaze, framing and questions of accessibility around these narratives. It compares them to Jamlo Walks and asks whether the text succeeds as a successful piece of children’s literature, in terms of both having a child protagonist and allowing for its targeted child or Young Adult reader to interpellate themselves with the characters in the tale. Jamlo’s story is an important one, not just as an embodiment of victimisation in a surge of alienating panicked responses and marginalisation along the axes of income and location meted out to migrant labourers, but also because it renders intimate, familiar, and therefore validates accounts of suffering, grief, and implicit neglect at a moment of crisis. Further, Jamlo stands at the intersections of caste, class, (perhaps gendered), age, and locational disenfranchisement. It is crucial to examine whether representations of her life and her trials alienate and abjectify her, or grant her agency and relatability, even—especially—in death.

While critical making was first coined as a design (especially architectural) term, it has since been extrapolated across multiple domains, including new media studies and digital humanities. Across its different usages/applications, there is a shared emphasis on promoting access to resources, problem solving in innovative-creative ways (often at local levels) that resist mass homogenization, and critiquing neoliberal practices through hands-on, do-it-yourself practices. And, as is already evident, a lot of localised, often low cost interventions, especially in marginalised, disenfranchised locations and communities is made possible in the way in which the concept of critical thinking decenters and attempts dehierarchising knowledge and its access points. This paper asks how a notion like critical making applies to a site where most of us won’t think resource generation is critical/crucial: public grieving and loss.

Especially in post-pandemic conditions, a lot of critique has looked at how COVID-19 made it impossible for us to ignore or occlude existing faultlines of social inequities. In spaces like India, the exodus of migrant labour from urban centres raised biopolitical concerns around the violence implicit in the lack of infrastructural support, and the economic and social devastation experienced. Jamlo Makdam’s story made headlines within this, but is now largely forgotten. It is terrible that the entry of her subjectivity/selfhood into mainstream discourses is predicated upon her death due to negligence. This is followed by what one may call an act of epistemic violence, whereby any account of her can only be accessed through a relatively minimal digital footprint. (hardly any non-digital resources are currently available regarding Jamlo). Given this, Sameera Mishra and Tarique Aziz’s Jamlo Walks may be seen as an act of critical making in the way in which the text decentralises, intervenes and renders visible the conflations and contrasts in situations like the one experienced by Jamlo in the final days of her life. However, it is just as important (if not more) to still draw attention to the fact that critical making practices also need critique and cannot be accepted as unequivocally unproblematic. While we don’t want to promote polarisation and insularity, weighing the proceeds of particular acts of critical making like this text is even more crucial for the ambivalences they create. In promoting/participating in critique of neoliberal practices—like other, assumed-to-be neutral or objective elements like design and programming—the book may end up endorsing/falling in the very traps it seeks to radically resist. Critical making also needs context-sensitive criticism, and a close reading and discussion of Jamlo Walks allows us to locate it in the extremely intersectional, heterogeneous, digitally disenfranchised, yet agentive knowledge systems of the Global South.Jamlo's vulnerabilities are cumulative and intersectional: a child in a world designed for adults; poverty-stricken; Dalit-tribal; female; injured. Newspaper reports of her gruelling journey towards home and death arguably abjectify her, thereby adding epistemic violence to the systemic violence of state negligence resulting in her death. Stuart Hall describes representation as an act of meaning-making that both reiterates an existing meaning, even as it creates a new, stand-alone iteration of it. Seen in this way, Jamlo, her life, and especially her death, as discursively constructed by these narratives, are textbook examples of Hall’s understanding of representation. One in thousands of tales of migrant labourers’ arduous trek home in the first lockdown, one of the most self-evident ways to unpack the discursive construction of Jamlo’s life and death as representation is through the filter of biopolitics and thanatopolitics. Storytelling frames how events are mediated, and the politics of mourning—especially for Jamlo, whose entry into mainstream discourse is predicated on her death—is crucial to study our post-pandemic sensibilities regarding violence and loss.

Speakers

Tonisha Guin

Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of technology Jodhpur India

Friday June 9, 2023 10:00am - 10:20am EDT
PS 308 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Place and Narrative
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords digital humanities, cultural studies, archives, accessibility, biopolitics, child, children’s literature, social justice, representation, violence
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

10:00am EDT

Black Yute Digital Content Creators Lab

In 2012, danah boyd wrote It’s Complicated: the Social Lives of Networked Teens, which outlined and described the social media use of American teenagers with data from a study that began in 2006 (boyd, 2012). Decades old at this point, boyd’s research, findings, and conclusions, reflected some of the realities of highly immersive, ubiquitous, and expanding digital networks in which teenagers actively participate. Research and discourses on teens and their experiences on and with various digital networks are increasingly relevant to social science, education, and humanities-based fields and research as the proliferation of digital media continues to shape the lives and experiences of youth.

To date, In Canada, there has been minimal research or accounts that examine how youth engage with social media and other socially informed platforms. Considering the diverse regions like the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), media research on youth must also examine how the intersectional identities of youth factor into their digital experiences. When considering the social and geopolitical differences between countries like Canada and the United States, for example, studies on the digital lives of American teens create opportunities for similar types of research studies on the experiences and perspectives of Canadian youth in context to media, representation, and cultural production in socially networked spaces.

Black Youth Digital Content Creators Lab (BYDCCL) is a research project that explores the contemporary digital lives and experiences of Black youth in the GTA, from the perspectives of study participants. The study explores how media education (technology training and critically engaged pedagogies) can be used to support Black youth in learning and understanding digital media. Critical media education supports any effort by youth to engage with and contribute to media representations based on how their digitally creative and/or spoken expressions focus on their critical perspectives.

The study is based on a 12-week contemporary culture and media education program that is designed to engage participants in open discussions on contemporary issues and provide media training that supports their desired content creation. The program provides space for Black youth to examine historical and contemporary connections to issues, then using digital techniques, create content to amplify the voices, opinions, and realities of intersectional Black youth living in the GTA.

The data, collected through a combination of qualitative methods (focus groups, digital content creation, surveys) and program activities, captures, describes, and showcases the digital lives and perspectives of Black youth in context to their identities. The themes identified by the research team (including participants) demonstrate how advancing community approaches to youth engagement and centring Black youth voices, perspectives, and cultural productions, can effectively contribute to academic fields such as media studies, cultural studies, and education.

This presentation will highlight the research study methodologies, which focused on community-engaged methods and participatory strategies while taking an interdisciplinary approach to collaborate and learn from Black youth in the Greater Toronto Area. In the end, scholarship from this study builds on media and cultural studies knowledge and assists in mapping the experiences of intersectional Black youth with context to Canada.

Speakers

Sharnia Navaratnam

Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada

Kisha McPherson

Toronto Metropolitan University

Taia Goguen

Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada

Friday June 9, 2023 10:00am - 10:20am EDT
ARC E-02

Papers & Talks

Session Title Community Co-Design
Modality In Person, Online, Hybrid
Keywords education, media studies, community, participatory methods, black youth, Canada, representation, social media, media literacy
Area HASTAC Scholars, Design

10:00am EDT

Unmaking Criminal Justice: From Carceral Design to Materiality of Accountability

In recent decades, increasing number of design scholars have been probing into structural inequalities in society, shedding light on how socio-political, economic and environmental (in)justices shape and are largely shaped by material practices (i.e. design, architecture, arts and technologies) (Schultz et al. 2018). Their studies have examined a myriad of material means by which colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and social hierarchies have been systemically reproduced (Benjamin 2019; Costanza-Chock 2020; Pater 2021) In this presentation, I will focus on a particularly severe one in which all such forms of dominance and inequality are exerted the most, all at once: Criminal justice system. It is a designed system reified not only by prisons and physical incarceration, but also by other apparatuses such as surveillance, policing and data extractivism (Sperry 2014; Agid 2018; Kirkham-Lewitt 2020). As the incarceration rates continue to raise and afflict especially marginalized bodies worldwide, the exponential growth of the prison industry on a global scale makes prison design as one of the major business opportunities today for architects, designers and multinational corporations (Swan 2013). Within this “prison industrial complex” (Davis 2003), in the meantime, those who already come from vulnerable groups in society are exponentially criminalized, targeted as culprits and get trapped in penal institutions under the most inhumane conditions. From walls, bars, electronically controlled metal gates, blinding lights and uniforms to solitary confinement cells and smart surveillance technologies, the aesthetics and corporeality of punitive justice prove only the impossibility of rehabilitation, if not the incessant state-led ill treatment and recidivism.

Addressing these concerns, I will start the presentation with a critical overview of carceral design practices and the way these practices have historically impinged on bodies, both physically and otherwise (Sperry 2014). In doing so, I will look into not only the modern penal architecture (i.e. separate systems and penitential typologies), but also into contemporary reformist examples (i.e. Halden Prison in Norway and electronic monitoring for house arrest) which are heralded as “humane” yet continuing to consolidate the discipline, control and extreme vigilance. After problematizing ameliorative discourses of “building better prisons” and design practices for crime prevention, I will turn to radical and transformative possibilities. Prison abolitionists have long advocated a justice system that is not based on punishment, incarceration and retribution, but on accountability, restoration and reconciliation between victims, wrong-doers and other community members (Davis 2003; Kaba 2021). So, the question is how can transformative justice be translated into material practices today? To sketch out possible answer to this inquiry, I will speculate about abolitionist design standpoinds as practices of “critical making”. Some of these include refusing to create cruel designs such as solitary confinement cell and death row (i.e. like ADPSR [Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility] and DAP [Design as Protest] did); transforming vacant or in-service prison spaces, objects and technologies into social (i.e health, education, childcare) services; using architecture and design to make good use of community spaces (i.e. gardening as in Solitary Garden project); and communicating the conditions of imprisonment better (i.e. the visual book “Undocumented” by Tings Chak or architectural art project “1986 Or A Sphinx's Interior” by Robert Glas). I propose such moves, in lieu of design activism, as a form of “design acting”; an acting that “can be an act of actively thinking through the contradiction and diremption” for our potentially equitable futures (Dilnot 2015, 206). I consider design acting a form of “active envisioning” practices that do not consolidate status-quo but produce their own space of functioning by refusing to be part of the legal space that is hegemonic and domineering (Keshavarz 2020).

WORKS CITED

Agid, Shana. 2018. “‘Dismantle, change, build’: Designing abolition at the intersections of local, large-scale, and imagined infrastructures.” Design Studies 59: 95-116. DOI: 10.1016/j.destud.2018.05.006.

Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambidge: Polity.

Costanza-Chock, Sasha. 2020. Design Justice: Community-led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge and London: MIT Press.

Davis, Angela. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press.

Dilnot, Clive. 2015. “History, Design, Futures: Contending with What We Have Made.” In Design and the Question of History, edited by Tony Fry, Clive Dilnot and Susan C. Stewart, 131-271. London and New York: Bloomsbury

Kaba, Mariame. 2021. We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books.

Keshavarz, Mahmoud. 2020. The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent. London: Bloomsbury.

Kirkham-Lewitt, Isabelle. 2020. Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality. New York: Columbia University Press.

Pater, Ruben. 2021. CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold Of Graphic Design, And How To Escape From It. Amsterdam: Valiz

Sperry, Raphael. 2014. “Architecture, Activism and Abolition: From Prison Design Boycott to ADPSR’s Human Rights Campaign.” Incarceration: Scapegoat Journal 7: 29-37.

Schultz, Tristan, et al. 2018.“What Is at Stake with Decolonizing Design? A Roundtable.”Design and Culture: The Journal of the Design Studies Forum10(1): 81-101. DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2018.1434368.

Swan, Rachel. 2013, August 21. “Punishment by Design: The Power of Architecture Over the Human Mind.” SF Weekly. https://www.sfweekly.com/news/punishment-by-design-the-power-of-architecture-over-the-human-mind/ [Accessed on June 6, 2017]

Speakers

ECE CANLI

University of Minho

Friday June 9, 2023 10:00am - 10:20am EDT
PS 401 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Design Interventions I: Health; Housing; Criminal Justice
Modality In Person
Keywords design, architecture, cultural studies, data, archives, abolition, carceral design, critical making, prisons, transformative justice
Area Design

10:20am EDT

Situated Narratives: Using Visual Novel Games to resist hegemony

How can visual novel games be used as a tool for intersectional storytelling that spotlight ways of negotiating and resisting oppressive systems? This project seeks to address that question by utilizing scholarship from critical game studies, queer studies, and critical race studies to inform the making of independently created visual novel games. Visual novel games, such as Dream Daddy (2017), passively talk about intersectional issues relating to Queerness, Race, and Gender but due to the game’s design and narrative standpoint falls into universalism which in turns produces harmful narratives. Validate (2022), another recent novel game, remedies many gaps found in Dream Daddy by explicitly having a point of view with its characters that is not afraid of being nuanced and situated in a particular context. Both games speak to what Miguel Sicart says about play in his book Play Matters where “...play is not just the ludic, harmless, encapsulated, and positive activity that philosophers have described. Like any other form of being, play can be dangerous; it can be hurting, damaging, antisocial, corrupting. Play is a manifestation of humanity, used for expressing and being in the world.” (Sicart 2). Dream Daddy (2017) sets a problematic precedent in representational storytelling by unsituating the social identities of its characters. We can compare this to Validate where its narrative names and contends with overlapping oppressive systems such as capitalism, racism, and homophobia within its play. Scholars and creative practitioners alike can turn towards visual novel games as sites of engaging with representation and resistance by sharing partial stories. With the example set by Validate, I seek to prototype and make a visual novel game of my own that engages with critical theory and praxis of daring to represent vulnerable and partial narratives that contribute to an intersectional archive of BIPOC lived experiences in media. This project aims to bring discussion towards the problems with universalism in storytelling and in game design that fails to represent Black and Brown stories. Instead, the project invites the sharing of critical narratives in the genre of visual novel games that re-center people through an accessible medium of play.

Speakers

Luke Hernandez

Graduate Student, The University of Texas at Dallas

Friday June 9, 2023 10:20am - 10:30am EDT
PS 308 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Place and Narrative
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords LGBTQ+ studies, media studies, race/ethnic studies, gaming, game studies, storytelling, representation
Area HASTAC Scholars, Activism

10:20am EDT

Are You Experienced? A Speculative Experiment in UXD Testing Sites

This physical installtion investigates User Experience Design research practices through critical-making methodologies (i.e. prototyping/making the testing environment) and analytical frameworks (prototyping of architectural space, design as a performance, and criticallity of design practices.) The physical space and location of user testing research provide opportunities in which to gather user feedback on over-arching issues facing design professionals involved in experience design, interaction design, and data management. The users provided feedback through paper surveys. Using speculative and critical making as guiding principles, the prototype UXD testing environment is an exploration into how end-users understand, participate, and view technological innovation as it relates to user experience with communication technologies and data. The users navigated through the installtion and provided oral and written feedback to prompts delivered via wall text and through interfaces.The exhibition serves as a user-centric laboratory and a prototype for continued inquiry into designing sustainably and ethically for a complex global population. This design-critical installation poses questions about the realationship between design and commerce and the power dynamics betweent those that design and those that must use designed products without critical input into the complexity of the 21st century technological landscape. The visual impact of the installation intends to and suceeds in drawing comparisons between 1960s psychedeilc mind shifts, early technological progress and the need to "shift our thinking" similarily to solve 21st century problems.

Speakers

Melanie Renee Roll

Associate Professor, Kent State University

Friday June 9, 2023 10:20am - 10:40am EDT
PS 401 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Design Interventions I: Health; Housing; Criminal Justice
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords arts, art history, design, participatory methods, performance, experience, interaction, critical making, provotype
Area Design

10:20am EDT

Critical Collaborative Pedagogies

The Black Diasporic Visions (De)Constructing Modes of Power digital project, is an intercollaborative publication created by course instructors and Futures Initiative Faculty Fellows, Dr. Javiela Evangelista & Dr. Carla Shedd; their students; and digital curator and Manifold Fellow, Dr. Wendy Barrales. The digital project grew out of the course, Black Diasporic Visions. Black Diasporic Visions turns us toward a myriad of pathways for liberation formed by African people and people of African descent, inside and outside of oppressive structures of power, as well as the development of alternative visions and spaces.

Through an opportunity with the Futures Initiative at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), - a program that supports course creation across disciplines, ranks and CUNY campuses that culminates in a public project - the authors explored nuanced levels of collaboration across time and space between: co-instructors, students, village visitors, a curator, and a public audience. The syllabus of the Black Diasporic Visions course was dreamt as a starting point, with the hope that it (along with energies of liberatory activation produced in the process) would expand with each opportunity for collaboration whether with students or invited village visitors. Throughout the semester our collective conjurings reached far beyond what the syllabus could hold, which led to the next stage of collaboration.

Dr. Barrales was then invited to create an open access project that would engage a public audience, showcase the collective’s conjurings, and attempt to recreate the classroom space for public engagement. Through a critical lens that interrogates the values and colonial histories of design, Dr. Barrales brought a level of intention to the process of developing the online iteration of the course that not only amplified, but also contributed to our overall project of centralizing historically and globally informed liberatory possibilities, imperative to our lives today, that challenge divides between theory and practice. It is our hope that the knowledge that grows out of all iterations of Black Diasporic Visions may inform and continue to be informed by urgent interventions and creations.

Speakers

Wendy Barrales

PhD Candidate, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Javiela Evangelista

Pedagogy Co-Leader, City University of New York (CUNY)

Friday June 9, 2023 10:20am - 10:40am EDT
ARC E-02

Papers & Talks

Session Title Community Co-Design
Modality In Person, Online, Hybrid
Keywords pedagogy, digital humanities, student-centered learning and teaching, public engagement, Black studies, diaspora, collaboration
Area Design

10:30am EDT

Augmented Reality for Community Memory in the Face of Repression

This talk presents the process and learning outcomes of creating interactive and digital experiences for remembering racialized victims of state violence in Nicaragua during heavy state repression. I created AMA y No Olvida, Memory Museum against Impunity, a transmedia community based project in collaboration with the families of victims of state violence, organized in the Association Mothers of April (AMA), an organization I am a member of. We gathered to protect, mobilize and share the stories of the victims in order to dispute the official narrative that criminalizes citizens who participated in civic protests and the climate of impunity fostered by the Nicaraguan government. Building on participatory (Huybrechts et al. 2014; Costanza-Chock 2014), decolonial and feminist research methodologies (Tunstall 2023; Ruiz Trejo 2020; Berry et al. 2017) I engaged in practice-based research to create this community based transmedia project and other experimental forms of human rights’ pedagogy and activism.

The Interactive Art book AMA Constructing Memory was designed with the aim to utilize Augmented Reality (AR) to transgress the state of exception, to intervene public and online spaces, and for the stories of the victims to travel outside their homes and reach wider audiences outside Nicaraguan borders. The audience is able interact with 3D photogrammetry replicas of the barricade altars created by the victims’ relatives to memorialize our loved ones in their own spaces using Augmented Reality filters and image trackers. With these new audiences we had to address viewers’ privilege and distance, and consider issues of user’s embodiment, access and place.

In the talk I discuss the possibility of AR to engage in memory work through theories of annotation posed by Victoria Szabo (2018) and include another analytical possibility for AR to perform rituals of collective grieving. The AR experience design proposes the creation of a space (i.e. ritual), that contextualizes the experience and refuses (Tuck and Yang 2014) its use without the context of the victims lives and the organizing of their families. I also draw examples of uses of digital media for remembrance from other artists and collectives such as Breonna’s Garden, VR Día de los Muertos and Digital Gardens and highlight how these mediated rituals and digital artifacts are culturally specific and have to be handled with care and respect.

References
Berry, Maya J., Claudia Chávez Argüelles, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada. 2017. “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field.” Cultural Anthropology 32: 537–65. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.05.
Costanza-Chock, Sasha. 2014. Out of the Shadows, into the Streets!: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Huybrechts, Liesbeth, Cristiano Storni, Yanki Lee, Selina Schepers, Jessica Schoffelen, and Katrien Dreessen. 2014. Participation Is Risky. Approaches to Joint Creative Processes. Vol. 13. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Valiz.
Ruiz Trejo, Marisa G. 2020. DESCOLONIZAR Y DESPATRIARCALIZAR Las Ciencias Sociales, La Memoria y La Vida En Chiapas, Centroamérica y El Caribe. Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2014. “Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 20: 811–18.
Tunstall, Elizabeth Dori. Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook. MIT Press, 2023.

Speakers

Emilia Yang

Assistant Professor of Art and Design, University of Michigan

Friday June 9, 2023 10:30am - 10:50am EDT
PS 308 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Place and Narrative
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords design, AR / VR / MR, activism, community, archives, dictatorship, state violence, transmedia, participatory methods, mapping, affect, visibility, witnessing, embodiment, trauma, digital media, race/ethnic studies, gender, rights, justice, memory
Area AR / VR / MR

10:40am EDT

Community Building through Co-Design

A reflection on the curriculum development and course delivery of the inaugural SoD Co-Design Studio at Pratt Institute, this paper synthesizes the challenges, opportunities, and methodologies of integrating community-partnered participatory design into interdisciplinary design pedagogy. Sharing excerpts from the forthcoming publication, "The Essential Guide to Co-Design" this presentation lays out best practices for partnership building, curriculum development, co-creation, and impact assessment of community-based projects within and beyond the gates of academia.

Part I: "Planning" will touch on relationship building and project framing with community-based organizations. Documenting best practices for ethical communication, project goal setting and avoiding extractive relationships, this section includes sample timelines and touch points for successful participatory project planning.

Part II: "Learning" will focus on the documentation of co-design course writing with and for K-12 schools. This segment will include recommendations for ethical research and facilitation practices as well as suggestions for how to empower students as co-teachers in the classroom.

Part III: "Evaluating" will assess the positive impact of the SOD Co-Design courses on project participants, including partner schools, K-12 youth, and Pratt students. This phase will include recommendations for ethical evaluation of course output for a participatory project, as well as tools to establish a sustainable feedback loop with project partners.

Part IV: Case Study will illustrate and build upon ideas shared through a visual case study of a recent partnership with Gotham Professional Arts Academy.

Seeking to amplify and support community partnership as a hallmark of equitable design pedagogy, this paper lays out a framework for sustainable delivery and assessment of community-based participatory design within the academy and beyond.

Speakers

Irina Schneid

Assistant Professor of Community Engaged Learning for the School of Design, Pratt Institute

Friday June 9, 2023 10:40am - 11:00am EDT
ARC E-02

Papers & Talks

Session Title Community Co-Design
Modality In Person, Online, Hybrid
Keywords education, design, pedagogy, community, participatory methods, co-design, social impact
Area Design

11:00am EDT

Break

Stop by the Student Union / Registration area throughout the conference for coffee, food/snacks, and daily activities.

Friday June 9, 2023 11:00am - 11:15am EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Registration/Breaks

Modality In Person

11:15am EDT

Bodies in Play: Work-in-Progress

“Bodies in Play: Inclusive Co-Creation for Wearable Technology and Virtual Reality” is a multiyear research-creation partnership between Social Body Lab and game:play Lab at OCAD University and Dames Making Games (DMG) that brings together academic, cultural and community practitioners to co-create knowledge towards more inclusive, innovative design practices. It scaffolds meaningful equity in the creative technology space, through participatory, feminist research-creation in embodied interfaces. It is doing this through a series of game jams and a residency program, bridging creative, technical and conceptual work.

As feminist, black and queer discourses have repeatedly emphasized, bodies matter, but have frustratingly been deprioritized in technology development and discourse. Computational design has typically centered users and creators that are white, able-bodied and male. Whether this bias is explicit or implicit, it results in a range of known inequities, including the embedding of normative values (for example, the optimal and able body targeted in fitness wearables (Lupton 2016; Moore 2017)), or the binary gender encoding found in surveillance technologies (Costanza-Chock 2018; Gaboury 2018)), the encoding of racial bias into machines, sensors and algorithms (Benjamin 2019; Buolamwini and Gebru 2018; Noble 2018; Russell 2020), the naturalization of particular conceptual paradigms (for example, the encoding of non-Indigenous worldviews in AI development (Lewis et al. 2020)) and resultant challenges for recruitment and retention of marginalized groups into the technology industry (Buechley et al. 2010).

To address this, we need a more substantive focus on embodied experience, particularly within interaction design. How do approaches from wearable technology create novel contexts for embodied play? In what ways does virtual reality play require re-consideration of player bodies? How might equity-seeking use these technologies to envision alternative forms of playful interactions which better reflect their embodied experience?

As one corrective, groups invested in equity work within the technology sector (like DMG) have been working to build and sustain communities of practice (Wenger 1999) around typically marginalized makers, to broaden access to literacies, technologies, and platforms of engagement.

The research-creation generated through this partnership will build interfaces and experiences that explore the expressive capacity for a diverse range of bodies in the areas of wearable technology, virtual reality, and augmented reality. This partnership leverages the strengths, resources, and shared values of partners to intervene in existing technology practices, to model and better articulate embodied material practices, and sustain meaningful networks. This talk will introduce the Bodies in Play (BiP) project overall as well as activities completed to date, including a Launch Event and the Bodies in Wearables (BIW) Workshops and Jam.

The Launch Event was formatted as an online zine-making “playshop”. Participants were invited to imagine a new future for interfaces and experiences for connecting bodies and technologies via three playful design activities. With the support of illustrators, these future visions were rendered for a digital zine that could be shareable publicly (Aveiro-Ojeda et al. 2022). The launch event for the BIP partnership initiated community building and networking essential to upcoming game jams and activities.

“Bodies in Wearables” is a series of hands-on events dedicated to the exploration of how wearable electronics practices can be used to support embodied expression of identity, experience, and self. These events took place both online and in-person. Two initial workshops focused on the development of wearable electronics skills including circuit design and coding, with a particular focus on the expressive potential of LEDs and servo motors. The Bodies in Wearables Jam supported the development of interactive and/or dynamic wearable electronics projects and explorations. These activities are meant to co-imagine, co-fabulate, co-design, and co-create potential relationships between bodies, technologies, and means of expression. https://bip.dmg.to/

References
Aveiro-Ojeda, Santo, Izzie Colpitts-Campbell, Kate Hartman, Yizhen (Ellie) Huang, Cindy Poremba, Emma Westecott. 2022. “Bodies in Play Zine.” in DIY Methods, September 2022, pages 61-82. Peterborough, ON: Low-Carbon Research Methods Group, http://lowcarbonmethods.com/DIYMethods2022.html

Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Medford, MA: Polity, 2019.

Buechley, Leah, and Benjamin Mako Hill. “LilyPad in the Wild: How Hardware’s Long Tail Is Supporting New Engineering and Design Communities.” In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, 199–207. DIS ’10. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2010.

Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classiﬁcation,” n.d., 15.

Costanza-Chock, S. “Design Justice: Towards an Intersectional Feminist Framework for Design Theory and Practice.” Proceedings of the Design Research Society, 2018.

Gaboury, Jacob. “Critical Unmaking: Toward a Queer Computation.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, 2018. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0cq870wh.

Lewis, Jason Edward , Abdilla, Angie, Arista, Noelani, Baker, Kaipulaumakaniolono, Benesiinaabandan, Scott, Brown, Michelle, Cheung, Melanie, Coleman, Meredith, Cordes, Ashley, Davison, Joel, Duncan, Kūpono, Garzon, Sergio, Harrell, D. Fox, Jones, Peter-Lucas, Kealiikanakaoleohaililani, Kekuhi, Kelleher, Megan, Kite, Suzanne, Lagon, Olin, Leigh, Jason, Levesque, Maroussia, Mahelona, Keoni, Moses, Caleb, Nahuewai, Isaac ('Ika'aka), Noe, Kari, Olson, Danielle, Parker Jones, 'Ōiwi, Running Wolf, Caroline, Running Wolf, Michael, Silva, Marlee, Fragnito, Skawennati and Whaanga, Hēmi (2020) Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper. Project Report. Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Honolulu, HI.
https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/986506/7/Indigenous_Protocol_and_AI_2020.pdf

Lupton, Deborah. The Quantified Self. 1st edition. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016.

Moore, Phoebe V. The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts. Routledge, 2017.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018.

Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London, UK: Verso, 2020.

Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. 1st edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Speakers

Kate Hartman

OCAD University

Kate Hartman is an Associate Professor at OCAD University, where she is the Graduate Program Director of Digital Futures (returning summer 2023) and the founding Director of Social Body Lab - a research and development team dedicated to exploring body-centric technologies in the social context. She is also an Adjunct Instructor and Director of ITP Camp at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. She is the author of the book Make: Wearable... Read More →

Cindy Poremba

OCAD University

Emma Westecott

Associate Professor, Game Design, OCAD University

Dr Emma Westecott is a feminist game studies scholar. Emma is Associate Professor in Game Design, and Co-Director of the game:play Lab (with Cindy Poremba). She has worked in the game industry for over 25 years - in development, research and the academy. She originally achieved international... Read More →

Friday June 9, 2023 11:15am - 11:35am EDT
PS 401 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Embodied Justice
Modality In Person
Keywords design, community, participatory methods, design-based approaches, bodies, wearables, embodiment
Area Platforms & Technology

11:15am EDT

Craft in the age of information: Teaching abstract concepts through hands-on weaving

Within the larger arc of the Information Age, we have entered a time of Big Data. This is an era marked by businesses and politicians exploiting the ability to predict and influence our preferences based on structures and patterns gleaned from large-scale statistical analyses. Now, in new ways, each of us exists as an instance of a category. This is the latest phase of a movement rooted in the Age of Industry – the rise of abstraction, from the alienation and commodification of labor to the recasting of the human agent as a locus of correlated behaviors.

In this talk I will review an experiment in undergraduate education that centers hands-on weaving in a course focused on elucidating computer science approaches to the analysis of structures and patterns. This is an attempt to restore the things behind the signs, to tacitly reconnect complexity with labor, and to help students feel the reductive brutality twinned with the tremendous technical power of abstraction. To further develop the theme of material intelligence and its parallels with formal reasoning, the course considers resonances of indigenous and contemporary aesthetics in textile art, as well as relationships between coding theory and the design and notation of weaving drafts [1]. Mass production of textiles was a primary driver of the Industrial Revolution and its concomitant exploitations of colonized peoples, but looms and hand-weaving can play at least a small counterbalancing role in the classroom today. As noted by Rosner, Shorey, Craft, and Remick [2], “worlds of hand-work and computing … are not as separate as we might imagine them to be.”

In this course, students learn to read weaving drafts and thread an eight-shaft table loom. We then introduce ideas from computer science in ways that relate directly to students’ fresh experiences with weaving. For example, we consider the question of how to quantify the complexity of an image and relate this to the fact that some weaving patterns inherently require more shafts and longer pick sequences than others. This leads to the concept of algorithmic complexity, grounded in student experience using looms to make cloth, in contrast to conventional pedagogy based on hypothetical Von Neumann machines. The ideas are reinforced by considering digital images of woven structures of greater or lesser pattern complexity and noting that the sizes of the corresponding (jpeg) files vary accordingly. Similarly, after the students learn to follow “block” weaving drafts, natural openings arise to discuss key concepts of data compression. We consider ways in which weaving is both analog and digital, and compare the advantages of analog and digital modes of representing and expressing images.

Laboring to make cloth from yarn leads students to reassess consumer behaviors such as fast fashion – as Yuriko Saito puts it [3], they begin to experience “a more engaged interaction with the material world.” Classroom studies of the ancient origins of weaving likewise help them understand that technologies based on binary codes [1] are not an invention of the modern West. While this course stands alongside contemporary studies such as [4] and can benefit from assimilating research results at the intersection of education and computational craft, it seems unusual in its focus on computer science concepts as opposed to computer technology skills.

[1] E. Harlizius-Klück, Textile 15, 176 (2017).
[2] D. K. Rosner et al., Proc. 2018 CHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1 (2018).
[3] Y. Saito, J. Aesthet. Art Crit. 76, 429 (2018).
[4] V. Mirecki et al., Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22).

Speakers

Hideo Mabuchi

Professor, Stanford University

Talk to me about: modern science and traditional craft; physics and the humanities; making and knowing.

Friday June 9, 2023 11:15am - 11:35am EDT
Main 210

Papers & Talks

Session Title Making in the Classroom
Modality In Person
Keywords arts, computing & computer science, pedagogy, physical computing education, craft, materiality, abstraction, algorithms
Area Pedagogy

11:15am EDT

Design is Not Neutral

The design field has a long history of excluding marginalized voices, and design education has played a significant role in perpetuating these exclusionary practices. The central text in design history courses, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, contains only 62 women out of 594 designers. People of color make up only 80. Traditional design curricula is defined through this canon of designers that prioritizes Eurocentric, capitalist, patriarchal approaches to design.

My work utilizes a feminist, practice-based approach to develop an anti-patriarchal and post-capitalist design pedagogy. This project challenges the notion that design is solely practiced within formal design structures, design schools, and professional bodies, focusing on re-centering subaltern forms of making in design education.
My intervention began with a podcast, social media, and a website containing resources for design educators to create equitable pedagogy. The podcast, titled “Design is Not Neutral” features design educators including Anne H. Berry, Jarrett Fuller, Nika Fisher, and others who have deeply researched the gaps in design education. The podcast’s episodes overwhelmingly discussed the industrialized system that has built design’s foundational teachings. As design education became institutionalized, it prioritized a more formalized, ‘professional’ approach to design. This shift was particularly pronounced in the United States, where design education became closely tied to the growth of corporate capitalism. In contrast, the Bauhaus school, founded in Germany in 1919, sought to integrate art, craft, and technology in a way that would create a more holistic approach to design education. Despite these efforts, design education has remained exclusionary which has marginalized craft-based design forms. The separation between craft, design, and arts is highlighted by the classifications of ‘high and low design’. These categories allow us to analyze the power dynamics and oppressive structures that have historically excluded craft from being considered a ‘high design’. By deconstructing these binaries, we can challenge dominant ideologies and begin to open new possibilities for design education.

For the second phase of my intervention, I created a knitting workshop that seeks to challenge these power dynamics and recenter ‘low design’ or craft forms of making in the design classroom. Through the use of non-digital materials, the workshop generated a connection to every day creating for participants and established a collaborative classroom. Using a feminist educational methodology, the knitting workshop model opens debates about the gendered hierarchies in design curricula that dictate what is defined as ‘design’. I increase agency to a practice traditionally designated as a ‘craft’, by presenting alternative ways to devise and initiate a design process. The practice of knitting circles is a design process that is slow and deeply personal in contrast with traditional profit-focused design education. My approach to challenging dominant patriarchal, Eurocentric, and heteronormative design education aligns with several feminist scholars, including bell hooks, Louise Schouwenberg, Paulo Fiere, and Cheryl Buckley. These scholars emphasize the importance of 'design in the margins' — small-scale acts of producing in the classroom that can begin the process of a profound change in education.

Developing a design education-focused podcast creates a more accessible and centralized source of resources for individual educators to incorporate feminist curricula into their classrooms. This project is unique in its focus on re-visioning design education through a feminist pedagogical methodology, its emphasis on challenging gendered stereotypes around craft-based design forms, and its engagement with the capitalist historical development of design education. This intervention seeks to create a more inclusive and equitable design pedagogy that centers marginalized perspectives by incorporating subaltern forms of making. This project allows design education to become more diverse, accessible, and empowering, ultimately leading to a more just and equitable society.

Speakers

Grace Hamilton

MFA Candidate & Instructor of Record, Notre Dame

Friday June 9, 2023 11:15am - 11:35am EDT
PS 311 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Design (against) and (within) Capitalism
Modality In Person
Keywords design, race/ethnic studies, gender studies, pedagogy, student-centered learning and teaching, design history, craft, object based learning
Area Design

11:15am EDT

Litter Baskets and Structural Inequity in New York City

In July 2020, New York City's Department Sanitation (DSNY) began to publicly release a dataset of litter basket locations throughout the five boroughs on New York City’s Open Data Portal. While this dataset includes an Open Data Portal map, no other prebuilt analysis of the data is provided. Researchers and citizens alike are then tasked with visualizing this city-wide data (often in combination with other datasets) in order to effectively examine DSNY Litter Basket distribution, densities, and relationship to other socioeconomic variables.
This proposal for HASTAC 2023 Critical Making and Social Justice is to present work that our block association - The Harlem Neighborhood Block Association (HNBA) - has done to visualize and expand upon this DSNY dataset. In particular, HNBA has been interested in examining whether or not a comparison between East Harlem (our Community District - CD11) and the Upper East Side (CD8) reveals disparities in resource allocation. Our interest in this dataset reflects an ongoing concern among our community members regarding resource equity and inquity in New York City, and with DSNY in particular.
The visualized results of our analysis reveals persistent evidence of overt and hidden structural inequality in DSNY’s resource allocations. The location of the quotidian trash basket - whether consciously or unconsciously determined - nevertheless has an important impact on everything from community health and well being, to rodent density and and tourism. Examination of this ubiquitous example of civic street-furniture reveals that the humble refuse bin - while serving as a classic example of a distributed civic asset - can also be investigated as a fascinating barometer of municipal equity in the urban space.

Speakers

Shawn Hill

Fordham University

I am a Harlem community activist working towards equity for all New York neighborhoods.

Friday June 9, 2023 11:15am - 11:35am EDT
Online

Papers & Talks

Modality Online
Keywords digital humanities, data, activism, community, public engagement, trash, dsny, structural inequality, garbage cans, capitalism, furniture

11:15am EDT

Sinister Wisdom and its Archive as an Artifact of Community Publishing’s Transition from Print to the Internet

The radical lesbian literary journal Sinister Wisdom made the transition from print only to online between 1998 and 2001—about 20 years after its first publication. This paper examines the history of that transition and of the journal's changing presence online. Learning from Melissa Rogers’s account of critical making as “[producing] space for modes of thought that put pressure on what matters in digital humanities scholarship and teaching,” I look at where and how Sinister Wisdom has been made available online and as data (234). While the journal remains in print, its website now features an open archive and database of past issues. Several private scholarly indexes and libraries record and make it available online as well. I will show that the distribution of Sinister Wisdom can be illuminated by the distinction between infrastructures and platforms, two concepts used in media studies to describe the relations enabled by the internet. Ultimately, I argue that Sinister Wisdom's website and database are as much archival artifacts as the journals themselves. A study of their production within a framework provided by critical making helps bridge the digital humanities and internet history in a way that considers the political commitments of Sinister Wisdom’s creators.

Rogers, Melissa. “Making Queer Feminisms Matter: A Transdisciplinary Makerspace for the Rest of Us.” Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 234–48. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt6wq.30. Accessed 27 Feb. 2023.

Speakers

Chelsea Clark

Graduate Student, Princeton University

Friday June 9, 2023 11:15am - 11:35am EDT
PS 405 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Digital Archives / Digital Divides
Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, LGBTQ+ studies, media studies, archives, platforms, Internet, queer feminist spaces, community
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

11:15am EDT

To Have & To Hold: Female Social Imaginaries

To Have & To Hold is a body of socially engaged practice, commissioned in 2019 by the Arts Council England and Chester Council, and is planned to conclude in late 2023. The work is informed by three almost-forgotten geographically specific narratives that all in different ways offer perspectives on gender and power. The primary aim of this body of work was to create conditions for new social participation with these historically distant and increasingly overlooked narratives, both for a local and wider audience. As a collection these narratives bring together fascinating rituals, strange tales of hope, self-sacrifice, and embodied female power.

Folklore allows us to consider past realities and re-experience the specificities of socio-cultural imagination (Bettelheim, 1976) and potentially learn from past practices, problematic representations, and expressions of community knowledge. Formative research explored how these three tales in different ways codified female aspiration but also revealed that they were simultaneously losing their embeddedness to their local communities. As such a secondary aim was to open up discussions around the role and usefulness of situated folk-heritage and explore any implications when this form of knowledge is increasingly used as touristic cultural capital.

The concept of marriage is used as a multifaceted device: to marry the past with the present, as a plot anchor in the original folklore and more allegorically in the practice itself, where virtual interactions are intentionally married with material and site-specific experiences. Part of this work was developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which physical interactions were limited, creating interesting additional boundaries for developing engagement.

The project uses a variety of media in an attempt to foster accessible social engagement through Augmented Reality (AR), sculpture, visual art, and participatory co-creation workshops. In terms of methods, I used critical design practice (Dunne & Raby, 2013) to draw out key analogical motifs (e.g. lungs, water, stairs) to agitate the issues normalised in the original narratives. These motifs intentionally functioned as prompts and provocations to allow myself and the participants to ideate around the entanglement of gender and power, and as a way to foster more "sentipensar" (i.e. emotional, socio-political, self-aware) responses (Borda, 1987, Fisher, 2021). The associated participatory workshops were used as a way to re-introduce these original texts to local community groups. Co-creation of artworks, and creative methods were used in these workshops to enliven context, opening up group conversations and help to ‘hold’ the space for deeper reflections and invite community-led re-imagining of the narratives.

To summarise, in advance of the project's conclusion and final analysis late 2023, I will share with the conference delegates an overview of To Have & To Hold as a body of work, its strategy for creating new social participation, including a rationale to the media and technology used. I will also discuss my approach around critical practice and the use of analogical motifs, drawing on my experiences as practitioner-maker and facilitator - specifically considering the successes or challenges of this work. Lastly, I will seek to offer preliminary insights around the larger question of ownership and value of folklore-heritage, as shared by my participants and my own experience.

References:
Bettelheim, B. (1976). The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Thames and Hudson

Boyd, D. (2008). Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.
Fals-Borda, O. (1987). “The Application of Participatory Action-Research in Latin America.” International Sociology, 2(4), 329–347.

Fisher, B. (2021) “Mestiza Consciousness and Sentipensamiento—Ontologies for a Feminist Instituting” In Instituting Feminism OnCurating Issue 52. Ed. eds. Dorothee Richter, Helena Reckitt.
van Leeuwen, T. (2005), Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge

Hodge, R., & Kress, G. (1988). Social Semiotics. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Josephson-Storm, J. A. (2017) The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago University Press.

Kress, G. (1993). Against Arbitrariness: the social production of the sign as a foundational issue in critical discourse analysis. Discourse and Society 4, 2, 169- 193.

Suchman, L. A. (1987). Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication. Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, S. (1955) Motif-index of folk-literature: a classification of narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, and local legends. Indiana University Press, 1955-1958.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Speakers

Donna Leishman

Associate Professor, Northumbria University

Friday June 9, 2023 11:15am - 11:35am EDT
ARC E-02

Papers & Talks

Session Title Gender and Narrative
Modality In Person, Hybrid, Online
Keywords arts, digital humanities, design, AR / VR / MR, social semiotics, gender
Area AR / VR / MR

11:15am EDT

HASTAC Commons: The Origin Story

November 2022 marked the transition of HASTAC.org to HASTAC Commons, with the community migrating to a new platform developed and hosted by Humanities Commons (HCommons). This complex project was the product of cross-functional collaboration between development, community, and user experience-focused members of both the Humanities Commons and HASTAC teams. This panel will explore the partnership between our two organizations in two parts; first, we will discuss how our collaboration came about and our process for creating HASTAC Commons, including aligning our vision, collaborative design and navigating an emerging relationship. Then, we will offer a tour of the new HASTAC Commons and share ways to engage with both HASTAC and Humanities Commons. The panelists represent the project management, user research and design, and development interests of the cross-organisational team responsible for launch.

The seed for this partnership was planted long ago as our organizations recognised in each other a shared vision for how scholarship can be done in digital spaces, and how critical it is to center the social dimensions of that work. With more than 20 years experience bringing together Humanities researchers, HASTAC is an ideal partner for HCommons in their efforts to develop infrastructure for open, social scholarship. HCommons itself has its origins in the MLA, and has been adopted by a number of other societies and institutions, offering HASTAC a place in a growing network of like-minded organizations. To this group, HASTAC also brings a proven track record of community engagement and an exciting new use case where membership is open to all.

This opportunity also provided the HC team with invaluable experience in migrating an existing community to our platform, with a partner willing to work through the unknowns with us. HASTAC’s leadership and generosity in participating in a learning process for the HC team will inform the rollout of new Commons nodes across a network of societies and institutions in the years to come. Reflections on and conversations with relevant stakeholders about this experience will also serve as a case study in a forthcoming open publication on managing digital projects.
When HASTAC began the transition process, we talked with stakeholders, some of whom have been involved in the organization for over a decade. Stakeholders emphasized how much HASTAC mattered to them and what a vital role it had played in the development of their own academic communities. They expressed a desire that the next iteration of the HASTAC website needed to foreground the community. When we considered the centrality of the community and its powerful network effects, HCommons became a natural partner for us.

During the implementation phase, we initially sought to replicate the previous HASTAC homepage experience, but after reflection on the process and on the idea of transition, the HCommons team chose to present a bolder, redesigned alternative. In creating this new homepage, we took the opportunity to develop a modern, mobile-friendly website that engages users using visual design, presents clear entry points to contribute to the community, takes into account accessible design principles, and highlights community interactions in the form of posts and tweets. Our visual design ethos focused on creating a vibrant experience that highlighted the interactive, interdisciplinary nature of HASTAC. This informed our choice of images and icons, as well as the information architecture and page hierarchy.
From a process perspective, iterative synchronous and asynchronous feedback sessions were conducted with the HCommons group, followed by synchronous feedback sessions with our HASTAC partners. This allowed us to to create multiple iterations on a faster timeline and to create a final design we could hand off to the HASTAC team to meet their hard launch deadline. The process as a whole reflects our shared value of experimentation, where we embrace imagining creative solutions and understanding iteration as part of the process. Going forward, we will pursue opportunities for more structured user research and feedback with the goal of future improvements informed by user needs and experiences.

Following the discussion section of the session, we will invite participants to follow along a guided tour of the platforms, highlighting the evolution of the design, results of critical decision points and points of interest relevant to their work in the HASTAC community. We will close with time for questions and feedback to continue in the collaborative spirit our two organizations have developed.

Speakers

Nikki Stevens

HASTAC/Dartmouth College

Zoe Wake Hyde

Community Development Manager, Humanities Commons

Stephanie Vasko

Michigan State University

Chris McGuinnes

CUNY Graduate Center

Friday June 9, 2023 11:15am - 12:15pm EDT
PS 308 (Design Center)

Panels/Roundtables

Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, platforms, community, open access / open knowledge, HASTAC, humanities
Area Platforms & Technology

11:35am EDT

Crip Futurity, Cyborg Disability and Designing the World Otherwise

This talk will report on a collaboration between Laura Forlano and Itziar Barrio, which was initiated in December 2019 when they met through the New Museum’s NEW INC art and technology incubator. Building on the work of feminist scholar Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip, Forlano -- a Type 1 diabetic for 10 years that relies on a “smart” insulin pump and sensor system -- has developed the figure of the “disabled cyborg” in her writing in order to describe the ways in which both people as well as the technologies that they rely on might be understood to be disabled thereby highlighting the mutually entangled lives of humans and non-humans. For example, disabled people are deeply aware of the ways in which technological fixes, innovations and imagined futures around disability require incredibly intensive regimes labor, maintenance and repair. This piece will discuss the development of a series of robotic sculptures, which together form an interactive installation that engages with the themes of crip time and crip futurity; automation and labor; and, failure, breakdown, maintenance, repair and care. The robotic sculptures are fed with “alert and alarm” data from the “smart” insulin pump and sensor system as a commentary on the ways in which both people and their technologies are disabled.

When I visited Barrio’s studio in December 2020, I was struck by the ways in which the choice of materials—cement, spandex, and rubber—suggested an alternative narrative about computing in contrast to the shiny metal and glass of the latest mobile phones, tablets, and computers. In 2019, I spent the month of July transcribing alert and alarm data on a daily basis to better understand the patterns. Some of this data is printed directly on the circuit board powering the sculpture, a reminder of the human labor that is required to make automated systems work. These sculptures translate alert and alarm data into subtle movements that recall the writhing movements from four years of sleep deprivation and balloons that inflate and deflate, mimicking the inhaling and exhaling of human lungs.

Speakers

Laura Forlano

Professor, Northeastern University

Friday June 9, 2023 11:35am - 11:45am EDT
PS 401 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Embodied Justice
Modality In Person
Keywords arts, design, disability studies, algorithms, practice, computing & computer science
Area Accessibility

11:35am EDT

Careful Making: Slow Fashion Production in the Midst of Capitalism

“Slow fashion” encompasses a burgeoning social movement, grassroots clothing industry, and thriving Instagram community. “Slow fashion” is also used to mark clothing as being sustainably and ethically made. Most importantly, “slow fashion” holds a critical and unwieldy contradiction: it is both rooted in and opposed to consumerism and commodification. In this paper, I examine the question: what does it take to make slow fashion?

Slow fashion follows other consumer movements, in that it joins a social movement with a market-based industry (Lyon 2011). As a social movement slow fashion aims to undo the fast fashion industry which proliferates a capitalist consumer ethic (Campbell 1987) where desire and novelty fuel the repetitive cycle of buying and discarding mass-produced garments (Dei Ottai and Cologna 2015; Gabrielli et al. 2013; Reinach 2005). This system is actively producing massive quantities of clothing in short, repetitive “seasons,” quickly and cheaply, at the expense of garment workers’ rights in the Global South and the environment (Krause 2018). As an industry, slow fashion businesses strive to create what Fletcher (2010) calls “a changed infrastructure and a reduced through-put of goods” (p. 262). To do this, slow fashion brands experiment with alternative models of production, such as: circular models, made-to-order models, or even production caps, all of which are intended to decrease excess waste and produce garments under ethical working conditions (Trejo 2018). Still, the global web of fashion infrastructure is embedded in a system of transnational capitalism (Rofel and Yanagisako 2019) in which overproduction and outsourcing are necessary for profit (Collins 2003). This places the slow fashion industry on a tightrope, where they must balance between the social movement’s goals and the infrastructural landscapes of the broader fashion industry.

To evaluate what it takes to make slow fashion, I draw on 18 months of ethnographic research conducted on the slow fashion community in the Pacific Northwest. Specifically, this paper focuses on participant-observation conducted at four slow fashion businesses in the Pacific Northwest - a fabric shop, a pattern-making studio, a consignment store, and a small-batch clothing brand. My analysis follows four critical objects (Hertz 2016) that I encountered during fieldwork: a paper sewing pattern, a collection of Italian wool, a brick-and-mortar store, and a large cutting table. I use these objects as a tangible entry point for my examination of the processes and problems these businesses must contend with as they make slow fashion in the midst of the globalized capitalist fashion industry. As I trace my encounters with these objects, I explore how slow fashion producers must ‘make slow fashion’ by traversing the contradictions of being both rooted in and opposed to commodification.

Speakers

Jimil Ataman

PhD Candidate, University of Pennsylvania

Friday June 9, 2023 11:35am - 11:55am EDT
PS 311 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Design (against) and (within) Capitalism
Modality In Person
Keywords anthropology, data, sustainability, ethnography, slow fashion, Instagram, feminism, social media
Area Critical Making

11:35am EDT

Conference Planning as DH Praxis: Lessons Learned from Putting Values into Action in the Global Digital Humanities Symposium

Conferences are activities through which communities come together to exchange knowledge, provide feedback, and inspire change. Yet, the process of organizing and cultivating community through these events is rarely discussed as a form of digital humanities praxis. In this presentation, we will share the values, processes, and challenges behind the Global Digital Humanities Symposium. We see this presentation as an act of transparency and humility through which we hope to begin a conversation with the audience so we can also learn and improve while also sharing our expertise and commitments.

The Global DH Symposium seeks to showcase social justice-oriented and globally engaged DH through its program while also making ethically grounded decisions in cultivating community and planning the event. Over the years, we have developed our strategies for keeping the event as truly global as possible - from providing travel funds for all presenters when run as an in person event, to funding live interpretation to run a multilingual virtual event, to opening planning committee participation to the international community, for example.

In the endeavor to develop a “truly global” event rooted in the institutional support provided by Michigan State University, we have iterated our approach. We work to foster community by keeping the size of the symposium small, offering only plenary sessions, experimenting with social activities while virtual, and providing a well catered event while in person. When in person, we keep the event free to attend for all, and we have provided financial assistance to presenters and secure inexpensive housing options. When virtual, we direct funds to support closed captioning and live interpretation in order to offer a multilingual event. Regardless of format, we rely on a dedicated team of planning committee members and a community of 40 reviewers who enable a double anonymous reviewing process, ensuring a high quality program and supports the proceedings (new in 2021) and an upcoming special issue in Reviews in DH.
Sharing effective strategies for improving accessibility and living out the global values of our event is part of an effort for transparency in DH work. Even more a part of that effort, however, is a discussion of the areas that we struggle with. How do we foster multilingualism and social justice work when there are limits to what we can have translated and how many languages we can support? What are the impacts of only providing live interpretation into/from colonial languages? As we shift to a part-virtual, part-in-person modality in 2023, how do we continue to support a globally engaged virtual event and an in person event taking place at Michigan State University, while still managing a limited budget?

At the core of our work is the imperative to be reflective regarding our institutional positionality, in order for the Symposium to support the work of DH scholars around the world without taking over or colonizing those conversations. Is there such a thing as “post-custodial conference planning”?

Speakers

Kristen Mapes

Assistant Director of Digital Humanities, Michigan State University

@kmapesy

Kate Topham

Digital Humanities Archivist, Michigan State University, United States of America

Viola Lasmana

Rutgers University

Merve Tekgürler

Stanford University, United States of America

Devin Higgins

Head, Digital Development & Strategies, Michigan State University, United States of America

Taylor Hughes-Barrow

Michigan State University, United States of America

Friday June 9, 2023 11:35am - 11:55am EDT
Main 212

Papers & Talks

Session Title Scholarly Infrastructures
Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, community, public engagement, praxis, multilingualism, conference planning, global
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

11:35am EDT

Grappling with Discord: Digital Literacy and Networked Learning with Class Servers

Founded in 2015, Discord has since become a widely adopted and recognizable group chat application among similar age groups (18-24) as those predominantly enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities (National Center for Education Statistics 2022). Between its broad familiarity among young people and its dynamic affordances as an educational technology, Discord can provide educators with rich opportunities to customize and iterate over their own interactive learning environments. Yet, not without its fair share of growing pains, Discord also bears a checkered history with moderating hate speech and harassment (Browning 2021). Accordingly, I treat this talk as a chance to grapple with the pedagogical possibilities and political contexts at stake in the use of Discord in higher education, charting some of the ways it can be transparently used for community building and networked learning in writing-intensive courses (Networked Learning Editorial Collective 2021).

Through this process, I draw on my online instructional guide to Discord, called Discord Educational Toolkit, to map out the pedagogical models and technical steps involved in the ethical use of “class servers” for teaching and learning. Here, I flesh out the connectivist principles on which my educational toolkit is based, then survey how to build class servers into networked learning spaces, which I offer as a student-centered alternative to institutionally endorsed learning management systems (Siemens 2005). I address these guidelines for the design of class servers across online and in-person modalities, describing in effect how to onboard students and prepare them for reflexive inquiry, critical dialogue, and group collaboration in Discord (Qualley 1997). In portraying class servers as sites of interstitial learning, I also consider how students can co-create their own “digital third spaces” amid the ever-evolving backchannels of formal class discussion (Moran 2018). From this commentary, I ultimately converge on series of methods for using Discord to scaffold students through digital literacy practices integral to their civic engagement with online communities of practice (Wenger 2007).

Works Cited
Browning, Kellen. “How Discord, Born From an Obscure Game, Became a Social Hub for Young People.” The New York Times, 2021.
Moran, Clarice M. "Learners without borders: Connected learning in a digital third space." Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 2018.
National Center for Education Statistics. “College Enrollment Rates.” Condition of Education, U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, 2022.
Networked Learning Editorial Collective. "Networked Learning in 2021: A Community Definition." Postdigital Science and Education, 2021.
Qualley, Donna. Turns of Thought: Teaching Composition as Reflexive Inquiry. Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1997.
Siemens, G. “Connectivism A learning theory for the digital age.” International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2005.
Wenger, Etienne. “Communities of practice: A brief introduction.” http://www.ewenger.com/theory/, 2007.

Speakers

Zach Muhlbauer

Graduate Teaching Fellow, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Friday June 9, 2023 11:35am - 11:55am EDT
Main 210

Papers & Talks

Session Title Making in the Classroom
Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, education, pedagogy, platforms, student-centered learning and teaching, digital literacy, discord, instructional design, networked learning
Area HASTAC Scholars, Pedagogy

11:35am EDT

Imagining Communities: Crowdsourced Collaborations and Collective Authorship

After the election of Donald J. Trump, a group of poets and activists conceived of a project wherein we could respond to the sudden and seemingly relentless barrage of Trump’s dystopian executive orders with a series of our own. The project, titled “Executive Orders,” was envisioned as a collaborative, freeform, emergency prose poem that would unfold real-time responses to current events and the U.S. socio-political landscape. Published between 2017 and 2020 in a series of three volumes by the Organism for Poetic Research and The Operating System, Executive Orders is a record of one literary community’s efforts to cope with and respond to the tidal wave of reactionary policies enacted or proclaimed during the Trump years. But it is also an experiment in digitally-crowdsourced collaborative making that will be among the first literary works to employ online tools to such ends. Crowdsourced projects such as Executive Orders provide an alternative to norms of authorship that valorize individual genius and thereby serve the ends of marketing conventions. They also tell stories about the ways we can—and can’t—come together to form virtual collectives that may have a voice in political deliberations.

This paper takes Executive Orders as a jumping off point for a discussion of comparable collaborative-writing and art projects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, critically examining the nature of the collectivity-making and archival curation that such projects often pursue. To this end, the paper discusses several collaborative works, including the Language movement’s The Grand Piano (1975-1980) and the Bernadette Corporation’s Reena Spaulings (2004), as well as recent thinking about crowdsourced “social-practice” and archival writing as this has been addressed, for example, in poet and scholar Mark Nowak’s Social Poetics, the Blunt Research Group’s The Work-Shy, and in a spate of recent journalistic pieces in publications from NRP’s Morning Edition to Wired.
The text of already published versions of the project can be found here: https://organismforpoeticresearch.org/opr/executive-orders-opreditions

Speakers

Andrew Gorin

Lecturer, New York University

Rachael Guynn Wilson

Friday June 9, 2023 11:35am - 11:55am EDT
PS 405 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Digital Archives / Digital Divides
Modality In Person
Keywords languages & literatures, community, public engagement, collective authorship, poetry, environment, social justice
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

11:35am EDT

Maternal Health Hackathon: Community-Led Design for Reproductive Justice in Arkansas

Since 2019, the maternal mortality rate in the United States has increased by more than 15%, according to the CDC. While the number of women that die during or after childbirth has fallen globally in recent decades, it has nearly doubled in the U.S. since 1987. In Arkansas, the maternal death rate is one of the highest in the nation. Arkansas also ranks fourth among states where a majority of women live in a maternal healthcare desert, with 37 counties that do not have a single OB/GYN. Furthermore, Arkansas has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country and, since the Dobbs decision in June 2022, the fourth toughest anti-abortion laws in the country. The lack of access to providers coupled with laws that lead to forced birth have created a complex crisis of reproductive justice in the state.

Understanding the crisis of maternal health in the United States is difficult due to a lack of data, as well as a lack of access to data, because there is no national system for tracking maternal health issues. Funded by a federal legislative proposal, the Arkansas Maternal Mortality Review Committee published findings in 2020 citing a distinct lack of data in the state as a key barrier to improving outcomes. In Arkansas, another significant challenge is the disparate and disconnected nature of birth worker communities. The experiences and perspectives of stakeholders vary widely, and there is a lack of collective understanding of the roots of problems or possible solutions.

In 2022, we teamed up with a group of researchers with backgrounds in nursing, business and design to generate community-led design approaches in addressing the maternal health crisis. Inspired by the 2014 "Make the Breast Pump Not Suck!" Hackathon at the MIT Media Lab, we hosted the Arkansas Maternal Health Community Hackathon. Traditionally, hackathons are multi-day events attended by multidisciplinary professionals, such as programmers, designers, and engineers. While hackathons are rooted in patriarchal tech culture, feminist researchers and designers have recently co-opted them as participatory spaces for social change. With an emphasis on relationship-building and care, feminist hackathons lay the groundwork for a plurality of community-led solutions to complex problems that are equitable, sustainable, and inclusive.

The Arkansas Maternal Health Community Hackathon was a one-day event that brought participants from across the state together to identify the root causes of the maternal health crisis and generate actionable visions for change. Attendees included parents of all genders, birth workers, nurses, doctors, midwives, doulas, public health experts, legal experts, policymakers, journalists, designers and artists. With support through facilitated activities and an on-site makerspace, participants formed teams to address specific problems related to maternal and infant health. This long paper presentation will address the planning, execution, outcomes and impact of the hackathon, as well as implications for future community-led design initiatives. With the feminist hackathon as a guide, we propose a model for participatory design with diverse communities to build coalitions in the uphill battle toward reproductive justice in the South.

Speakers

Alison Place

Assistant Profesor of Graphic Design, University of Arkansas

Bree McMahon

Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, University of Arkansas

Friday June 9, 2023 11:35am - 11:55am EDT
ARC E-02

Papers & Talks

Session Title Gender and Narrative
Modality In Person, Hybrid, Online
Keywords design, community, participatory methods, public engagement, makerspaces, maternal health, reproductive justice, feminism, hackathon
Area Design

11:35am EDT

Six Arguments why Critical Making is open, local and connected, social and diverse, reflexive, impactful, joyful and meaningful

In 2021 five mostly European-based organizations launched the participatory research project “Critical Making” to explore the criticality and responsibility of current maker practices (https://criticalmaking.eu). Recent studies have shown the diversity of practices found in the global maker movement. Highly generalized, while making in the Global North involves a lot of tinkering and playing with the latest digital fabrication technologies, makerspaces in the Global South have a much more entrepreneurial function and are serving small local businesses as incubation spaces. Next to the innovation potential found in maker communities experts have assigned them great education potential. Critical Making builds on these findings and defines three areas of research interest, namely gender, education and open innovation. In a series of co-creation activities members from the global maker movement were invited to reflect on current practices and suggest concrete projects that contribute to elaborate core principles of Critical Making. Through these explorations and practical implementations the following aspects have been defined as describing core principles or values of Critical Making, each exemplified each by a concrete project:

Open: Critical Making promotes open collaboration, including the sharing of skills and knowledge. It boosts creativity in the ecosystem of makers by making processes and results accessible.
The Water Filter kit https://wikifactory.com/+criticalmaking/stem-water-filter-kit developed in Kenya to teach about water filtration and recycling is an engaging, portable, recyclable, modular, scalable and replicable STEM kit.

Local & connected: Critical Making is happening locally, working on the ground and adapted to a particular socio-cultural context. Thereby, critical making implies an engagement with local communities as well as global networks - thinking globally and making locally.
In the “Gosanitize” project https://gogirlsict.org/gosanitize/ in South Sudan teachers are producing hand sanitizers from locally available material with local female brewers. They took on this approach from MboaLab in Ghana, who gave them remote training on the process.

Social & Diverse: Critical Making reflects on the social dimensions of making, the living realities of those persons involved and concerned, as well as the ethical implications of their work. Critical Making thereby addresses societal challenges and needs. That’s why it is so important to strive for diversity and inclusiveness.
The Xixi project, https://wikifactory.com/+criticalmaking/stories/xixi-inspiration provides a tool for women, non-binary and trans persons for intimate safety when they need to use the streets to relieve themselves.

Reflexive: Critical Making re-thinks and re-constructs the dominant mainstream maker culture from a critical stance, reflecting on underlying power structures and their implications.
The manual on how to create inclusive makerspaces https://criticalmaking.eu/creating-an-inclusive-and-welcoming-maker-space/ offers guidance, resources and tips on how a makerspace and its community can become more inclusive, diverse and welcoming to those, who might feel under-represented.

Impactful: Critical Making aspires to really make a difference. It seeks to improve life and build a sustainable future.
The Responsive Open Source modular Housing Prototype project https://wikifactory.com/+criticalmaking/stories/roshop is a housing prototype for complex post-conflict and politically unstable environments. It was created at the Pagirinya South Sudanese Refugee Settlement in Uganda, as a response to urgent community-use housing needs.

Joyful & meaningful: Critical Making is still about the joy of and in making, but adds meaning to it. What is made critically is made with a specific purpose of individual or social kind.
The open source educational wood game Virando Jogo https://wikifactory.com/+criticalmaking/stories/virando-jogo-open-source-educational-games emerged during the pandemic to offer joyful remote education for young children and stimulates their sense of cultural belonging.

The project is offering tools for makers to self-assess and reflect on these principles in their practice. In this contribution we present the status of our work, and spark a discussion around these principles and how they relate to social justice.

Speakers

Barbara Kieslinger

Centre for Soziale Innovation

Regina Sipos

Global Innovation Gathering, Germany

Friday June 9, 2023 11:35am - 11:55am EDT
Online

Papers & Talks

Session Title Rethinking the Process of Design/Making
Modality Online
Keywords sociology, community, participatory methods, sustainability, makerspaces, critical making, social innovation, responsibility, co-creation

11:45am EDT

Social Justice through Wearable Technology: A Critical Making Approach to Support Sexual Assault Survivors

This paper introduces a wearable garment designed to provide an alternative narrative to counter the flawed assumption that attire is responsible for rape, sexual assaults, or gender-based violence in Bangladesh. Building on Carl Disalvo’s conception of how design decisions contribute to the formation of publics and his notion of tracing as “…use of designerly forms to detail and communicate, and to make known, the network(s) of materials, actions, concepts, and values that shape and frame an issue over time” (Disalvo, 2009; p.55), the garment challenges the culture of blaming the victims of sexual assault. The wearable textile project features a poncho-style shawl made of traditional handwoven South Asian ‘khadi’ fabric which has been embellished with a programmable circuit and colorful LEDs. It uses Arduino Lilypad to regulate how the LEDs illuminate to highlight texts providing affective support to the victims of sexual assault and gender-based violence. Using Cricut iron on technology, the garment affixes texts and shapes indexing affective support towards the sexual assault survivors. The garment also uses a LilyPad Vibe Board programmed to accentuate the heartbeat of the wearer. As the source of the power of the circuit, the garment uses a 3.7-volt lithium-ion battery pack. Building on Kafai and Peppler’s notion of ‘e-textile’ (2014, p. 179), the paper argues that the garment functions as a healing mechanism for the victims so that they can overcome the shame and trauma caused by sexual violence. It also works as a technology for protesting against victim shaming and blaming that are rampant in various societies by challenging the prescribed behavior and moral policing resulting from the flawed assumption that dress is the root cause of rapes and other forms of sexual misconduct.

Works Cited
DiSalvo, Carl. “Design and the Construction of Publics.” Design Issues, vol. 25, no. 1, Winter 2009, pp. 48 –63.
Kafai, Yasmin B., and Kylie A. Peppler. “Transparency Reconsidered: Creative, Critical, and Connected Making with E-Textiles.” DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media, edited by Matt Ratto and Megan Boler, MIT Press, 2014, pp. 179-188.

Speakers

Nusrat Zahan Chowdhury

The University of Texas at Dallas

Kasif Rahman

Doctoral Student, The University of Texas at Dallas, United States of America

Friday June 9, 2023 11:45am - 12:05pm EDT
PS 401 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Embodied Justice
Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, design, gender studies, makerspaces, social justice, wearables, critical making, arduino, sexual assault
Area HASTAC Scholars, Platforms & Technology

11:55am EDT

Thinking Making, Making Thinking: Pedagogy, Praxis, and Embodiment in the Classroom and Beyond

This project seeks to highlight the transformative power of making as an academic and intellectual—as well as material and embodied—practice at CUNY on several interconnected levels: from the material and experiential individual level, to the pedagogical and the theoretical. Beginning with the making practices of Text, Texture, Textile Studio (3Text), a student-run community of makers following the example of Eve Sedgwick’s pedagogy and praxis at the Graduate Center, I trace the influence of making practices via pedagogical interventions that straddle active learning and critical making in my own teaching practice. Mostly taking the form of alternative assignments and assessment, these alternative pedagogical strategies include critical reflection journals, arts praxis journals, and sketch diaries. Using case studies and critical making theory, I advocate for making practices and pedagogies in the Art History classroom and beyond, tracing their conceptual and practical import for teaching the whole student, trauma-informed pedagogy, and encouraging a more rigorous acceptance of embodied and differentiated learning for a more kind and generous pedagogy.

Speakers

Gwendolyn Shaw

CUNY graduate Centr

Friday June 9, 2023 11:55am - 12:05pm EDT
Main 210

Papers & Talks

Session Title Making in the Classroom
Modality In Person
Keywords arts, art history, education, pedagogy, participatory methods, making, hands-on, haptic, meditative, process
Area Pedagogy

11:55am EDT

Developing a Critical & Sensitive Design Practice: Detaching from Market Logic

In lieu of a workshop, I will give a short talk on the importance of providing designers---emerging and seasoned---the opportunity to explore an ethos and practice that are detached from market logic. I will ground this with four key parts: 1) a theoretical framework that was developed from my doctoral research, 2) a pedagogical framework that I designed as a Teaching Fellow, 3) a case study that outlines a way to apply this into the classroom, and 4) an exercise that can be immediately used, at the individual, studio, and classroom levels. This talk aims to provide critical design theorists, designers, and technologists with the vocabulary to discuss design differently while also the opportunity to engage with tools to explore the possibilities in this domain.

Design education in the US pays focused attention on technical skill sets and consumer satisfaction, conditioning undergraduate and graduate students in developing a de-contextualized practice that is contingent on market development. The centrality of a market logic in curriculum development reflects the increasingly profit-driven industries and monopolies that shape design pedagogy located in a region that has a profound impact on the global market, organization of labor, and concentration of power—the US–warranting deeper engagement on how design curricula are developed. This workshop provides an opportunity, space, and facilitated experience for design educators and practitioners to detach their existing design etho from market logic to identify ways to challenge their existing approaches and applications. Participants will be introduced to dominant strands of thought that sustain a market logic in the design industry to then deconstruct their current works and identify ways to pivot their ethos and practice.

This workshop does not focus solely on the ways design is used to continue the detriments of US-centric capitalism onto US soil and many others. Rather, it sheds light on the empowerment that lies in having the tools to identify how these values show up in one's work to then make actionable change, incremental and long-term. I argue that if design is a world-making (Arturo Escobar) and articulatory (Mahmoud Keshavarz) practice, it, similar to technology, also has the propensity to be used for creating the conditions where the codependency on US-centric values, such as growth, efficiency, and seamlessness, are no longer or less relevant. In order to direct design in this particular direction, design pedagogy needs to create a space for students and educators alike to expand their imaginations on what an ethos and practice outside of and aware of US-centric capitalism may entail—in theory, speculation, and practice.

The goal of this workshop is in two parts: 1) provide educators and practitioners with a hands-on and reflexive learning experience that critically engages with the ways in which market logic profoundly shapes industry, beginning with their own works; and 2) equip educators and practitioners with a template that can be applied (and modified) to their teaching and working contexts, as appropriate and relevant. The hope is that this workshop will begin to concretize the ways anti-capitalist theories oriented towards a social justice that de-centers the US are tangible and applicable, incrementally or dramatically to their ethos and practice. It aims to empower, encourage, and equip all participants who attend this workshop.

Speakers

Esther Kang

Carnegie Mellon University

Friday June 9, 2023 11:55am - 12:15pm EDT
PS 311 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Design (against) and (within) Capitalism
Modality In Person
Keywords education, design, pedagogy, activism, design-based approaches, market logic, detachment, deconstruction
Area Design

11:55am EDT

Dispatches from the Urban Humanities: Making and Sustaining an Emergent Global Network

The newly established Urban Humanities Network (UHN) is a consortium of campuses, organizations and professionals (scholars, practitioners & community leaders) collectively building the emerging field of Urban Humanities. Urban humanists share practices of research, design and place-based public engagement at the intersection of architecture, urban studies, and the public humanities. Over the last decade, this trans-disciplinary work has been institutionalized as a field through the support of the Mellon Foundation, creating pedagogical programs, research centers, and community engaged scholarship in cities across the globe. This panel submission, created by members of the UHN Steering Committee, will document and report on the UHN’s convening of the Inaugural Urban Humanities Global (Un)Conference to be held at Tucson, AZ in March 2023. It reflects on the process of building and sustaining this network as a form of critical making.

With planning currently underway, the (Un) Conference is framed around the critical question of what is missing –people, data, methods, theories–and how we can address these missing elements within the field. This is to build-up a next generation of urban humanities scholars and practitioners that exist beyond the R1 institution to include and support pre-tenured faculty, adjunct lecturers, graduate students, early career professionals from academic and non-academic institutions, as well as interested artists, organizers, and community practitioners. We hope the network pushes the field in new directions with more explicit orientations towards social justice, while also seeding urban humanities in new institutions and cities. These questions will be reflected on by participants in a variety of settings, such as roundtable discussions on the central pedagogical commitments of the field to place-based experiences on the streets of Tucson.

The conference will also highlight the power of place via the cultural and environmental landscape of Southern Arizona, in its austere ecological frailty, fraught borderlands history and utopian imaginaries. To that end, a central thematic spotlight and conference location is the University of Arizona’s stewardship of Biosphere 2, the largest sealed environment in the world, and which is now a laboratory for studying the effects of climate change. During a day-long site visit, the conference will experiment with the ways that sites like the Biosphere can serve also as a laboratory for humanistic thought, especially about the city, to meditate on speculative models for collective life, or to glimpse new relationalities formed into being (such as the network itself).

We envision our panel contribution as a first chance to make sense of the collective ideas generated by the conference. As organizers, we will gather our impressions throughout the proceedings, and explicitly engage participants with reflecting on the process of making this network together, so that we can better understand both the current state and future of the field of urban humanities. We hope to synthesize these collective ideas into some kind of creative object (visual, textual, sonic, material) utilizing collaborative making practices already existing the urban humanities (or perhaps discovered through the gathering itself), which can be showcased as part of the panel talk.

Speakers

Gus Wendel

Assistant Director, University of California, Los Angeles

Gus Wendel is the Assistant Director of cityLAB at UCLA. Gus is interested in the ways that visual culture informs planning and design, the politics of place and space, urban humanities, and the effect of urban interventions on marginalized communities. He previously served as the... Read More →

Jonathan Banfill

Assistant Professor, Champlain College

Jacqueline Barrios

Assistant Professor, University of Arizona

Kenny Wong

Lecturer, University of Arizona

Friday June 9, 2023 11:55am - 12:15pm EDT
Main 212

Papers & Talks

Session Title Scholarly Infrastructures
Modality In Person
Keywords architecture, mentoring, community, public engagement, urban, field building, emergent network, biosphere
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

11:55am EDT

Epistemic Justice: Through and beyond information inequality

My paper will examine the concept of “information inequality” (alongside related terminologies such as “information poverty” and “the digital divide”) as a multifaceted construction, produced by both academic and popular discourses, and given to a wide range of interpretations and subsequent policy implications. Historically, the concept of information inequality has roots in research on social inequalities within the fields of education, literacy, and universal access, dating back to the 1960s. In this paper, however, I will be chiefly concerned with formulations of information inequality as they have been shaped since the dawn of the internet age in the early 1990s, at which point information inequality becomes widely interrogated as a) the lack of technological literacy among “information poor” groups; and b) the unequal distributions of material access to various communication technologies: personal computers, broadband internet, and the like.

The information inequality framework is premised on a few consequential assumptions, namely that information and its value is to be globally understood in a uniform way, and that the complex group of issues that contribute to an unjust information landscape can be addressed through the simple economic solution of a more equal distribution of resources. This framework also has the negative social potential, as argued by David J. Hudson, of perpetuating and deepening biases about the intellectual tendencies and capacities of ethnic groups who are not historically well-resourced.

In contrast, I will explore Miranda Fricker’s concept of “epistemic justice” as a theoretical approach that de-emphasizes the role of technology and/or standards of knowledge in addressing issues of information justice, instead stressing the need for attentive contextualizations of problems of information access and exchange within the parameters of specific information needs and socio historical dynamics. Epistemic justice encourages collaborative—as opposed to prescriptive—processes that foreground a critical consciousness concerning the varied hierarchies of information value that exist simultaneously in a global world. My paper will conclude with an examination of the field of “open scholarship”, an arena in which important work has occurred both in theory and in practice. I give particular focus to the conceptual development of “situated openness” as an applied framework for developing more just relationships between communities of differing social positions.

Speakers

Morgan Võ

student, Pratt Institute, School of Information

Morgan Võ (b. 1989) is a poet concerned with resonance, contingency, difficulty understanding, and the presence of the dead among the living; he is also an MSLIS candidate at the Pratt Institute School of Information. He organized G-L-O-S-S, a mutual aid-based poetry press, fro... Read More →

Friday June 9, 2023 11:55am - 12:15pm EDT
PS 405 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Digital Archives / Digital Divides
Modality In Person
Keywords library and information studies, participatory methods, open access / open knowledge, epistemic justice, access, digital divide, technology
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

11:55am EDT

How to stimulate moral imagination about new technologies? A narrative-based experiment.

In John Dewey and Moral Imagination, Steven Fesmire argues that imagination allows us to “concretely perceive what is before us in the light of what should be” (Fesmire, 2003). The practice of imagination indeed enables one’s perception to be amplified beyond the immediate environment and this is how moral judgment and moral deliberation are possible (Johnson, 1983). In the context of digital technology, the enhancement of moral imagination is generally suggested for helping engineers to discern the moral relevance of design problems, creating new design options, and considering the possible outcomes of their designs (Coeckelbergh, 2006).

Yet, how do we get the stakeholders of tech design (such as the scientists, engineers, designers, tech entrepreneurs but also the society in its whole) to practice moral imagination? How do we raise interest in this matter and especially, how do we stimulate moral imagination with the ambition to develop an ‘ethical culture in Tech?
Among the various paths that are envisaged for stimulating moral imagination, narratives are surely worth to be considered as a tool. As a matter of fact, they are seen as a ‘productive form of imagination’ that allows new possibilities rather than copies (Ricoeur, 1983; Reijers 2020).

In this line of arguments, this paper presents a design-based experiment where narratives are used as a heuristic method, as well as for their educational function. The experiment consists in gathering tech people, narrative specialists, visual artists as well as linguists and philosophers, and to invite them to create imaginary science-fiction movie posters and pitches.

In this way, we aim at observing how such an imaginative exercise foster moral judgment and deliberation by creating sensitivity towards the issue of moral imagination about new technologies. We then discuss how this narrative practice could enable participants to question various notions such as the one of an ‘ethical culture’ in tech.
In the context of the HASTAC conference, we wish to present the objectives and the methodology of this narrative-based experiment and to discuss its relevance.

Coeckelbergh M., Regulation or Responsibility? Autonomy, Moral Imagination, and Engineering, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol.31, May 2006
Fesmire S., John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics, Indiana University Press, 2003
Johnson, M. Moral imagination: Implications of cognitive science for ethics, University of Chicago Press, 2014
Reijers, W. et al., Narrative and technology ethics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
Ricoeur P., Time and narrative, volume 1, The University of Chicago, 1983

Speakers

Céline Pieters

University of Vienna

Friday June 9, 2023 11:55am - 12:15pm EDT
Online

Papers & Talks

Modality Online
Keywords education, languages & literatures, participatory methods, literacy, imagination, narrative, narrative-based experiment, ethics, reflection
Area Pedagogy

11:55am EDT

Soluble Body: Being Formless as Survival Strategy

There is an exhaustive amount of misogynist perspective that feeds the production of the objectified images of women, from film tropes to androcentric pornography, from entertainment culture to social structure, which finds its apex in the abyss of male-centric culture. In online world, the flattening of images of women - fetishizing, infantilizing, commodifying - is accelerated with the image circulation system. Once uploaded, an image is embedded, copied and pasted, saved and re-uploaded, cloned and meme-ed in a seemingly infinite cycle. The image loses its context and time. These images are immortal, haunting macho online communities, group chat rooms, and offline secret folders of anonymous voyeurs. These sad undead images are deprived of good rest in peace, destined to be an indefinite index of their hosts.

The pervasive sexual objectification online and the over-simplification and negative categorization of femme identity has been constantly imposed on women as real human beings. One’s story is crushed and flattened into trite female images, deprived of personality and narrative. In South Korean context, this objectification accelerates with the spur of anonymous online communities, films and dramas featuring infantilized female characters, which employ and amplify the punitive and relegating perspectives of misogynist culture.

This web-trauma, a trauma as a child of biased perception and technology, has been circulating through commodification and rapid distribution of images. My research involves examining this ecology: how web-trauma is born, processed, consumed as tragedy, and feeds back to the newborn traumas. This cycle forms within online image distribution system, but also across reality and virtual, as the commodified image fuses with the identities of real human beings.

In transcending the flattened and demeaning perspective on femme identities, fictional storytelling comes in as a methodology that allows to react to such violence: a speculative shield against ontological threats, a self-made ark for potential readers and viewers. The focal point of my storytelling experimentation has been chiefly threefold: the materiality of the screen whether it is through my skin or planar structures; the operation of the interactive screen through utilizing a trigger element for transforming an object into a portal; and the poetic possibility of the personae building and 3d fabrication process.

Experimenting with water-soluble filaments to print the scanned image of my performing body, I suggest a speculative survival narrative for a femme identity in a patriarchal society. This paper aims to unfold my printing experiments and raise the questions I started to ask myself during the process, about the narrative possibility of the printing system and the material dynamics of water-soluble filament. Can a dissolving sculpture signify “being formless”, as a survival strategy for a female body under the risk of constant objectification in this patriarchal world? For the minor identities to happily exist in a society, is it safer to be visible or to be invisible? Can I emancipate myself from objectification by being the subject in a self-fulfilling, self-destructive fantasy?

Speakers

June Yoon

Lecturer, Inha University

Friday June 9, 2023 11:55am - 12:15pm EDT
ARC E-02

Papers & Talks

Session Title Gender and Narrative
Modality In Person, Online, Hybrid
Keywords arts, performance, 3D modeling & printing, digital, feminism, new media, storytelling
Area Arts

12:05pm EDT

Disabled Erotics: Offerings to Bob Flanagan & Dependency Rituals

My project, Disabled Erotics, explores the potentiality of eroticism through collective haptic horizons within relational care webs. This proposal is an act of future dreaming beyond the whitewashed colonial confines of intimacy, relationality, and sex. My desire is to examine how disabled queer and trans people relate to sensuality and dependency as a form of reflexive agency. Thus, this endeavor explores the intersections of disability and erotic potentiality from a place of critical queer sensation-filled subjectivity. Inspired by thinkers such as Audre Lorde, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha, Mia Mingus, Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Constantina Zavitsanos, and Amber Jamilla Musser, Disabled Erotics is located within fissures of unruly, disorderly, queered, messy, overflowing crip- ness. In doing so, I aim to locate the importance of claiming disability as a means of further contending with the somatic, sensational, haptic, material, and figurative. Within this context, to center disability is to also center Blackness, queerness, transness, mundane labor, and (im)mobility. However, due to the carceral policing, medical surveillance, and violent systems forced upon our bodies, this project reckons with the understanding that care is relational and therefore not exempt from violence. Disabled Erotics contends with the inherent racialized, gendered, and classed dynamics of care exchange as they affect multiply marginalized disabled people. In doing so, moving towards a more capacious endeavor of not only care, but understandings of liminal and permanent dependency. The impetus of this work is to highlight the fragility and sturdiness of being and sensing as they relate to the insatiable needs and dependencies that we all possess.

Looking to alx velozo, agustine zegers, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Bob Flanagan, and Kamra Sadia Hakim, Disabled Erotics asks us to concede with our own preconceived notions of sensuality, breaking open towards more capacious ways of being and knowing with ourselves and each other. This project proposes a cosmos through the entanglement of disability and erotics as they are inextricably woven into each other and ricocheted onto new forms. In its multi-leg formulation, Disabled Erotics invites a plethora of experiential engagement through sight, touch, and sound, invoking a variety of “access intimacies.”

Disabled Erotics, Dependency Rituals looks to artists alx velozo, agustine zegers, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, and Kamra Sadia Hakim in the legacy of Audre Lorde and Bob Flanagan. Orienting towards a ‘ritual of the erotics,’ way of knowing, and multi sensorium point of access, this second section of the project spans across disabled bodies, assistive devices, and cross species knowledge. Disabled Erotics pursues the embodied, material, and haptic bonds between notions eroticism and disability and debilitation. My desire is to examine how disabled, chronically ill, and mad queer and transgender artists to sensuality as a form of reflexive agency, despite pre-conceived ableist notions of our bodies. Thus, this analysis of velozo, zegers, Branfman-Verissimo, and Hakim’s work highlights the intersections of disability and possibilities of eroticization from a place of critical and queer subjectivity. The section proposes a deeper understanding into collectivized and individualized experiences of pain, pleasure, grief, mourning, and care, for example. This project is a continual process of locating threads that lead one back to the disabled body as well as processes of debilitation - whether through contortion, examination, pressure, and materiality.

Disabled Erotics stems from a former video project of mine titled Offerings to Bob Flanagan. My video work Offerings to Bob Flanagan interrogates pain as an endurance performance, incessant conjuring, and connective tissue as both subject and witness. While I will not be showing this video during my presentation, I will make the link available to audience members who wish to engage with this other leg of the larger Disabled Erotics project.

Speakers

Mae Eskenazi

Student, University of Pennsylvania

Friday June 9, 2023 12:05pm - 12:15pm EDT
PS 401 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Embodied Justice
Modality In Person
Keywords arts, LGBTQ+ studies, disability studies, pedagogy, open access / open knowledge, erotics, disability arts, kink, queer theory
Area Accessibility

12:05pm EDT

Research-creation as social justice pedagogy: Alexandra Bell’s art activism in the critical making classroom

Content warning: police violence, racism

In How to Make Art at the End of the World (2019), contemporary art scholar Natalie Loveless advocates for research-creation: a scholarly activity that considers art practices as research methods in their own right. To do research-creation “is not simply to ask questions; it is to let our curiosities drive us and allow them to ethically bind us; it is to tell stories and to pay attention not only to which stories we are telling and how we are telling them, but how they, through their very forms, are telling us” (24). For Loveless, research-creation is curiosity-driven, ethically binding, and narrative-based. We discern what stories’ content and form reveal about our beliefs. Stories hold power over us, and because this power falls differentially along intersectional identity lines, it perpetuates dynamics that empower some and disempower others. Research-creation requires us to self-reflexively account for our stories. We create, and we critique, iteratively.

This concept of praxis (or making) as method (or critique) informs my pedagogy in the Digital Culture and Design (DCD) program at Coastal Carolina University. In the DCD classroom, critical making renders digital humanities work politically and affectively responsive to contemporary social justice issues.

In this short talk, I introduce “News Bias Before & After,” an intro-level DCD assignment I designed in homage to the work of multidisciplinary artist Alexandra Bell. Bell’s public art project “Counternarratives” (2017) epitomizes her imperative: “deconstruct[ing] language and imagery to explore the tension between marginal experiences and dominant histories” (Harvard Radcliffe Institute 2023). Bell created large-scale paste-ups of New York Times pages—for instance, coverage of the police killing of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson in 2014—and annotated these pages to highlight biases dictating journalistic and design decisions like page real estate and word and image choice. Bell conveys the “framing” that shapes not just what news stories say, but how they say it. She lays bare racist stereotypes governing how these stories are systemically told, all to underscore that readers must systematically interrogate stories for this bias. I discuss how responses to Bell’s work—protestors papered over her posters, counter-protestors uncovered them, and so on—attest to both the investment of white supremacy in leaving racist narratives unchallenged and the resilience of anti-racist activists in deconstructing such narratives.

Inspired by Bell’s research-creation, I invited students to identify a news story in which they discerned a governing bias, use image editing software to expose this bias, re-make the news story, and reflect on their critique. Students described this assignment as an eye-opening, dismaying, yet empowering experience of civic engagement. In closing, I show provocative student work as a prompt for open discussion about pedagogical strategies for engaging issues of social justice through critical making.

Works cited
“Alexandra Bell.” Harvard Radcliffe Institute: Fellows. https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/people/alexandra-bell.
Bell, Alexandra. “Art that forms new narratives." National Geographic Society: Storytellers Summit, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXjkxdRtGe8.
Bell, Alexandra. “Counternarratives.” Public Work. http://www.alexandrabell.com/public-work.
Loveless, Natalie. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Duke University Press, 2019.

Speakers

Anna Mukamal

Assistant Professor of Digital Culture and Design, Coastal Carolina University

Friday June 9, 2023 12:05pm - 12:15pm EDT
Main 210

Papers & Talks

Session Title Making in the Classroom
Modality In Person
Keywords arts, media studies, pedagogy, activism, public engagement, critical making, art as activism, social justice, public art
Area Pedagogy

12:15pm EDT

Lunch

Friday June 9, 2023 12:15pm - 1:30pm EDT
Student Union 191 Grand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA

Registration/Breaks

Modality In Person

1:30pm EDT

A Social Bibliography: Re-Visualizing the Work of S.R. Ranganathan

SR Ranganathan (1892-1972) was a prolific writer, speaker, and scholar in the field of Library and Information Science, though his work is largely out of circulation in Western LIS scholarship. This project draws on bibliographic data collected about Ranganathan during his lifetime, as well as through original research by the author, to create a comprehensive dataset of Ranganathan’s authored works, which is presented through data visualizations as a means of re-examining Ranganathan’s place within the history of 20th century librarianship, his role as a social catalyst, and the narratives about his work and personal life that accompany his formal scholarly work.

The data for this project comes from three main sources. The first is the two-volume Ranganathan Festschrift, particularly in the second volume, “An Essay in Personal Bibliography” written by AK Das Gupta, who is presumably also responsible for the histograms and other visualizations with the book.[1] The second is the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO)’s online version of Ranganathan’s bibliography, which was derived from Das Gupta’s original work, with some additions and revisions by the authors of the site.[2] Das Gupta’s work ends in 1961, was first published prior to Ranganathan’s passing in 1972, and while ISKO’s bibliography does document some of his later work, it itself does not claim any kind of completionism.

The third source is the aggregated records of all his post-1961 original publications, as well as records where he is listed as editor, contributor, or secondary author, which is being created by the researcher as a part of this project. This data comes from Ranganathan’s own works, many of which are held by the New York Public Library, Columbia University Library Service Library, and NYU Libraries. Additional data comes from the several biographies of Ranganathan which provide contextual information about Ranganathan’s later years, as well as from this author’s own collection of 20th century LIS textbooks.

The conversations in and around librarianship as a field in recent years have begun to acknowledge the overwhelming whiteness of the profession, its history, and the structures it has codified. I believe that working to bring the work of Ranganathan and his peers to the forefront of the conversation around the development of LIS in the 20th century can serve to demonstrate not only the presence, but innovation and leadership of global LIS work that does not center whiteness or western thought. Contemporary LIS theory and practice owe much to Ranganathan’s teaching and writings, and without work to preserve it and bring that work to contemporary western audiences, we run the risk of continuing to whitewash the past and future of our field.

Re-creating Ranganathan’s bibliographic network in a digital format enables the publication of updates as new knowledge is uncovered, or new publications come out. As the data continues to be collected, tidied, and rendered in machine-readable formats, more and more nuanced analyses will become possible. The social nature of the existing Ranganathan bibliographies, as well as his well-documented travels in Europe and the United States provide ample additional data, toward the development of a network visualization of his co-authors, colleagues, students, mentors, and proteges. I see this work as the seed for large digital projects documenting and exploring the development of contemporary LIS theory and practice, and present it not as a finished work, but as an ongoing labor of making and re-making the narratives of LIS as a field by its scholars and practitioners.

Speakers

S.E. Hackney

Assistant Professor, Queens College, CUNY

Friday June 9, 2023 1:30pm - 1:50pm EDT
Main 212

Papers & Talks

Session Title New Approaches to Cataloging
Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, library and information studies, history, data, bibliography, data visualization, 20th century history
Area HASTAC Scholars, Digital Humanities & Archives

1:30pm EDT

Curricular Interventions: Critical Making, Social Justice, and CVSN at 10

How do we create opportunities for undergraduates to engage in critical making for social justice? If, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten argue, “it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of” (2013, 26), what are the trade-offs in institutionalizing de/re/constructive and critical approaches to media making and domesticating it within the space of the university?

This presentation reflects on the past ten years publishing CVSN, a peer reviewed student publication from the Critical Visions program at the University of Cincinnati (https://www.criticalvisions.org). Founded in 2011 as a joint endeavor between faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), the cross-college curriculum teaches students how to effectively combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practice to: increase students' understanding of what is at stake in how we see, including the social and political ramifications of advertising, art, media, popular culture and science, among other dominant and subversive visual forms and visualizing practices; and develop new artistic, media or design forms and practices that will intervene in dominant ways of seeing and explaining the world. The publication has taken many forms—art/design broadside, magazine, field guide, anthology, digital zine, and almanac—but is always produced on a single topic in the space of a single semester. Past issues have explored space, the future, color, surface, identity, and land/water. The capstone course, co-taught across Anthropology and Fine Art, guides the process and draws on a rotating editorial board and guest faculty for crits of works-in-progress. Students design both their own inquiries and the final publication, producing the most recent issues on a Risograph, printing, folding, and binding them collectively. The program has been supported by grants from the university, but has no standing budget, no dedicated teaching lines, or service credit for running it.

In this presentation, we will provide an account of creating and maintaining a critical making and social justice curriculum and publication, including the infrastructural and institutional impediments to this work. We will show how institutional interests in innovation, scalability, and impact created openings for this work, while the durational qualities of maintenance and infrastructural work to reroute resources and reconfigure the university gives it its potency. We will also share strategies we have used to sustain and not grow our program and the kinds of critical making for social justice we have fostered.

Reference Cited
Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & Black study. Minor Compositions.

Speakers

Stephanie Sadre-Orafai

Associate Professor, University of Cincinnati

Stephanie Sadre-Orafai is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research explores emerging forms of expertise, discourses of realness, and the intersection of race, language, and visual practices in aesthetic industries. Using ethnographic methods, she analyzes how experts come to... Read More →

Friday June 9, 2023 1:30pm - 1:50pm EDT
Main 210

Papers & Talks

Session Title Pedagogies of Justice and Care
Modality In Person
Keywords arts, anthropology, education, pedagogy, public engagement, publishing, interdisciplinarity, curriculum design
Area Pedagogy

1:30pm EDT

Engineering Interactive Devices that Enable Alternative Relations Among Humans, Devices, and Other Organisms

As interactive devices have become increasingly interwoven and necessary in our daily lives, we are primed to expect them to be fast, small, and ubiquitous, catering to our every need. These values also drive many of the latest innovations in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. In fact, when we think about our relationship to interactive devices, we primarily think of ourselves as consumers—this encourages an extractive relationship, in which we use devices without reflecting on the impacts of our use, such as the environmental impact interactive computing has on our ecosystem.

Some research efforts have aimed to lessen the ecological impact of interactive devices by developing biodegradable materials or reducing our dependency on batteries. While these efforts are essential for a more sustainable future, we also need to explore new user-device relationships that promote more reflection, care, and responsibility for our devices rather than just relationships built on consumption and careless disposal. This is especially important for the tons of consumer devices that end up as electronic waste yearly—the world’s fastest-growing waste stream.
In my research, I explore approaches in engineering and designing interactive devices that foster alternative user-device relationships. To do so, I engineer interactive artifacts that encourage people to be more than just users or consumers of electronic devices and instead, engage also as caretakers and maintainers of their devices. Through these artifacts, I explore how we might design the future of interactive devices to encourage more ecologically minded engagements between human users, devices, and even other organisms. My approach builds off recent advancements in biological circuits (Adamatsky et. al 2016, Pataranutaporn et. al 2020), critical making (Ratto 2011), and theories in more than human design (Wakkary 2021, Karana et. al 2020). I motivate my work through speculative futures while also grounding it in engineering, design, and research contributions.

To explore caretaking of an interactive device, I engineered a wearable smartwatch that works based around the user’s care of the living organism inside the device. When healthy from the user’s provided water and food, the organism (a slime mold, Physarum Polycephalum) participates in the device’s functionality by acting as a physical living wire that enables power to the watch’s heart rate sensor. As such, caring for the device is intrinsic to its interaction design —with the user’s care, the slime mold becomes conductive and enables the sensor; conversely, without care, the slime mold dries and disables the sensor, and resuming care resuscitates the slime mold. In addition to engineering this device, I also conducted a user study where participants wore our slime mold-integrated smartwatch for 9-14 days. In this study, participants developed a unique connection towards their slime mold-integrated device, with many feeling a sense of responsibility and/or reciprocity.

Rather than a user-device relationship built on extractive use, this approach explores how devices can be designed to encourage the user to take on a caretaking role. By presenting this project and other works in progress, I hope to foster discussion of how we might design future technologies to center care and maintenance and rethink our user-device relationship.

Speakers

Jasmine Lu

PhD Student, University of Chicago

Friday June 9, 2023 1:30pm - 1:50pm EDT
ARC E-13

Papers & Talks

Session Title Design Interventions II: Ecology; Food Waste; Home Care
Modality In Person, Hybrid, Online
Keywords computing & computer science, engineering, design, physical computing education, living organisms, slime mold, interaction, human-computer interaction, care
Area Design

1:30pm EDT

Feminist Making and (De)Coding – Revealing the Stacks

The traditional power structures in the world have been digitised. They are embedded in our digital systems and are coded into the fibers of our digital being. Layer upon layer of socio-technical infrastructures contain the traces of colonialist and imperialist actions, thought and violence. From internet cables which trace old colonial routes, to exploitive labour practices and extractive resource acquisitioning, imperialism is now embedded in the digital communications infrastructures upon which our digital worlds rely. The code that runs across these wires are entangled with layers and stacks of bias that is socially, culturally and politically engrained and embedded. As Ruja Benjamin (2019), writes, discriminatory design pre-dates software design - past and present 'legal...[and]...social codes' make manifest systems that exclude and discriminate across class, gender, gender identity, sexuality, race and ethnic intersections. The embeddedness of algorithmic or coded bias reflects the embeddedness of societies historic bias, prejudice and discrimination. As such, this paper explores ‘Full Stack Feminism’ as a framework to help mitigate the ways in which implicit/explicit bias and discrimination are hard-coded into our digital systems. Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities, a two-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and the Irish Research Council, takes seriously how our technical and social infrastructures create connection/disconnection, can contaminate/heal, and can empower/disempower. We use the “full stack” metaphor to denote the ways in which (un)conscious bias manifests across software development stacks – this provides us a framework for various, specific, interventions. In this respect, we conceive of three stacks: data and archives; infrastructure, tools and code; access, integration and experience. Within this framework we are developing and gathering practices for a Full Stack Feminist Toolkit. The framework thereby enables us to, as per ‘The Feminist Principles of the Internet’, understand the machine (hardware/software) and to reclaim it ‘down to the code’ (see https://feministinternet.org/en). In this framework code refers also to the social and cultural codes which inform, for example data models, user profiles, database structures, metadata descriptions, among others. This work, and its aspirations, are framed in terms of critical making – what can we learn about systems we use when building alternatives? What might we inadvertently reveal about our own practices and short-comings? Are ‘autonomous feminist infrastructures’ possible? What does feminist approaches to making and coding, in these spaces, across these stacks, bring in terms of a reevaluation of the systemic problems coded in our digital infrastructures? How might the application and rethinking of infrastructure stacks and layers through a feminist praxis and lens help us decode the encoded bias and discrimination deep rooted in our technologies? These questions are explored with relation to some experiments and initiatives developed through Full Stack Feminism and adjacent projects: ‘Building a Feminist Chat Bot’ (developed by the Feminist Approaches to Computational Technology Network); building ‘autonomous feminist infrastructures’ (Toupin & Hache, 2015), experimenting with raspberry Pi clusters; and feminist making and coding, workshops designed develop a feminist software life-cycle

Speakers

Sharon Webb

Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, University of Sussex

Friday June 9, 2023 1:30pm - 1:50pm EDT
ARC E-02

Papers & Talks

Session Title Feminist Interventions in Technologies
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords digital humanities, gender studies, activism, participatory methods, feminism, feminist digital methods, feminist software, ethics, critical making
Area Platforms & Technology

1:30pm EDT

HERENOTHERE || Artists' work in Mental Health Methodologies & New Paradigms

During COVID, the artist Ben Webster-Burr struggled with uncertainty of time, existence, life, death, and overwhelming feelings of a dystopian past, present, and future. LIke so many of us, creative people needed to recalibrate, adjust, find coping mechanisms, and sometimes, find resources and alternatives for both materials and means for creating and presenting artwork and other creative output. Thus HERENOTHERE came to be in fits and starts. Ben found himself in the greatest struggle in his 50 plus years of life on this planet.

This paper will review Ben's journey, and the journeys of other artists in a variety of genres -- it will delve into the lives of musicians, poets, artists, and writers. It will explore case studies of a young fledgling artist, an emerging artist, and an established artist who found ways to be in a world where existence and time itself were dislocated and dissolved.
Out of this brief rift in the human experience on earth, Ben created a non-linear narrative; designed objects; sculptures; installations; video shorts; photographs; drawings; ink prints; and a set of narrative passages that were hyperlinked across social media platforms. Some of these works appeared in a virtual gallery in Chelsea’s art district, on display at Towhee Co. / JC Fab Lab at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, NJ; in diary entries, and more. During this creative endeavor, Ben created some works in traditional forms, including artifacts produced for use in photos, videos, and gifs. But he also conceived of a mental health tool – a wearable called Locus. This ‘watch’ was fully conceived and was developed through a traditional product development process… something that Ben is familiar with, but, at once, a process that he does not typically use for art work.

What is Locus? That will be talked about in detail in this paper. But essentially, it amounts to a self-contained wearable biofeedback device. The paper will elaborate on Locus' use cases, functionality, and purpose. Locus is at once high-tech, practical, low-tech, low-bandwidth, privacy (HIPPA) compliant, and latency-independent. Versions planned include luxury, standard, and DIY models.

This paper will put this all into a context of mental health resources and needs for the general public. What is the need for such a device? How might Locus fit into existing paradigms and models for therapy (art therapy, talk therapy, freudian analysis, etc.) and why is it vital that such a ‘product’ should be developed? And if not Locus, then there must be something that can serve those who are desperately in need of mental health therapies in contemporary settings, and currently relevant paradigms. The paper will provide arguments as to why we need a device or means for inexpensive and accessible answers to these urgent human needs, both in the US and internationally.

Speakers

Ben Webster-Burr

Artist in Residence, Towhee Co. / JC Fab Lab

Friday June 9, 2023 1:30pm - 1:50pm EDT
PS 308 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Healing Futures
Modality In Person
Keywords mental health, art
Area Arts

1:30pm EDT

How Do We See What Takes Place?: Dilemmas in the Creation of Educational XR Experiences of Religious Rituals

This paper will present outcomes of a NEH supported workshop exploring the creation of extended reality (XR) experiences of religious rituals. The proposed resources would capture a selection of rites using 360-degree video while incorporating interactive commentary from scholars, clerics, and practitioners. An interdisciplinary cast of scholars met over two days with digital humanists and immersive media creators to discuss best practices for designing and producing these assets. I will address three questions from the workshop relevant to the critical making of educational XR resources for the study of religion:

How can we avoid reiterating the Euro- and Christo-centric “world religions” paradigm in selecting which rituals to record?
How might XR’s ability to approximate presence help combat religious discrimination and xenophobia?
How can we responsibly work with communities towards ethically recording and explaining religious practices?
What are the limitations of XR regarding rituals, both in terms of sensory experience and accessibility in delivery.

Choosing what rituals to record immediately raised concerns about religious essentializing. Selection implicitly communicates a determination of what constitutes a “religious” ritual versus, for example, a “cultural” celebration, which historically has led to the marginalization of indigenous and diasporic religious forms of life. Moreover, portraying a single ritual construction as representational of any tradition is irresponsible, while including every ritual nuance between lineages is impossible. Workshop participants determined to first use institutional networks (e.g. individual students, campus religious groups, or faith and spirituality centers) to identify interested communities rather than attempting to establish a list of rituals to engage.

Site visits have long been a feature of “world religions” classes, exposing students to spaces and viewpoints they are unlikely to encounter on their own. XR offers the opportunity to approximate presence at sacred spaces as well as experiencing first-hand the practices that take place in those venues. Cultural exposure mediated through XR has potential to increase empathy by humanizing those whose practices are unfamiliar to students, and religious practices are particularly well suited for such exposure. Treating religious rituals which are familiar in the same way as those which are not—as well as those often altogether excluded—can expand students’ understanding of religions as well as the boundaries of religion itself.

Effectively doing so will require thorough and consistent participation from these communities of practice. Visual anthropology has long recognized the dangers of treating cultural enclaves as mere subjects to be studied, and the workshop early determined that partnering with those whose practices would be recorded was essential. Plans were made to highlight the group’s voices and experiences; participants will guide users through the preparation for and participation in the rites, along with surrounding “microrituals” often ignored in academic studies.

Issues of equitable treatment and diverse representation are salient not only for the recording of cultural practices but are from the start essential considerations if we are to avoid imposing external meanings or reinforcing outmoded ways of thinking about religion. The result will not only allow mediated experiences of sacred practices, but will soundly connect those practices with living religious communities.

Speakers

John Soboslai

Assistant Professor, Montclair State University

Friday June 9, 2023 1:30pm - 1:50pm EDT
PS 405 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Technologies of Experience
Modality In Person
Keywords digital humanities, religious studies, pedagogy, AR / VR / MR, ritual, extended reality, immersive
Area AR / VR / MR

1:30pm EDT

Pit Glitch

A paradoxical condition of repudiation, reliance, and elision characterizes the place of mining in our society. In 2022, it was estimated that the average American with a lifespan of 78.6 years will consume 3.02 million pounds of minerals, metals, aggregated stone, and fuel in their lifetime.1 The mining industry, as these numbers show, is a deeply entangled facet of American life. This paper engages entanglements of extraction and image production by way of Lucy Raven’s China Town (2009), a video work that disjointedly charts the transnational web of copper extraction and wire production by stitching together thousands of digital photographs and recorded ambient sounds over the course of fifty minutes.

Copper and copper wire are key components in the fabrication of various technologies, including cameras and digital photographs. Copper also contributes to maintaining our contemporary age of web-based interconnectivity, supplying electricity and acting as the conduit of data currents in the global cloud. In Raven’s China Town, the photograph is used as both a medium and metaphor, interweaving matter and apparatus in both material and conceptual registers to highlight the spectral circulation of extractive industries in our contemporary moment.

Through a series of staccato-like glances, China Town follows copper’s journey in the global commodity chain, from the front seat of a mining haul truck in Nevada to the floor of the Jinlong Copper Smelter China nearly 7,000 miles away. Raven’s animation of thousands of still images, pieced together like stop-motion, precludes China Town from taking on a characteristically smooth cinematographic or documentary flow. Rhythm in China Town is incoherent. Photographs appear on the screen in irregular intervals, taking on a stuttering or glitch-like quality. These photographic glitches subtly intercede in one’s visualization of copper’s circulation through global commodity chains, slowing down and momentarily interrupting the stream of extraction and consumption.

Sharp cuts between processing steps and a lack of narration leave gaps in viewers’ understanding of how ore turns into the wire that connects our increasingly digitized world. Raven’s accompanying on-site audio recordings correspond to her photographs, but the audio is not precisely synchronized with the sequence of images. One sees images of the mine and hears its operations but only through mediated and disparate glimpses which never add up to a distinct whole. Raven’s sutured photographs and sounds are moments of splintering. These aural and visual disjunctions, or glitches, reiterate the mediated and spectral quality of extracted matter and its circulation in our contemporary moment.

In China Town, photographs offer a visual framework through which we can ruminate on networks of extraction. They capture matter, movement, systems, and transformations as fragments and traces; they do not prescribe a simple solution to our perhaps irreconcilable reliance on and alienation from extractive industries. Visual glitches in the flow can initiate a slower and more deliberate confrontation, image-by-image, with our own disassociation from the transmutations and circulations of extracted matter subtending the shaping powers of globalized contemporary life.
1 Minerals Education Coalition, “Mining and Mineral Statistics,” 2022, accessed November 14, 2022, https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/mining-mineral-statistics.

Speakers

Maya Hayda

Friday June 9, 2023 1:30pm - 1:50pm EDT
PS 401 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Imag(in)ing Worlds
Modality In Person
Keywords arts, art history, sustainability, contemporary art, photography, mining, extraction
Area Arts

1:30pm EDT

Sankofa: Playing with my Ancestors

As Black and brown scholars, we are taught to leave our traditions, knowledge-making practices, and cultures in general at the door. The suppression of our cultural knowledges and personal and collective histories within traditional academic research maintain Western, Eurocentric epistemological norms within the academy, thereby perpetuating dominant white masculinist perspectives as “neutral,” and the only standpoints from which legitimate knowledge can be produced (Collins, 2000). Scholars such as Eve Tuck, S.R. Toliver, Angela Figueiredo, and K. Wayne Wang, among many others, have put forth decolonial methods by which we can begin to value alternative ways of knowing. This project, in accordance with these methodologies, is an effort to reinscribe the people, culture, and history that most directly make up who I am and the work that I do.

The collages I will be presenting began with a day spent with my maternal Great Aunt Pat. Over lunch, I recorded an interview with her discussing our family's genealogy, which she was able to trace back to the generation after enslavement. She told me about where family members lived, what jobs they had, memories she had of them, and how they shaped her life. Toward the end of the conversation, my aunt began showing me photos she had of some of these family members. I took pictures of the photos using my phone, just as a way to keep "copies" for myself.
A week after our conversation, I looked back at the photos and realized I could make something with them. I started with a photo of my great grandmother, Pearl Sadler, isolating her image from the background and playing with it in the ways I usually do in my digital collaging practice. I reflected on what I'd learned about her personality, her life, things she liked, and what I thought we had in common as I worked on the piece. I continued this process using images of other ancestors, aiming to visually reflect what I thought they'd want their descendants to know about them. Through this ongoing series of digital collages, coupled with short vignettes incorporating theory, I reflect on what I’ve learned from family members who have transitioned — either directly, through familial traditions or cultural retention, genetically, spiritually, or otherwise.

Theoretically, this project is as an exploration of “Sankofa,” an Akan concept loosely meaning “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind." Tying together my thoughts about performative methods, Black feminist epistemology, embodied scholarship, culture, and futurity, among other ideas, this project embodies a number of topics I explore in my scholarship. Most importantly, it reflects what teachings I bring to my scholarship by way of my ancestors.

This project speaks directly to the HASTAC 2023 conference theme as it attempts to subvert the epistemological norms of the academy through the process of making collages and critical reflection. However, it also speaks deeply to my work as a Black feminist and multimodal scholar more broadly. Toliver (2021), citing Dillard (2000), discusses “the importance of examining culturally indigenous ways of knowing, researching, and writing by calling for the validation of knowledge produced in alternative sites like literature, poetry, and music” (p. xv), a list to which I would add a number of other multimodal forms, including collage. In line with these ideas, I believe art and media are crucial sites of cultural knowledge and discourse particularly amongst people of the African diaspora whose oral traditions and artistic knowledge-making processes have been subjugated by white supremacy. As such, notions of critical making and social justice are specifically important to my decolonial approach to scholarship.

Speakers

Azsanee Truss

PhD Student, University of Pennsylvania

I'm a thinking artist and PhD Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. I study the role of multimodal forms in structuring decolonial knowledge production processes. My work is a Black feminist approach to multimodal theory, grounded... Read More →

Friday June 9, 2023 1:30pm - 1:50pm EDT
Steuben 410 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Decolonizing Art & Design
Modality Hybrid, Online, In Person
Keywords arts, cultural studies, race/ethnic studies, performance, ancestral scholarship, collage, restoration, genealogy, reclamation
Area Arts

1:30pm EDT

Towards a Commons for Open Learning: Commons In A Box OpenLab

Commons In A Box OpenLab (https://cboxopenlab.org/) is free and open source software that anyone can use to launch a commons for open learning. Our remote roundtable session will introduce the platform and its goals, going beyond features and functionality to engage attendees in a nuanced discussion of the complexities of making open infrastructure for open education and the public good.

In Fall 2011, a team of scholar-practitioners at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, a public institution in downtown Brooklyn, launched the OpenLab (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/), an open platform for teaching, learning, and collaboration that everyone at the college can use (Edwards et al.). Combining the open source publishing platform WordPress with BuddyPress for social networking, the OpenLab is a community-driven space where members can create and customize their own learning environments, work together across institutional boundaries, and share their work with one another and the world.

The OpenLab quickly became a vibrant hub of activity for the City Tech community and since then has served over 41,000 members – students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Inspired by this enthusiastic response, the OpenLab team partnered with the Commons In A Box (CBOX) project at The Graduate Center, CUNY to create Commons In A Box OpenLab, a commons for open learning modeled on the OpenLab at City Tech. Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC, CUNY) was an early adopter (https://openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu/), and other institutions at CUNY and beyond have established OpenLabs of their own and are actively contributing to the project.

In building CBOX OpenLab, we seek to offer a powerful and beautiful open alternative to “black-boxed technologies that amass and commercialize data on students, often without their knowledge” (Noble and Roberts 2017). Unlike closed, proprietary systems designed by external vendors and driven by market concerns, CBOX OpenLab is created by and with the communities it serves, and guided by the needs and values of open education. Instead of monetizing members’ work, it is designed to support open pedagogies and open educational resources, fostering interdisciplinary approaches and sharing of best practices. Communities can make their work more visible and accessible, and students can actively participate in the construction of their knowledge (Rosen and Smale 2015).

Our session will begin by introducing the platform and sharing example uses from the City Tech and BMCC OpenLabs. However, we recognize that even when platforms are designed for openness, in Stommel’s words, “pedagogical work in and around these new systems must continually poke and prod at their intentions, the assumptions we've baked into them” (2017); indeed, as Costanza-Chock reminds us, “design justice is not about intentionality; it is about process and outcomes” (2020). So we will ask attendees to join us in poking and prodding the OpenLab model, engaging with both the benefits and challenges of building, using, and supporting a commons for open education. Finally, we will discuss lessons learned and recommendations for those who are interested in adopting the platform or pursuing similar initiatives, and connect participants with a growing community of practitioners.

References
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. The MIT Press. Available at: https://designjustice.mitpress.mit.edu/ (Accessed: 15 November 2022)
Edwards et al. (May 27, 2014). “Building a Place for Community: City Tech’s OpenLab.” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Available at: https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/building-a-place-for-community/ (Accessed: 15 November 2022)
Noble, S. and Roberts, S. (March 13, 2017). “Out of the Black Box.” EDUCAUSE Review. Available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/3/out-of-the-black-box (Accessed: 15 November 2022)
Rosen, Jody R., and Maura A. Smale. (January 6, 2015). “Open Digital Pedagogy = Critical Pedagogy.” Hybrid Pedagogy. Available at: https://hybridpedagogy.org/open-digital-pedagogy-critical-pedagogy/ (Accessed: 15 November 2022)
Stommel, Jesse. (June 5, 2017). “If bell hooks Made an LMS: Grades, Radical Openness, and Domain of One’s Own.” Available at: https://www.jessestommel.com/if-bell-hooks-made-an-lms-grades-radical-openness-and-domain-of-ones-own/ (Accessed: 15 November 2022)

Speakers

jean amaral

open knowledge librarian, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, United States of America

Charlie Edwards

New York City College of Technology, CUNY, United States of America

Jody R. Rosen

Christopher Stein

Professor, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, United States of America

Hi, I’m a professor in the Media Arts and Technology department at BMCC/CUNY. I also have been involved in some open source platforms at CUNY including the CUNY Academic Commons and most recently the BMCC OpenLab, the later of which I’ll be talking about at this conference. I’m... Read More →

Friday June 9, 2023 1:30pm - 2:30pm EDT
Online

Panels/Roundtables

Session Title Pedagogy Workshops
Modality Online
Keywords education, platforms, student-centered learning and teaching, open access / open knowledge, community, pedagogy, infrastructure

1:30pm EDT

Pieced Together: Collective Memory in Crisis

Pieced Together: Collective Memory in Crisis (paper abstract)

In the midst of crises, humans need each other more than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic has made physical gathering and typical efforts to share resources like food, clothing and shelter risky, if not impossible. As people were dying on a massive scale, social distancing severed communal ties and rituals that usually supported those grieving. A simple hug was dangerous. These interconnected and compounding losses in the midst of isolation drove many to creative expression. These practices marked time, recorded experiences, and enabled safe contact with others through physical objects—proxies for the embrace they could not share. This paper will explore how grassroots textile making activities during the pandemic support personal survival and also reinforce individual ties to the collective—from the ancestors that developed textile techniques and collective textile responses to crises, to neighbors near and far, to descendants who will interact with these future archives. I will show that just as making objects is a time and labor-intensive process, the items produced exist within a dynamic socio-cultural context that itself evolves slowly over time; cultural memory and narrative is crafted and requires attentive care and mending while it is being created and as it is maintained. We know there is no “one story” that is History, so we must aim to hold in tension many threads of stories and weave them into an interconnected cloth, one that can support more equitable futures.

(presentation/workshop/exhibition proposal)
To present this paper, I will read it while stitching with attendees on a section of our collaborative project, Stitching the Situation. I will invite folks to sit with me around embroidered panels, give a short introduction to the project, instruct participants how to cross stitch, and read the paper while we stitch. After reading, there will be time for discussion.
StS is an ongoing, grass roots community art project that considers the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. Utilizing the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center database1, each case and death reported is embroidered with blue and red threads, one stitch each, respectively. With a variety of values and hues, stitchers create designs that reflect their individual pandemic experiences in the US. The first six months of data are represented on three lengths of fabric, organized by date, while each day following June 25, 2020, are individual “blocks,” stitched by individuals and groups of people across the US.

Social and political change is often slow; this project aims to catalyze the reach of digital networks and collaborative making practices to create an archive that can support and enable lasting social cohesion and equitable change. This hybrid process is an example of Dr. Vernelle A. A. Noel’s concept of “Situated Computations,” in which technologies and methods are “grounded in the social world by acknowledging the historical, cultural, and material contexts of design and making.”2 Dr. Noel’s scholarship is rooted in Richard Sennett’s definition of repair, from his book, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation3. As the pandemic has exposed deep tears in our social and political fabric, we take on the work of repair.

Stitching together not only ties us to the long history of communal textile making, but also brings our attention to the present through meditative mark-making repetitions. We record our contributions, hear and see the stories of others, and share physical and temporal space while considering how these intersect, inform, and are shaped by history and scholarship. This additional layer of information adds to the database represented by the stitches, and “imagines data creation, as well as data sets and archiving, as an act of protest. When users, when people are cut out of the process of deciding what data collection means and how data is collected, the communal and slow process… emphasizes this protest.”4

The repetitive action of stitching calms the body and mind, and enables dialogue, even when conflicting experiences surface, in a format that is often more welcoming than our more frequent, disembodied interactions through digital platforms. This time- and labor-intensive process highlights the human and physical impacts of the pandemic, and the agency and power we embody as a collective.

In addition, I will bring completed blocks for display as an exhibition, alongside the initial three panels. The blocks can be hung on a wall or from the ceiling, while the panels will be displayed on tables with thread and needles to invite anyone to contribute stitches to the work during the conference. I will bring kits to distribute to anyone who wishes to participate further in the project.

I will also have “COVID Impact Worksheets” available for folks who may wish to contribute something of their story during the pandemic to the project, but may not be able or have time to stitch. These worksheets guide folks to consider how their identity and personal context shaped their COVID experience, and free write responses/memories they wish to share. Anyone who fills out a worksheet/shares their story will be connected with a designer/stitcher (if they are comfortable doing so, otherwise they can remain anonymous), who will translate their story into a pattern to be stitched by a volunteer.

All written instructions and worksheets are available in Spanish and English, and if anyone with additional communication needs would like to participate, I will meet those needs to the best of my ability. Accessibility is a central tenet of this project, and I am always adapting to include more people in this work.

Citations:
1. Coronavirus Resource Center. Johns Hopkins University & Medicine, Jan. 22, 2020, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/.
2. Noel, Vernell A. A. “Situated Computations as a form of Repair: Craft, Culture, and Computers,” Acadia 2020 Keynote: A Conversation of Culture and Access, Oct. 28, 2020, 29:20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W83McyRQ2JI
3. Sennett, Richard. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2012.
4. Sinders, Caroline. Feminist Dataset. 2017-current edit, p 4. https://carolinesinders.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Feminist-Data-Set-Final-Draft-2020-0526.pdf

Speakers

Heather Schulte

Founding Artist, Heather Schulte Studio, Stitching the Situation project

Heather Schulte is an interdisciplinary artist based in Colorado and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2003. Her work combines handmade textile materials and techniques with digital fabrication and design processes, analyzing the intersection... Read More →

Friday June 9, 2023 1:30pm - 5:00pm EDT
Steuben 414 (Design Center)

Activity

Modality In Person
Keywords arts, data, community, participatory methods, Covid, memory, equity, craft

1:50pm EDT

Affirmations 2.0: The Politics of Liberation and Exploration of Healing in Digital Games

Negative thoughts plague the self-consciousness of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and affect how we proceed through our days. Through my own struggle with this, I developed a personal coping mechanism of visualizing and facilitating an encounter with both the negative and positive attributed versions of myself as a Black woman. In previous works in ATEC, I developed a game, Affirmations, representing this personal coping mechanism for reconfiguring my sense of self. As an extension, Affirmations 2.0 explores the affordance of a digital game as a communally situated coping mechanism and critical making technology for Black women and children. Through the game, the player encounters intrusive thoughts and reflects on how the main conflict within oneself is rooted in the internalization of systemic oppression. In so doing, Affirmations 2.0 complicates player’s knowledge of the self and work as a flexible artifact that facilitates critical making, reflection, and self-care for Black women and children.

This project directly addresses the concerns of mental health perceptions in the traditionally underrepresented group of Black women and children by highlighting the contributing factors of internalized systemic oppression. This project is grounded in the theoretical framework of pleasure activism and healing as community care work in order to resist neoliberalist perceptions of health as individualistic responsibilities. Furthermore, this project challenges the common oppositional relationship between game designer and player by introducing a collaborative partnership based on critical making between players and game designers. By engaging with the game’s infrastructure as a critical making technology, player will complicate their perception of their internal voice and understand the outside factors that affect individual and community health.

Speakers

Diamond Elizabeth Beverly-Porter

Lecturer, University of Texas at Dallas

Friday June 9, 2023 1:50pm - 2:00pm EDT
PS 308 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Healing Futures
Modality In Person
Keywords cultural studies, media studies, race/ethnic studies, gaming, play, narrative, Black studies, mental health, critical making
Area Critical Making

1:50pm EDT

AmpDance: Rethinking Computing Technologies for Dance Education through Community Design Practices

Computing education and technology development spaces more broadly continue to suffer from cultures that exclude many individuals and communities. This impacts how technologies are designed and who typically is left out or not prioritized in computing education––with female-identifying and BIPOC students disproportionately affected. One aspect that propagates this exclusionary culture is that design of educational computing spaces and technologies do not leverage the assets or practices of diverse communities. Our work presents a case study that implements inclusionary practices, as researchers worked in collaboration with a justice-oriented community organization, STEM From Dance, to co-develop a physical computing hardware kit, AmpDance. AmpDance was designed to facilitate youth in choreographing original dances with programmable electronic components. The learning technology supports plug and play functionality of electronics to help dancers rapidly create and iterate on flexible, expressive wearable costumes that they can program to be responsive to choreography. The system consists of a set of printed-circuit boards (PCB), with embedded connectors that allow learners to plug in and control sensors (i.e. buttons, tilt) and outputs (i.e. LED strips) with a microcontroller. The design of the kit was shaped by our partner organization’s experience working with other sewable wearables and requirements of the dance context such as flexibility, mobility and durability.

AmpDance was developed over the course of a four-year participatory design collaboration between researchers at NYU, University of Colorado, and STEM From Dance, an NYC-based non-profit centered on equitable STEM education which creates creative learning opportunities for female-identifying youth of color by pairing dance education with various computing technologies. STEM from Dance has a unique program structure centered on community and confidence building, which supports students as they learn about dance and computing. Participants learn by creating dance performances that include technologies that they have programmed and choreography they have designed. In this paper, we outline the contextual exploration that we engaged in to develop a better understanding of our community partner and their learning environment. This includes participating as instructors within their program, observing learning sessions, and conducting interviews with instructors, students, and the executive director. We present AmpDance in the context of this initial collaborative research as well as two subsequent user studies with instructors and students examining the wearables as tools for facilitating dance and technology design.

Our research findings explore the ways in which a community focused on equity, computing, and dance, can support new contexts and technology for learning and creative expression. We provide two main contributions: the design of AmpDance, which supports learners to explore, test, and iterate as they quickly prototype robust wearables that can be danced in, and an understanding of how these design decisions, including the materiality and interactivity, support learning, creativity, dance and community practices. The connections we draw between community practices and technologies for learning, demonstrate the power of designing for equity in context with communities that already exist.

Speakers

Kayla DesPortes

Asst. Professor of HCI & the Learning Sciences, New York University

Kathleen McDermott

New York University, United States of America

Friday June 9, 2023 1:50pm - 2:10pm EDT
PS 405 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Technologies of Experience
Modality In Person
Keywords computing & computer science, education, design, community, participatory methods, wearables, physical computing education, creativity, dance
Area Platforms & Technology

1:50pm EDT

Disrupting the Logic of Technology: Decolonizing New Media Art

The non-neutrality of technology has become more apparent since Langdon Winner wrote: “Do Artifacts have Politics” (1980). For instance, we cannot ignore the context in which these artifacts are situated, specifically as technology functions within technocapitalist and technocolonialist impulses as Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias have written in their recent text, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism (2019). Not only is our data extracted for profit, but this is the continuation of colonialist structures of power underlying surveillance technologies like biometrics and artificial intelligent systems that disproportionally target BIPOC, the queer community, and women. What is further needed then are decolonial strategies that conceive of multiple technological imaginaries and that challenge the colonial and capitalist logic of technology.

Disrupting the Logic of Technology specifically analyzes the works by recent African-American new media artists like Rashaad Newsome, Mimi Onuoha, and LaJuné McMillian. They not only disrupt the logic of technology by orienting us to the specificity of African and diasporic cultures and traditions but in doing so transform technology and new media for different ends. While this paper is an art historical analysis it is also grounded in decolonial discourses in technologies and data (Ahmed Ansari, 2019), (Mohamed, Png, Isaac 2010), alternative philosophical imaginations of technology (Yuk Hui, 2020) (Ansari, 2018) (Cruz, 2021) and race and technology studies (Benjamin, 2019) (Browne, 2015) (Noble, 2018).

Disruption is an intentional act to overcome, challenge, and subvert systems, people, and things. This has been a common tactic throughout history in art and activist projects. From Dadaism, and détournement, to queer and feminist artworks of the late 20th century, these artists worked within the systems of oppression to resist the logic of art, media, and politics. In this paper, McMillian hacks VR technologies to question which bodies are represented using her Black Movement Library–an archive of Black bodily movement. Newsome creates queer and Black AI chatbots that recite the poetry and philosophy of African-American scholars and designs these chatbots to help the Black community with mental health concerns. Onuoha looks toward African cosmologies to imagine alternative uses of technologies. These artworks orient us to intersectional and decolonial strategies and a plurality of technologies away from their Western logic. Not only are their works disruptions, but they also become transformative actions to challenge our current socio-technological contexts.

At issue will be the role of disruption, resistance and transformation to create social change. Some questions I will interrogate are: How do we create and design decolonial technologies for social justice and change? Under what terms do we analyze change? How do we better support underrepresented artists and communities in redesigning technologies?

Speakers

Constanza Salazar

Ph.D. Candidate, Cornell University

Constanza Salazar, Ph.D. is a Canadian art historian and writer based in New York City. Her research focuses on how artists since the 1990s have responded with criticism to advanced technologies like biotechnology, the internet, surveillance, and more recently, artificial intelligence... Read More →

Friday June 9, 2023 1:50pm - 2:10pm EDT
Steuben 410 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Decolonizing Art & Design
Modality Hybrid, Online, In Person
Keywords art history, media studies, race/ethnic studies, activism, disruption, logic of technology, capitalism, technocolonialism, new media
Area Arts

1:50pm EDT

Making STEM Feminist: Curricular Interventions in an Engineering School

What does it mean to make STEM fields “feminist” and how should STEM practitioners accomplish this? This question has vexed feminist science studies scholars – several of whom, like Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Banu Subramaniam, were in fact trained as STEM practitioners – for over three decades. The proposed paper discusses the aims and process of establishing a Feminism and STEM minor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, a United States engineering school. The Feminism and STEM (FSTEM) curriculum is designed to teach students how to use the critical tools of feminism as a methodology for doing work in STEM fields. The goal is thus one of praxis: simultaneously educating students in the relevant histories and theories of feminism and facilitating their use of feminist methodologies as tools for working in STEM professionals. For example, discussion about the history of women’s roles in mathematics is paired with interviewing real women working in STEM-focused institutions and students apply difficulty theory about feminist objectivity to designing procedures for laboratory pratices. The reflections of feminist science studies scholars like Donna Haraway and Banu Subramaniam on how training as STEM practitioners prompted them to develop feminist consciousness indicate how necessary it is for engineering students to engage with feminist theories to avoid reproducing intersecting regimes of oppression in the future.
This paper situates this specific curriculum development project in the context of the norms and constraints of engineering education. For example, how does the FSTEM minor incorporate and respond to engineering education scholarship that is increasingly focused on practical, project-based learning? How does the curriculum achieve the goals set forth by engineering accreditation standards, which often play a large role in decision making about curriculum development at engineering schools? A praxis-focused FSTEM curriculum provides a unique opportunity to intervene in the engineering curriculum to introduce students to the theories and methods of social justice in a way that is relevant to their future careers and furthers the established educational aims of engineering education. It is a small but important gesture toward making STEM feminist.

Speakers

Danya Glabau

Industry Assistant Professor, NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Friday June 9, 2023 1:50pm - 2:10pm EDT
ARC E-02

Papers & Talks

Session Title Feminist Interventions in Technologies
Modality Online, Hybrid, In Person
Keywords education, engineering, gender studies, pedagogy, feminism, technology
Area Pedagogy

1:50pm EDT

Notes Towards a ‘Design Humanities’

Extending the conference theme of “critical making and social justice” my brief presentation will take the shape of a proposal for a new, experimental field of transdisciplinary exploration that I would like to call the “Design Humanities;” a field where an ethically and politically inflected practice of ‘making’ in the design disciplines meets ways of thinking and doing that are offered by a training in the literary humanities; Versions of this conversation have been staged over the years for instance, in the emergence of ‘STEAM’ with the addition of ‘Art’ (although not the Humanities) to hegemonic STEM fields or, the increasing body of work in anthropology and/or sociology of design (again, primarily social science disciplines), but I would argue that a robust engagement between design and the literary humanities has so far only received insufficient attention from scholars and practitioners in both fields. It is also important to mention that while my proposal is cognizant of various existing configurations like ‘humanistic design’ or ‘human-centered design’ that have primarily emerged from the ‘making’ end of the conversation what is unique about my approach is its focus on amplifying methods, concepts and assumptions emanating from the specific academic discipline of literary humanities instead of larger, somewhat totalizing conceptions like ‘humanity’ or ‘humanism’. Chief among such disciplinary assumptions and methods in the literary humanities is learning to work with the unverifiable, the intuitive, since it is modeled on reading (imaginary) texts of fiction - think world building - or, an unfashionably slow training that has its sights set on producing problem solvers of the long term (imagining justice) instead of solutions in the short term (passing a law). These transdisciplinary lineaments I am proposing here build upon Arturo Escobar’s (decolonial) idea of a “cultural studies of design” and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (postcolonial) argument about humanities teaching as “training of the imagination for epistemological performance;[i]” along the way I will also engage with the work of many scholars and practitioners directly invoked by this conference like Dunne and Raby, Costanza-Chock, and Benjamin, and some others perhaps only indirectly cited like Tunstall, Schultz, and Crosby and Stein. My speculations are also informed by a decade long experience of teaching the humanities to art and design students, collaborating on research projects with artists and designers, and most recently, co-leading a university-wide, year-long faculty seminar on decolonizing art and design education, all of these at an elite insitution of higher education. A ‘Design Humanities’ conceived along the above lines, I submit, will therefore turn on the fundamental significance of the imagination that animates the work of both design and the literary disciplines, but especially the reparative imaginations of BIPoC and Global South authors, artists, texts. My broad goal here is to create a philosophical-theoretical architecture to ground these interdisciplinary conversations rather than offer another market-friendly notion of ‘humanities lite’ which, unfortunately, often tends to be the case. In their 2004 ‘Manifesto for the Humanities in a Technological Age’ Davidson and Goldberg had already declared: “The humanities promote a broad range of social and cultural literacies. They offer critical civic competencies, ways of comprehending cultural and technological values, and the worlds such values conjure; in short, ways of world making.” Inspired as my proposal is by this visionary manifesto it also attempts to supplement it by highlighting the specific conjuncture of design (not just the digital) with and within ways of imagining worlds that is above all the remit of the literary humanities.

Notes
[i] Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can there be a Feminist World?” (2015).

Speakers

Avishek Ganguly

Associate Professor, Rhode Island School of Design

Avishek Ganguly is an interdisciplinary scholar who works at the intersection of translation, theater and performance, cultural studies, and contemporary literatures in English. His publications include Living Translation: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Seagull Books, 2022) co-edited... Read More →

Friday June 9, 2023 1:50pm - 2:10pm EDT
Main 210

Papers & Talks

Session Title Pedagogies of Justice and Care
Modality In Person
Keywords languages & literatures, design, cultural studies, pedagogy, design-based approaches, humanities, imagination, making, thinking
Area Pedagogy

1:50pm EDT

Rule No. 5 : Exploring the Library Through Sound

“A library is a growing organism,” reads the fifth “rule” of library science, as penned in 1931 by S.R. Ranganathan, widely considered to be the father of library science. In an ever-shifting cultural and information landscape where libraries have become far more than just books, it’s the last of Ranganathan’s guiding principles that prompts us to continuously respond to our environment and deeply interrogate the ways we curate, collect, organize, and preserve information for generations to come. In a world where the predominant form of museum tours is a “voice of god” narrator interpreting a place, space, or art on the wall, a global community of librarians has other ideas about how stories of the library–as concept, as space, as entity– can be told.

Rule N° 5 is an interactive audio experience that lives at the intersection of public humanities, critical librarianship, and installation art. As library workers reflect upon Ranganathan’s rules, this collaboration offers a sneak peek into the magical, mysterious, complicated, and controversial work happening inside the library– a place that visitors might not otherwise explore beyond its surface.

Rule N° 5 encourages a deeper exploration of the library through six interactive objects permanently installed in NYU’s Bobst Library. Each interactive object contains audio content to be explored by the user, inviting visitors to tune into a place they frequent but might have not consciously considered. A card catalog, for instance, plays a short audio collage about systemic harm in official cataloging language endorsed by the Library of Congress when visitors open its drawers. A custom built radio invites visitors to scroll through a number of simulated librarian pirate radio stations that counter library stereotypes through programs that feature music written and performed by librarians to a book dedication talk show.

There is no single history or way of knowing the library. Instead in Rule N° 5, carefully crafted sound compositions offer a multitude of voices and stories, sparking curiosity, wonder, and joy at the invisibility and vastness of library work. Our project engages listeners in conversations about core questions of labor, power, authority, and the politics of seemingly innocuous library labor.

We propose to present on this project, grounded in social and critical public history. We will overview the artistic collaboration, which defies traditional hierarchical and authoritative notions of authorship, and offer attendees a listening experience of sound compositions alongside engaging visuals of the completed installation.

Speakers

Amanda Belantara

New York University

AM Alpin

New York University, United States of America

Friday June 9, 2023 1:50pm - 2:10pm EDT
Main 212

Papers & Talks

Session Title New Approaches to Cataloging
Modality In Person
Keywords sound, library and information studies, access
Area Digital Humanities & Archives

1:50pm EDT

The Precarity of Images: Sci-fi Worldbuilding and its Uses in Agitprop

“The Precarity of Images” examines how theories of worldbuilding common to the science fiction genre are applied to the making of agitational propaganda for liberation movements. In doing so, it questions how both explicit and implicit political images—posters, games, comics, illustrations, social media posts—either light a pathway for making a more just world or limit our ability to imagine alternate futures.

Following the ethos of Steven Jackson’s essay “Rethinking Repair,” the paper takes the “breakdown, erosion, and decay” of images as a starting point. Images change meaning over time as our cultural connections to them shift. Strategies of decoding and recoding our visual world — through discursive questioning, drawing, and acts of “political looking” — are used to understand how these broken images are maintained or repaired. Further, self-reflections from the author’s teaching and illustration practice provide concrete examples of how the theories in this paper have been applied.

Worldbuilding offers image-makers a sandbox in which these strategies can be tested and questioned. Drawing from speculative design practices, the paper looks at how illustration and design build on literature’s capabilities for making other futures or realities plausible enough that an audience can critically engage them. The paper unpacks worldbuilding tactics from activist and design communities. Frameworks include the contemporary prison abolition movement in the United States, collectives including Critical Resistance and Interrupting Criminalization, and the "visionary fiction" championed by the Octavia’s Brood anthology.

Applications of the techniques explored come from moments of political and social upheaval, when visual meanings become decoded or recoded. In this paper, those moments include the Black Lives Matter movement, the contemporary rise of fascism, the Black Panther movement, Constructivism after the Russian Revolution, and the coups of mid-20th-century Latin America — each chosen for their legible examples and their relevance to the author’s practice.

Pitfalls are inevitable in worldbuilding, ranging from uneasy truces between author and audience to the economic realities of working as a commercial artist. The paper ends by using these pitfalls as fertile ground for questions that unearth emergent processes of change. Successful processes are those that lead an audience to re-engage their political imaginations.

Speakers

Noah Patrick Jodice

Lecturer, Washington University in St. Louis

Friday June 9, 2023 1:50pm - 2:10pm EDT
PS 401 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Imag(in)ing Worlds
Modality In Person
Keywords design, cultural studies, activism, participatory methods, speculative, propaganda, science fiction, world-building, abolition
Area Arts

1:50pm EDT

Who you gonna call? Challenges to participatory design methods

This research seeks to understand the everyday experiences of informal waste collectors and recyclers in Sydney, Australia and raise greater awareness about their activities. Existing discourse on informal waste collection has framed the activity as a pragmatic response to unemployment and economic marginalisation, particularly in developing nations such as Brazil, Egypt and India where the practice is more prevalent. Comparatively, informal waste collection remains an under researched activity in Australia. No formal organisation or authority currently exists that provides services and support to the community of informal waste collectors in metropolitan areas such as Sydney. As an unsupported group, individuals who engage in informal waste collection can be considered structurally disadvantaged and are required to individually navigate issues such as health, safety, ownership and legality, and stigmatisation while conducting waste collection. This research is situated in the field of design activism and employs cultural probes to better understand the experiences and desires of informal waste collectors. Cultural probes invite participants to complete a series of creative, open-ended activities and the insights drawn from their responses are used to inform the iterative design research process. With the objective of designing tangible forms of assistance that enable waste collection with greater safety and confidence I frame the research as a collaboration with diverse participants and communities, thus meeting an ethical imperative that mobilises the shift in design from authorship towards cocreation. This paper considers the practicality and feasibility of participation when it comes to social design practice with marginalised communities by reflecting on the difficulties I have encountered in recruiting participants to the research. I locate the research at the intersection of debates in design activism, participatory design, urban planning and social innovation and the work and writing of experts in design research including Sasha Costanza-Chock and Joachim Halse, whose contributions surrounding ethical participatory practices and community engagement in waste management respectively are used to orient the analysis. Ultimately, the paper presents strategies I have implemented to supplement the challenges of participation and advocates for greater nuance in future discourse around the merits, strengths and limitations of this approach in certain parts of the world.

Speakers

Jack Grant

PhD Candidate, University of New South Wales

Graphic designer and design researcher, currently exploring informal waste collection activities in Sydney Australia through PhD research.

Friday June 9, 2023 1:50pm - 2:10pm EDT
ARC E-13

Papers & Talks

Session Title Design Interventions II: Ecology; Food Waste; Home Care
Modality In Person, Hybrid, Online
Keywords design, activism, participatory methods, design-based approaches, informal waste collectors, design activism
Area Design

2:00pm EDT

Material World: Design for a Healthful and Equitable Future

Environmental justice is a topic that has received increasing attention as the public comes to realize that issues such as pollution and climate change are intimately tied up with race, gender, and socioeconomic class. Temporary, traveling, and pop-up exhibitions are often made to last a few weeks to months, and then sent to landfills at the end of their public-facing lives. Additionally, they likely contain long-lasting materials that are harmful to human and environmental health. For example, most plywood and medium-density fiberboard (MDF) materials are bound with formaldehyde, a known carcinogen that causes irritation to the eyes, nose, throat, and airways (“Formaldehyde and Your Health”). The fenceline communities near plants that manufacture such unhealthy chemicals and products are more likely to be low-income or people of color (Johnston and Cushing 2). Traditional design and construction practices have implicit intersectional harms. My project reimagines built environments by creating an informational pop-up exhibition that is, itself, made of sustainable materials. In doing so, it advances two main goals: first and foremost, to educate on the impacts of environmentally and socially sustainable design methods and materials; and second, to establish a proof-of-concept for holistic sustainable design that considers the exhibition’s entire life cycle and impact.

The framework established for the project relies on published sources, as well as a commitment to radical transparency regarding successes and roadblocks in the design process. As an evaluation standard, I use ExhibitSEED’s Green Exhibit Checklist, published by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, with the goal of achieving a platinum certification. Results of evaluations are shared openly. I follow the Federal Trade Commission’s “Green Guides” to establish definitions of terms such as “compostable,” as well as to evaluate manufacturers’ sustainability claims. The project reflects upon and shares resources that address both conceptual and technical issues, including: definitions of sustainability; the intersection of sustainability with human rights; ethical design practices; and material choices. To establish a framework for design and material selection that encompasses both the environment and human rights, I rely on the five pillars of sustainable exhibition design put forth by the American Alliance of Museums: human health, social health and equity, ecosystem health, climate health, and the circular economy (Flandro and Moritz 4). All materials in the exhibit are considered within this framework and fit into one or more of the following categories: locally sourced from within a fifty mile radius of Storrs, Connecticut, reclaimed, reusable, and/or compostable in a non-industrial setting. Additionally, I endeavor to reduce or eliminate the use of petroleum-based plastics. For instance, I am sourcing lumber, a material at risk for having child labor in its supply chain, locally from the UConn Forest (“Forestry”). Not only does doing so uphold the social health and equity pillar by avoiding contributing to social harms such as child labor, but it also upholds the ecosystem and climate health pillars since the wood is dried in a solar powered kiln and is not associated with large carbon shipping footprints. As another example, the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) certified organic cotton canvas used for banners in the exhibit upholds the human health, social health and equity, and ecosystem health pillars since GOTS certification requires textile manufacturers to adhere to environmental and social responsibility standards throughout their supply chains.
The final stage of the project involves creating a digital version of the exhibition so that it can continue to serve as an educational tool without the environmental footprint associated with shipping it long distances. Once the digital version is developed, I will implement end-of-life plans for the exhibition by biodegrading, repurposing, and reusing materials as determined during the research phase of the project. For example, any fabric used as wall cladding can be repurposed into tote bags, while mycelium panels can be composted.

Given that this project is as much about the design process — from research, through concept development, material sourcing, and construction, all the way to end-of-life treatment — as it is about the end product, this presentation will guide attendees through a discussion of sustainable design processes using the exhibit as an example. It will focus in particular on ethical material sourcing in creative and design fields in the context of the five aforementioned sustainable design pillars set out by the American Alliance of Museums. It will also discuss ongoing life cycle research, such as end-of-life plans and digital versions of the exhibit. In the presentation, I will be transparent regarding successes as well as shortcomings of the exhibit as a tool for accountability as well as for reflection on the part of myself and attendees. Sustainability is not a one-and-done activity, but rather a process of continual changes. How can we improve our practices to persistently work towards sustainability and equity?
As we continue to face greater challenges due to climate change, it is increasingly important to engage in knowledge-sharing and critical discussions in order to transform traditional design practices to promote social and environmental justice.

Speakers

Cameron Slocum

University of Connecticut

Friday June 9, 2023 2:00pm - 2:20pm EDT
PS 308 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Healing Futures
Modality In Person
Keywords education, design, sustainability, public engagement, design-based approaches, equity, design process, materials
Area Design

2:10pm EDT

Hermeneutic Spiraling: Connecting and Creating with The Golden Ratio and the Golden Era of Hip-Hop

This presentation explores the researcher’s hermeneutic spiral while connecting and creating visual art for educational purposes. It aims to unravel the familiar and unfamiliar key elements of the Golden Ratio (Phi) and the Golden Era of Hip-Hop (1985-1992). More specifically, the rapper Rakim’s knowledge production and his impact on the global rap culture during that era. Although Rakim did not have a high school degree, he had a thirst for knowledge that led him to read texts in which he used in his lyrics to educate his community. During Rakim’s “non-traditional” studies the rapper learned about the Golden Ratio.

According to Rakim (2019), “[t]he golden ratio gave me a deeper understanding and a deeper love for life.” That begged the question: How can others engage with the Golden Ratio and its features through design? It provoked thought and question about Rakim’s lyrics, the Golden era, math, science, philosophy and so much more. I began to interact and reflect with the text/graphics and context differently with new information and understanding. I drew expanding the narrowness (Dunne & Raby) of explaining the Fibonacci sequence to offer more engaging rhetoric around the shapes, numbers, culture, and meanings. In other words, the spiral opened more possibilities to reflect, speculate, dream and question. When it comes to design, homing in on culture was imperative for scholarship representation. The researcher designed the infographic to open discussion on what it looks like based on a set of values that are more cultural and relatable. The ontological and epistemological experience of creating the spiral infographic created its own critical-making hermeneutic spiral.

Speakers

Kashema Hutchinson

Ph.D. student in the Urban Education, Independent Scholar

Preferred Gender Pronouns: She/HerBio: Kashema Hutchinson is a Ph.D. student in the Urban Education program at the Graduate Center (CUNY). She has a B.A. in Communications: Advertising/Public Relations and an M.A. in Sociology. She is currently a Communications and Leadership Fellow... Read More →

Friday June 9, 2023 2:10pm - 2:20pm EDT
Main 210

Papers & Talks

Session Title Pedagogies of Justice and Care
Modality In Person
Keywords hip hop, creativity, arts, music, pedagogy
Area HASTAC Scholars, Pedagogy

2:10pm EDT

no more room in hell

For this short talk, I will present on my moving-image work no more room in hell, an experimental film that began with research conducted at the archive of horror director George A. Romero (dir. Night of the Living Dead) housed at the University of Pittsburgh. The film and research project explore the zombie as a posthuman species by following threads from Romero’s archive through Pittsburgh’s shifting industry sectors, with a particular interest in autonomous vehicle development and contemporary data collection practices in the region. Modeling itself after Romero’s cult classics which birthed the American cinematic zombie against the industrial backdrop of Western Pennsylvania, the film explores the echoes between the zombie & this landscape.

The research I will present in conjunction with this project investigates the Steel City as a microcosm of a broader cultural phenomena of industrial and technological zombification. Using the undead body – the zombie – as critical framework, this brief multimedia artist talk/ lecture combines research with audio-visual elements from my cinematic work to probe three seemingly unrelated elements of Pittsburgh’s history: Romero’s archive (housed at the University of Pittsburgh), the architectural vestiges of the steel industry, and the development of autonomous vehicles.

The talk will implement Romero’s zombie narratives and the horror genre as a tool in probing where the boundary between living and living dead lies as I imagine the zombie as an emblem of post-human (dis)embodiment. The archive itself will be explored as a reanimated corpse, exposing the horror vacui that it embodies and the legacy it is intended to ensure. The fetishism of industrial aesthetics will be contested by recontextualizing the posthumous architectural bodies of the steel industry as emblems of catastrophic environmental impact and the labor strife. Automated vehicles will be examined as both zombie-like and enablers of the zombification of their human operators through an exploration of neural networks and cyborgian futures.

Riffing on zombie-scholar Dale Knickerbocker’s theory that the zombie apocalypse has a likeness to technological singularity – a time in which AI-driven systems surpass their human creators and lead to our demise. In response, Shapass presents the zombie as an embodiment of apocalyptic futurity, representing the ways in which the ghosts of the past often shape our fears of the future.

In exploring the past-haunting of the steel industry and the future-haunting of autonomous vehicles, I trace the shifting landscape of American “progress” through its careful orchestration of laboring bodies into machine-like entities, and, conversely, its incapacitation of bodies into technological mediators.

Speakers

Rebecca Shapass

Graduate Student, Carnegie Mellon University

Friday June 9, 2023 2:10pm - 2:20pm EDT
PS 401 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Imag(in)ing Worlds
Modality In Person
Keywords arts, media studies, data, archives, posthuman, zombies, autonomy, labor, capitalism
Area Arts

2:10pm EDT

Calendar Collective

Calendar Collective is a design-led research that challenges the normative understanding of time as linear, objective and neutral. As a design-led research, it uses ordinary domestic objects like a calendar to unfold alternate histories and marginalized futures that otherwise remain in the unexplored nooks of our everyday world. It employs a calendar to dismantle current hegemonic time structures and rebuild plural structures. As a designer from a previously colonized country, I use the calendar as a decolonization tool to render time - one of the most invisible epistemologies in futures work - visible. Using a combination of participatory design workshops, counterfactual history techniques, and personal cultural experiences, I unfold a fictitious archive of alternate calendars (real and imagined) traced through voicemails.

For the presentation, I hope to role play as an archivist introducing the archive in the form of a video consisting of nine calendars and accompanying voicemails. The presentation explains the impetus for forming the collective where design workshop participants are invited to be the members. It further expounds the theoretical framework, thinking tools (timescapes, polarity maps, tactile tools), and visual techniques employed to develop the calendars based on the participants' insights. It ends with an open call for contribution where each contributor is invited to be a collective member.

Calendars play a fundamental role in establishing our everyday rhythms, shaping our consciousness of temporality. But these tools are not neutral. They codify values and behaviour while obscuring the politics of time embedded in their representation. After all, how we represent time affects how we conceptualize time.

Using the Respectful Design framework, Dori Tunstall (Lab, 2021) explains how 'aesthetics' as the first technology of control can influence how values are made tangible. Calendar Collective focuses on the 'aesthetics of unreal time' by mutating the visual design of the calendars, distorting expectations and creating calendars that live between possible and impossible. Rather than coordinating through a stable, predictable atom (Standard Time), the alternate calendars are personal and local. They represent the changing daylight, phases of the moon, colours of the sky and blooming and withering flowers. These calendars (though less predictable, less accurate) highlight who or what is in relationship with other beings and how. They undo the implicit distinction western societies make between ‘time of culture’ and 'time of nature’.

In Hertzian Tales Anthony Dunne (2005) offers value fiction in the form of conceptual design proposals derived from alternate value systems. Values can change assumptions, beliefs and transpire different behavior. The accompanying voicemails offer a peek into the elaborate socio-cultural polyrhythms influenced by the alternate calendars. They hint at other worldviews that foster diverse values of the time. In doing so, they render alternate realities possible.
Our over-reliance on Standard Time has left us ill-equipped with other senses of time, especially in global crisis moments where standardized time management is no longer possible. While the current calendar is a mathematical abstraction, our lived experience of time is divergent. What if calendars could support intuition, anticipation or care? After all, calendars are ‘designed’ tools. They can therefore be redesigned. They can be reassembled to respond to temporal challenges in new ways. With COVID-19 lockdowns, time was bent completely out of shape. This serves as a reminder that exploring alternate calendars is no longer a far fetched thought. As we brace ourselves for the new reality, I offer this collective to consciously traverse in ways previously unimagined or unimaginable.
www.calendarcollective.com

Speakers

Kalyani Jayant Tupkary

Independent Designer

Friday June 9, 2023 2:10pm - 2:30pm EDT
Steuben 410 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Decolonizing Art & Design
Modality Hybrid, Online, In Person
Keywords arts, design, participatory methods, design-based approaches, speculative, design fiction, time, calendars, futures
Area Design

2:10pm EDT

Community for Community-Based Caregivers: Designing Technology for the Collective Mobilization of Home Care Workers

“Without community, there is no liberation” - Audre Lorde

Home care workers (HCWs) embody the power of the community but are themselves bereft of the same care they give to others. HCWs help people with disabilities to remain in the community and not “disappear again after a history of segregation and institutionalization” (Wong, 2022). However, HCWs and people with disabilities also demonstrate “interdependence,” bound together by shared vulnerability, as HCWs’ “skills and labor … need to be acknowledged in real (economic) and intangible (cultural) terms” (Wong, 2022). Due to low hourly wage and inconsistent hours, HCWs are also on welfare and living below the federal poverty level (PHI, 2022). In addition, high physical and emotional burden (Stacey, 2011) result in home care being seen as “jobs of last resort” left to women of color and immigrants (Glenn, 2010).

Prior literature has demonstrated the potential power of community for social justice through technology design that subverts the existing structures of oppression. Traditionally, the technology that shapes and regulates the work of HCWs focuses on compliance (Okeke et al., 2019) and ultimately puts both the worker and their clients under surveillance (Mateescu, 2021). However, through frameworks like participatory design (Bødker & Kyng, 2018) and workers’ data rights (Colclough, 2022), workplace technology can be designed in opposition to how they are typically designed (Khovanskaya, 2021).The design could create more community (Le Dantec, 2016). Ordinarily, HCWs are isolated. Computer-mediated communication could build communities of practice, where HCWs are able to find support for performing the emotional labor of home care work (Poon et al., 2021).

We are working closely with a union-affiliated, grassroots organization to explore the issue of wage theft and the potential role technology could play. Currently, we have interviewed workers, labor experts, and legal experts to understand the problem space and held co-design sessions with workers to provoke conversation about potential initiatives. We explored key questions around how to make the process the least additional burden, hold employers accountable, and establish trust with sensitive data. By the conference, we will have run a few iterations of experiments to understand questions around individual adoption of technology, relational impacts between the stakeholders, and potential institutional-level changes (Wolf et al., 2022).

We explore this idea of community and liberation through critical making. Firstly, we focus on the process of community-driven design itself. Our research design challenges the status quo while carefully balancing the prefigurative future (Asad, 2019) and the tangible present (Raval, 2021), the centering of voices of the community as experts of their circumstances (Asad, 2019) and placing undue burden on the oppressed to design and enact solutions for their liberation (Harrington et al., 2019). Moreover, we highlight the power of information and action on a collective scale. Finally, we explore how empowering HCWs can in turn move us to a future of a “beloved community” (King et al., 2010) where we “save each other” (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018) and care is not at the margins.

Speakers

Joy Ming

PhD Student, Cornell University

Friday June 9, 2023 2:10pm - 2:30pm EDT
ARC E-13

Papers & Talks

Session Title Design Interventions II: Ecology; Food Waste; Home Care
Modality In Person, Hybrid, Online
Keywords computing & computer science, design, community, future of care work, frontline health workers
Area Design

2:10pm EDT

Critical Theatre History Pedagogy: New Engagement with Theatre Histories in the Undergraduate Classroom

Critical Theatre History Pedagogy: New Engagement with Theatre Histories in the Undergraduate Classroom
My project addresses a particular challenge of theatre history course within general education curricula: the need to cover a wide range of dramatic and historical content. This requirement often leaves little time in the classroom to surface meta-level discussions of the contingency of historical narratives, and by extension social injustice in historical representations. This project explores the value of digital pedagogy in criticizing the politics of knowledge in theatre history classroom. Specifically, I investigate how instructional technology can inform the design of class activities and course assignments that invite students to recognize, challenge, and rewrite theater history.

As Joe L. Kincheloe points out, one of the central dimensions of Western colonial domination is the production of “universally valid knowledge.”[1] Such claim buttresses Western-centric intellectual hierarchy while invalidating alternative ways of knowing. The content of theatre history class is often structured by Western-centric historical categories, such as “Ancient Greek,” “Renaissance,” “Enlightenment,” “Romanticism,” “Modernism,” etc. This selective principle produces what theatre scholar Steve Tillis calls a worldview of “Western parochialism.”[2] Without reflections on how this narrative of theatre history is produced, by whom and for whom, theatre history class risks reinforcing the colonial logic of universalism and perpetuating the unjust social structure and cultural relationships grounded on this logic.

My project underscores the importance of surface the epistemology practice of theatre historiography and the necessity of a critical revision of teaching methods that caution against its power structure. I approach the problem by incorporating archival research into two course assignments. Throughout the semester, students write or rewrite catalogue descriptions for five objects in digitized collections relevant to theatre history. This exercise culminates in a final project where they imagine a theatre-going experience in the past based on their archival research and interpretive observations. These assignments invite students to exercise the cognitive processes of historiography as they complete tasks identical to those of historians on a smaller and selective scale.

I use digitized collection and digital publishing tools to facilitate reflective and revisionist practice around the colonial narrative of theatre history. As discussed in recent scholarship on the pedagogical value of digital archive, digitized collections assist students in processes of synthesizing information and forming interpretive points of view.[3] I use Manifold, an open-source publishing platform as the primary learning space and textual headquarters. Manifold best facilitates the critical pedagogical values of my course because the platform enables a variety of student-centered learning features, including but not limited to social annotation, multimedia resource collections, and interactive textual publications. My project enables students to maximize the effect of their archival research and public-facing academic writing through a variety of multimodal writing activities, which together scaffold students across the various modules of my project, culminating in informed and interest-driven student contributions by the end of the semester.

[1] Joe L. Kincheloe, Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction (Springer eBook, 2008), 5.
[2] Steve Tillis, “Theatre History’s ‘View of the World,’” TDR: The Drama Review 48 no.3 (Fall
2004): 8.
[3] Christopher Hanlon, “History on the Cheap: Using the Online Archive to Make Historicists Out of Undergrads,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 5 no.1 (Winter 2005): 99; Joanne T. Diaz, “The Digital Archive as a Tool for Close Reading in the Undergraduate Literature Course,” Pedagogy 12 no.3 (Fall 2012): 428; Jolie A. Sheffer and Stefani D. Hunker, “Digital Curation: Pedagogy in the Archives.” Pedagogy 19 no. 1 (Winter 2019): 81.

Speakers

Cen Liu

PhD student, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Friday June 9, 2023 2:10pm - 2:30pm EDT
PS 405 (Design Center)

Papers & Talks

Session Title Technologies of Experience
Modality In Person
Keywords arts, history, languages & literatures, archives, pedagogy, open access / open knowledge, theater
Area Pedagogy

2:10pm EDT

How to increase gender-inclusiveness in critical making: innovative formats and measures co-created with makers worldwide

In the collaborative research project Critical Making, which is conducted by five European-based institutions and financed under the European Research Framework Horizon 2020, we study grassroots innovations in the global maker movement. In this research we put a special focus on gender relations. We started our work with a collection and review of existing initiatives and programmes, on- and offline, that are aimed to engage and accept cis and trans female, inter*, and non-binary persons in the community of responsible innovators and makers. Gender aspects have been investigated in the maker movement for some years and studies confirm a cis male gender bias in maker settings across the globe (Maric, 2018; Wittemyer et al., 2014). In a participatory research manner we wanted to collectively explore what measures can contribute to a more balanced gender representation in making. In our approach towards gender, we define gender as a relational, fluent category of social structuring and relevance, which is inherently tied to power differentials and inequalities. We do not consider gender as binary, but as a category offering space to cis and trans men and women, inter* and nonbinary persons and those not only attributing themselves to one of these categories. In relation to the concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), gender cannot be deduced as a single category of interest, as at the level of individuals gender intersects with other categories of discrimination such as race, class, disability or sexual orientation. In three online workshop sessions with 12 representatives of the maker community, which were happening in October and November 2021 a series of gender-specific measures were co-designed to achieve a more gender diverse participation in makerspaces. The proposed measures include new formats for caretaker inclusive making, supporting women in local communities to engage in making, and specific communication and dissemination activities to highlight gender diversity in making, such as the documentation of inspirational stories.

The feedback from those implementing these measures has been very positive so far. For example, the two maker organisations HONF and XXLab in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, ran an inclusive space camp, where they invited mothers, nonbinary persons and children to produce innovative projects out of everyday domestic objects. They engaged 20 mothers & children, 4 nonbinary persons and 65 participants from the general public in total in their activities. Participating mothers all valued the experience of making as very rewarding. However, those mothers who were in their teenage years had varying interests and would have liked to work more with coding and programming rather than hands-on activities. Another example is the GoSanitize project implemented by the GoGirls ICT initiative in South Sudan. Based on the shared experiences from the MboaLab in Cameroon young female brewers were trained to produce highly concentrated alcohol (ethanol) for use in the hand sanitizers. In order to counteract slander of women being involved in the production of alcohol, religious leaders were invited for their approval and important safety standards for local brewers were discussed, which all contributed to strengthening the female brewers businesses. In our contribution for HASTAC 2023 we will elaborate further on the co-created measures for gender-inclusiveness in making and discuss the experiences and feedback collected from their implementation in maker communities worldwide.

We write this proposal as 3 women and 1 nonbinary person, as 2 white persons from the Global North and 2 BPOC from the Global South, as nondisabled social scientists and makers. Our different perspectives have enriched our mutual collaboration and the presented activities. We combine a history of researching social innovations in technology and making, with in-depth experiences of implementing hands-on innovation processes in local maker communities

Speakers

Teresa Schaefer

Researcher, Centre for Soziale Innovation, Austria

I am a researcher at the Center for Social Innovation in Vienna, Austria. I focus my research on participation processes in digital social innovations and the assessment of their impact. I have been involved in several research projects that investigated the potential of making as... Read More →

Lisa Mo Seebacher

Centre for Soziale Innovation, Austria

Friday June 9, 2023 2:10pm - 2:30pm EDT
ARC E-02