HASTAC 2023 Conference

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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, Jeff Sweeton
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

Critical Design (CD) has a close relationship with everyday life where we encounter most of political/injustice issues through our practices. CD comprehends everyday life, speculate and materialize it. It deterritorializes every day practices and alienates them so that we are able to recognize the embedded injustice. But, how does CD tackle with familiarity of everydayness? Because as Hegel says, "The familiar, precisely because it is familiar, remains unknown.” The familiar resists to be revealed. This is the main idea I intended to intervene: to go beyond familiarity of everyday life via a methodology for Critical Design course. 
CD is an attitude, a position; so "methodology" itself contradict with the nature of CD (as connoted with affirmative design practices). Regarding, we use "methodology" in this study as a discursive yet flexible theoretical framework consisted of four theories as: Critical Design and Everyday Life, Object-Oriented Ontology and New Materialism, The Public and Construction of Publics, Strategy-Tactics.
These new theoretical lenses bright up our path to stratified and complex injustice issues by making them visible and open them to discussion. Some of the student projects (HEIMATLOS, WATERDROBE and SEVERITY OF VIOLENCE) exemplify the proposed methodology of Critical Design Course.

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.

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.

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.
This session can be accessed at the following link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/7605787379.

This talk reflects on the making of the HASTAC 2023 Conference. In doing so, we discuss core values of the conference that guided our work, such as sustainability, access and accessibility, community, and inclusion, as well as how those values were extended into practical aspects of the conference, such as visual design and social media.

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.

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)

We are Marginalia Making, a group of undergraduate and graduate students in Communication at North Carolina State University, facilitated by a faculty member at the Department of Communication. We are strong believers in making with and tinkering technologies as a way to actionize critical technical literacy in ways that also acknowledge the intersectional implications of technological innovation. We are implementing critical making workshops as a strategy for serious play, critical reflection, and social intervention to further critical technology literacy, cultivate embodied intersectional making practices, and engage with social justice design among underserved student populations enrolled in community colleges that are part of the Community College Collaboration (C3) at NC State, as well as first generation college students and any student in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences who is interested in developing technology literacy invested in values of social justice and equity.

We are reframing technical literacy and critical thinking through a framework of care to imagine, engage and reconstruct technological imaginaries that are more inclusive and equitable. We expect that the offering of the workshops will develop participants’ critical technological literacy by inviting them to engage with various types of technologies, and experiment with how these technocultural artifacts can be rearranged to materialize more just and equitable expressions of humankind(ness). Also, we will assess how critical making, reframed as an approach oriented towards community care, may advance justice-oriented making, and social well-being.

There is a common belief that the epistemological, methodological and validity differences between Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences render the latter as the one legitimate way to do science in detriment of the first. Interdisciplinary collaborations amongst these areas is believed to only be possible when Humanities and Social Sciences (soft science) are catering to Natural Sciences (hard science). As members of North Carolina State University, a STEM-oriented land grant university, we have identified a need for other ways of understanding technology, and have worked to create a program that emphasizes making-with-technologies to promote critical technological literacy, utilizing intersectional creativity, and cultivating community-oriented care to demonstrate the role of the Humanities and Social Sciences via workshops that apply a framework that reorients critical making towards more intersectional, social justice, and care-oriented making practices.

As our workshops aim to address the gaps in offerings for underserved on campus communities, we have structured them so that there are options both in person and synchronous/asynchronous online. The workshops are currently in development and prototyping stages. Online workshops include: “Coding by hand”, a workshop on bracelet making that articulates morse code with indigenous craft making, “Stickers and the art of protest”, a workshop on digital illustration that articulates with discussions of rights to the city and urban arts, “Sneaker Hang Tags”, a workshop that articulates black identity making through sneaker culture, and “Mail Chain”: a workshop that invites the participant to create an illustration, interfere on other participant’s work, and exchange illustrations to promote a growing chain of collaborative creativity, among others.

All workshops adopt the Learning for Social Justice Standards proposed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (2018) as a metric for teaching and learning through principles of social justice and equity. These standards are rooted in four key anchors, namely: Identity, Diversity, Justice, and Action and are being used to guide both workshop curricular development as well as outcome assessment. Workshops’ assessment includes participants’ survey after workshop completion, and interviews to take place in late Spring 2023.

Marginalia Making is committed to a critical engagement with technologies that insists on making room for intersectional experiences and forms of care. Such distinction is put into practice when we define what counts as knowledge, what counts as technical literacy and technology, what counts as making. This initiative puts in practice an intersectional, justice-oriented approach to making that pays attention to embodied narratives: what makers experience out-side of institutions, the pressures they exist within, the places they are kept out of, and the practices they find familiar and safe (Harwood, 2019). When we create spaces for critical making to enact critical care, we interrogate what we are relegating to the margins and what we are centering. We create opportunities for more time to linger in experience, to play, to focus on the personal and relational parts of our scholarship and restorative creations (Stone, 2018), and to forge relationships with others like and unlike us.

For HASTAC 2023, we would like to give an online panel to share a detailed account of the elements that make up the workshops and community response to workshops that have been offered thus far. We will highlight the ways in which the breaking up of academic space with workshops has the potential to be used as a form of intervention into STEM focused institutional logic that erases care and delimits the status of the Humanities and Social Sciences in technology centered practices, and that this model can be a valuable tool for educators who are interested in subverting the mandate to produce work deemed functional in STEM by asserting critical making as a way to build intersectional, social justice, community care oriented making practices.

This panel brings together design educators from diverse backgrounds to discuss their critical making, research, and teaching practices. The panelists share ethically-centered methods, processes, and projects from their design pedagogies and scholarship. From socially-engaged extended reality experiences to feminist pedagogy and impactful activist posters, the panelists examine and discuss their socially-embedded projects that challenge sociopolitical status quos. Panelists seek to constantly acknowledge their positionality throughout the process of engaging in socially-impactful and community-based design work.

Through a variety of methodologies, panelists encourage students to develop their voice as citizen designers, collaborators, and leaders who practice inclusive design to contribute to more equitable futures. How can we collectively pursue and inspire design for social impact? What are the implications of bringing the practice of discomfort into the design classroom? What ethical considerations must we be accountable for as designers? This session invites the audience to join in and contribute to this dialogue.

Challenging Sociopolitical Status Quos with Ethically-driven Design Pedagogy and Scholarship: Session Agenda (90 minutes total):
(10 minutes) Introduce the session topics, schedule, and brief panelist biographies.
(30 minutes) Each panelist will give a five to six minute presentation of their socially-engaged scholarship and pedagogical practices. Brief summaries of the panelists’ topics are below:
Panelist 1: This presentation shares examples of design activism for North Korean human rights and outcomes from ethically-conscious design pedagogy.
Panelist 2: This presentation will share projects that engage students in reflective identity and positionality exploration, considering ethical implications in design practice, and research into social issues.
Panelist 3: Through the feminist practice of engaged pedagogy, this presentation seeks to inspire agency and meaningful collaboration in design classrooms.
Panelist 4: This presentation showcases virtual reality as a narrative-based experiential media aimed at cultivating empathy for children experiencing traumatic events in their pursuit of education.
Panelist 5: As a means of social dissemination, this presentation reveals medium-independent and socially engaged artifacts in the classroom.
(25 minutes) This time will be used for a series of pre-generated, open-ended, theory-based questions for panelists to facilitate dialogue. We will have intentional moments of reflection during this part of the session in order to engage the audience. The list of questions for the panelists is below:
Question 1: How can we collectively pursue and inspire design for social impact?
Question 2: What are the implications of bringing the practice of discomfort into the design classroom?
Question 3: What ethical considerations must we be accountable for as designers?
(25 minutes) This time will be used for questions from the audience and further discussions surrounding the topics set forth in this abstract.

Resources:
First things first 2020 a manifesto — 2020 edition. (2020). https://www.firstthingsfirst2020.org/
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Noel, L. A. (2020, October 4). Critical Alphabet. Critical Alphabet. https://criticalalphabet.com/
O'Grady, J. V., & O'Grady, K. V. (2017). A designer's research manual, updated and expanded: Succeed in design by knowing your clients and understanding what they really need (2nd ed.). Rockport.
Shea, A. (2012). Designing for social change: Strategies for community-based graphic design. Princeton Architectural Press.

Modes of performance can counteract the portrayal of data colonialism and algorithmic oppression as objects too gargantuan for the average user to comprehend. As such, this panel approaches the practice of performance through a data feminist lens in order to embody processes and practices of systemic oppression (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020) that so often exceed perception or felt experience. More precisely, it explores reenactment as an avenue to broaden ways of exploring questions regarding which voices are inscribed in and affected by interface affordances and dysaffordances (Wittkower, 2016). Through three diverse and action-based inquiries into methods of reenactment with interfaces, these three presentations approach performance as grounds for the reinterpretation of dominant, neoliberal mechanisms of behavioral change.

Following feminist new materialist perspectives that examine material phenomena as agential assemblages in intra-action (Barad, 2007), this panel explores technocultural performance as distributed between human and nonhuman actors. As each presentation approaches the matter of performance subject and recipient in a different way, our panel explores a wide spectrum of the presentation of the self in everyday life (Goffman, 1956). Black performance studies scholars also provide approaches for unlearning harmful and discriminatory practices (Judd, 2022), which we believe are pertinent for reenacting otherwise experiences of interface design paradigms. All three projects engage with the performativity of language — verbal, non-verbal, and executable — which plays out in contemporary technoculture, with implications for identity regulation and reconstruction. The presentations in this panel all serve to closely examine methods of performance, offering valuable insights for broadening conversations about ethics, justice, and critical making.

Ambient-Incantory-Oracular: Performativity and prediction in vocal interfaces
Alex Borkowski (York University, Toronto)
As smart technologies are becoming an ever-more common feature in North American households, consumers are developing increasingly conversant relationships with computers. The increasing uptake of vocal, as opposed to haptic or textual, input and output is often considered “paradigm shift” in the way that people interface with technology. Yet what precisely is at stake when ambient computing becomes conversational? What transpires when the performativity of language meets predictive analytics? How are assumptions and ideologies regarding voice as an innately human form of expression, a marker of agency and unmediated self-presence, rehearsed and reconstituted through smart technologies? This talk examines contemporary art practices that interrogate the politics of vocal interfaces, as well as the biases and exclusions that permeate the algorithmic milieu to which they belong. By staging conversations with nonhuman agents, artists such as Stephanie Dinkins and Wesley Goatley propose speculative genealogies, and more equitable futures, for such technologies.
Navigating gray zones of consensual landscapes through the Atlas of Dark Patterns
Darija Medic (University of Colorado Boulder)
This talk introduces two projects that explore performance as action based methods for the research of ethics in user experience design. The first is The Terms of Service Fantasy Reader, a project that builds from a collective participatory performance model exploring reenactment practice such as socio-psychodrama to read through multiple Terms of Service Agreements, which subsequently grow into an interactive online archive and web opera. The second is The Atlas of Dark Patterns, a multimodal framework for naming and broadening the scope of what and how dark patterns could signify in contemporary digital culture. In these projects reenactment methods are applied for leveraging embodiment in order to acknowledge relating to interfaces as a physical, real, continuous tactical exchange of cognition. More precisely, these projects argue that performance methods allow exploring the weaponization of affective relationality between interface and user(s) through a form of surplus reality (Moreno, 1965). The talk will showcase some of the outputs from the collective conversation generated in The Terms of Service Fantasy Reader, how they showed a further need to explore gray zones in consenting as practice in relation to interaction design and how that need resulted in what is currently forming as The Atlas of Dark Patterns. Together, these projects propose performance practice as a valuable asset for the critical making process, establishing potential ground for experiential feedback within design justice oriented user - or rather community experience research and a form of socially-engaged collaborative learning.

Letter from King County Jail: Reflections after the Reenactment
Nathanael Elias Mengist (University of Washington)
Setting the stage for taking performance seriously as an emancipatory exercise, this presentation reenacts and reflects on my brief time as an incarcerated individual. Confined to solitude for 4 days in the 7th floor psychiatric ward of King County Jail, I witnessed abuses that Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. fought against. In my cell, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I remembered that Dr. King wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail” while incarcerated during the summer of 1963: the first sign of my calling to pursue ministry. But who is your audience while in solitary confinement, where every single interface is designed to oppress you? Your fellow inmates? The many guards? Or a “prophetic organization” yet to come (Harney & Moten, 2013)? Importantly, what fugitive repurposings of carceral communication technologies could be imagined through ministry with incarcerated people? Inspired by Simone Browne’s (2015) discussion of sousveillance, I repurposed the oppressive interface of the intercom into a tool for counter-surveilling my jailers (i.e. sousveillance). Through video, I will reenact my experience of jail and reflect on key moments using Julius Fleming’s (2022) notion of “Black patience.” This presentation aspires to contribute a black study of performance that not only honors memories but that also makes dreams.

Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism.. MIT Press. 2020.

Wittkower, D. E. (2016, 13-14 May 2016). Principles of anti-discriminatory design. 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Ethics in Engineering, Science and Technology (ETHICS)

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007

Goffman, Erving. Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, The Overlook Press. 1959

Judd, Bettina. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought. Northwestern University Press, 2023.

Taking up Tung-Hui Hu’s (2021) call to explore the “rich set of states in between sociality and antisociality” (128) in digital capitalism, this interdisciplinary panel attends to the new and illegible (if only briefly) intimacies and socialities that emerge in this current moment. By focusing on the embodied user experience of diverse digital spaces, we explore the possibility of meaningful moments of intimacy and self-making on platforms that seek to profit from those very moments. Although such possibilities may necessarily already be co-opted, they nevertheless need to taken seriously when opportunities for intimacy and self-making seem increasingly scarce.

To this end, our conversation will fold an array of concepts such as Doulas Kearney’s practice of ekphrasis as synthesis (“Mess,” 2011), Wendy Chun’s “wonderful creepiness” (Updating To Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, 2016), Samuel Thulin’s “data resonance” (“Diabetes, Art, and Data Resonance,” 2021), and Jasbir Puar’s model of disability (The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, 2017) into Hu’s generative framework of digital lethargy. Each panelist’s branch of dialogue will stretch through different digital spaces, critically analyzing intimacy and embodiment within those spaces on auditory, visual, and textual levels.

pruneah Kim (she/her) is a disabled, queer, first-generation Korean critical food scholar in her 2nd year in the American Culture doctoral program at the University of Michigan. In this panel, she will speak on new forms of intimacy in digital capitalism by looking to the genre of 먹방 (mukbang) in digital food cultures. By building on Hu’s framework of lethargic subjectivity and relationality, her research explores the question, what forms of intimacy, connection, and community are created through mukbang? By inviting participants in the panel to close read an exemplary video of 입짧은 햇님 (haetnim), one of South Korea’s most prolific “mukbanger” (mukbang content creator), she aims to facilitate a generative discussion on re-centering the embodied and affective responses of viewers/users in digital studies.

L. Cynthia Lao (she/they) is an autistic, trans, nonbinary, 2nd-generation Hong Konger in their 3rd year of a PhD in English Literature at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on a particular kind of double bind that emerges from the imbrication of embodiment and intimacy in the virtual, with a particular focus on the social media platform of Tumblr. She focuses on the critical role that platforms play in facilitating social embodiment for queer, trans, neurodiverse, and disabled subjects, while simultaneously attending to how these platforms subject their users to algorithmic capture in order to exploit their data. When the only body that exists in the digital is the body that can be communicated, how can subjects be virtually embodied without making their bodies algorithmically legible? In this vein, Tumblr stands out from other social media not because it doesn’t practice capture, but because its attempts to exploit the data of its (largely queer, trans, disabled, and neurodiverse) userbase have been generally unsuccessful. To that end, Cynthia seeks to draw out practices of illegibility that can be used both to navigate existing virtual spaces and to design new ones.

Raquel Escobar (they/them) is a queer, nonbinary, disabled, neurodivergent, Latinx in their 2nd year of pursuing a PhD in English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Their research focuses on the eating disorder treatment app, Recovery Record, as a site where people with eating disorders form identities and communicate embodied experiences. Drawing from Feminist Disability Studies, Raquel seeks to understand how the bodies, identities, and intimacies of people with eating disorders might be made legible within the normalizing framework of the digital health industry. They are particularly interested in artistic misuses of the biodata and diary entries collected by Recovery Record as critical self-making practice.

For this panel, we will present our respective research for 15 minutes each, then facilitate a discussion for the remainder of the session with interactive activities.

This panel convenes scholars/communities of color in the Americas to discuss alternative digital/analog archives through decolonial frameworks, ethnic studies practices, and digital technologies. We center the stories of Afro-Latinx, San Antonio Black/Chicanx community members, Latine people and border women activists in digital and community-based spaces to disrupt monolinguistic, colonialist and patriarchal understandings at local and global scales. Collectively, we engage in discussions about Afro-Latinx digital projects that recenter the humanity of Afro-Latinx communities employing multi-lingual and multi-epistemic perspectives and putting into question mainstream ideas of data and their associated values. We explore transgenerational oral histories of a working-class community during the 1950s into the 1960s, in San Antonio, TX. We discuss the importance of conducting oral histories with underrepresented communities including best practices. We highlight the importance of cultural awareness to maintain respect at all stages of the interview process. Lastly, we present the first stage of a U.S.-Mexico transborder digital project that documents the collective memory through public records, oral histories and personal archival material of the anti-feminicides movement of the mid 90s in the Paso del Norte. Together, we articulate a vision for anti-colonial-patriarchal-imperialist interventions through alternative frameworks and practices that respond to present violence in analog and digital archives of communities across the Americas.

The first presentation titled, “Voice, Data and Afro-Latinx Decolonial Archival Practices,” discusses how two Afro-Latinx digital projects Las Caras Lindas and the DataLabe become digital decolonial archives that aim to recenter the humanity of Afro-Latinx communities. Centered around the use of voice and/or data, both projects create representations that question and challenge the “Politics of design” (DiSalvo) and propose alternative ways out of the “matrix of domination” (Constanza-Chock). The archives and living collections developed through these projects employ multi-lingual and multi-epistemic perspectives that put into question a singular idea of data and their associated values: transparency, objectivity, efficiency and accuracy.

The second presentation, “San Anto Soundscapes: A community oral history project on the West Side Sound,” focuses on the West Side Sound is a genre of music, also known as “brown-eyed soul” (Steptoe, 2016), or “Chicano soul” (Molina, 2017) that is tied to a historic barrio in Yanawana/San Antonio, Texas. Comprised mostly of Black musical styles, such as rhythm and blues, doo-wop, rock, and swamp pop, as well as elements of conjunto music, the West Side Sound reflects San Antonio’s Black/Chicanx/working class communities and histories (La Rotta, 2013; Molina, 2017; Steptoe, 2016). The West Side Sound Oral History Project collects oral histories of some of the musicians a part of this music scene which developed during the 1950s into the 1960s, along with interviews with the larger San Antonio community who continue to support this music.

The third presentation, “Learning from the Past: Archiving the collective memory of the anti-feminicide movement,” engages in the ethical practices that should be consider when creating public digital humanities work with vulnerable communities, involved in social justice movements across borders and the reconsiderations to document, access, preserve and visualize memory through oral histories, archival material, and personal and public data, taking into account the complexity that exist in cases of gender-based violence and femicides at the Paso del Norte border region (Chihuahua, Texas and New Mexico).

This roundtable considers how experimental, innovative, and emerging approaches for social justice-oriented teaching with games, gaming, and game design provide pedagogical opportunities for students to engage critically with the complexities of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, cisnormativity, heteronormativity, ableism, colonialism, and other interlocking oppressive systems and ideologies of power. Games have been and continue to be important cultural sites for negotiating the politics of representation, inclusion, and equity, including exploitative labor injustices in the industry, issues of misrepresentation and underrepresentation of marginalized groups in gaming content, and online harassment and toxicity, to name a few concerns. Thus, games offer a compelling flashpoint for exploring issues related to social justice, particularly as questions concerning the ethics of various technology industries take center stage. Pragmatically, because games have become one of the most widely consumed and discussed media forms in contemporary culture, they offer advantages for teaching social justice by drawing on student engagement, familiarity, and interest with gaming. Additionally, games–as technologies built to enact interlocking processes–provide a medium for critical engagement with systemic and structural thinking.

The conversations featured here in this roundtable discuss both teaching game studies and game design for social justice in non-games-focused classes as well as social justice for the game studies and game design classroom. Through discussion of their experiences teaching with assignments, activities, and engagements with games–from game playing and game streaming to game studies, game design, and gaming events–the speakers explore how gaming can be used for developing and honing critical thinking, critical making, and critical worldbuilding toward social justice and equity.

The first set of short presentations focuses on approaches to game design and game making in the classroom through rich explorations of platforms and power, collaboration and community, and theory and practice. In “Critical, Queer, and Resistive Design: Teaching Critical Technology Studies through Game Design,” Whit Pow discusses teaching resistive design through a design project in which students create games and interactive experiences using non-game engines including Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Maps, Twitter, and others. In their talk, Pow speaks about the process of teaching about the biases inherent to software design, the exclusionary assumptions and norms built around platforms, as well as the possibility for critical, queer, and resistive uses for teaching critical technology studies through hands-on and entry-level approaches to game design. Following that, Teddy Pozo will present “‘Let’s All be Theorists and Let’s All be Practitioners’: Collaborative Public Events and Inclusive Games Pedagogy,” which reflects on the classroom itself as a designed interactive experience benefitting from a co-design model that culminates in a collaborative exhibition of student work. In enabling students to take ownership of a final showcase event for their work, Pozo suggests that conceptualizing the class itself as an interactive event and the individual assignments as experiments toward such an event, mobilizes event-organizing pedagogy’s focus on community-building and inclusion in order to counter dominant prioritization on developing expertise and professionalism that enables the dismantling of (white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal) gatekeeping practices in both humanities and computer science. Next, in “Critical Game Making: Teaching Design with and from Game Studies,” Michael DeAnda discusses teaching game studies in a design school. Through this course, fae uses critical game making projects for students to engage with scholarship and explore the relationships between theory and design. Emphasizing exploration and curiosity through rapid prototyping, iterative design cycles, and other mechanisms to support student engagement in critical making, DeAnda provides opportunities for students to embrace failure as part of their learning process, one that affords experimentation with design materials and testing hypotheses about design and theorizing.

The latter set of short presentations explore critical engagements with gaming content. Amanda Phillips discusses their experiences performing live online gameplay for social justice classes in “Critical Streaming Pedagogy: Successes, Failures, Insights.” Critical streaming pedagogy requires the instructor to integrate analytical observations, theoretical perspectives, and critical commentary into a mode of live play that students usually expect to be entertaining. In this presentation, Phillips will speak about their experiences while streaming in social justice classrooms, which present unique challenges in terms of game content, student engagement, and preparation. How can instructors successfully balance the expectation of liveness with the need for preparation and rehearsal? How does streaming platform choice impact pedagogy? What is the worst thing that could happen? Lastly, Josef Nguyen shares “On Using Fictional Games for Teaching Social Justice,” which draws on his experiences teaching with fictional games found across narrative media to explore how games writ large operate as technologies for cultures to make sense of themselves, others, and the worlds they inhabit or seek to build. With particular generativity for examining tensions between individual agency and structural conditions, he suggests that representations of fictional games, from Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games to Tomorrow Corporation’s Little Inferno, offer cultural sites for exploring the contested meanings of equity and fairness, meritocracy and privilege, utopia and dystopia, collaboration and competition, and other social relations, practices, and values through what we think games are or expect them to do.

These presentations will prime a discussion with the audience about the use of games and game design for social justice pedagogy. This format will facilitate collective learning about these emerging pedagogical strategies, and ideally audience members will contribute their own best practices as well.

In speculative design, the focus is on experimenting with different methods to understand possibilities outside of the probabilistic narratives afforded by the self-fulfilling prophecies of cultural production and consumption. The goal of this roundtable will be to overview and discuss the concept of speculative education, which we posit as an alternative to neo/liberal arts education that occupies the intellectual space between traditional humanities and entrepreneurial design-focused professional training. Speculative education can be viewed as a set of ideas that informs critical cultural and material production of public humanities in higher education through program development, and the curricular design of individual classes. The theoretical underpinning of speculative education is, we argue, posthumanism. Posthumanism is a collection of theories, concepts, and practices that challenges human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism, and binary/hierarchical thinking while offering practice-based, networked alternatives. It expands what the “public” has meant in public humanities by folding into the center of the narrative and educational focus the ephemeral, silenced, and excluded lifeforms and relations. Guided by the question of “What could have been?” speculative education embeds the heterogeneous relationships between past, present, and future in critical engaged pedagogy to not only seek for inclusion and belonging, but more profoundly, radical relationalities between marginalized ways of being and knowing.

We theorize and practice speculative education from our teaching and research experiences at Champlain College. Champlain focuses on applied, experiential pedagogies designed for students interested in pursuing professionally-focused programs of study like game development and digital forensics. We draw methods and teaching tools from urban and digital humanities and cyberfeminism to engage students in critical examinations of the human-technological and human-nonhuman interactions. By guiding students to analyze the social processes of making and, on that basis, to practice speculative design, our teaching raises awareness of capitalism’s intimate governance of everyday life. Between our classes, we highlight the inherent connections between disciplines, contexts, and perspectives with the goal to build a programmatic focus on Global Futures that interrogates racial, class, and gendered exploitations through the matter of fiction and lived experience.

The Core Division, where all three speakers teach, was created in 2007 through merging smaller liberal arts programs to deliver an interdisciplinary, scaffolded humanities-based general education curriculum mandatory at a college that marketed itself as professionally-focused. Both its structure and content were organized around the theme of “Self, Community, West, and World.” The Core curriculum is undergoing a large-scale revision called Core 2.0, which is our primary example of speculative education. Core 2.0 offers a speculative education through a shared curriculum across Year 1 to Year 3 that helps learners recognize methods, theories, and contexts that inform how knowledges are situated, how truths become truth, and how global futures are under construction rather than inherited absolutes. The revised Core curriculum now has two types of required courses: foundation and exploration courses. Foundation courses focus on ways of knowing, or epistemological foundations necessary to participate in the speculative design including a critical understanding of information, science, culture, historical context, place, and identity; Exploration courses teach methods and processes while leaving the content more open for instructors and students to translate what they learn in their programs of study into different contexts.

Jonathan Banfill will present a second-year course that focuses on introducing students to theory. Jonathan’s specific section focused on theorizing the relationship between borders (political, economic, and social barriers that divide us) and common spaces (designed to overcome material and invisible borders and foster community). In the first half of the course, students investigated geopolitical border issues and created interactive spatial stories using digital mapping software. In the second half, students partnered with a senior-level creative design studio to produce a collaborative exhibition project that examined issues of wellness and community-building on campus and Burlington, as the world emerged from winter and pandemic learning. For a final exhibition, the two courses staged a series of contemplative spaces around the theme, utilizing ice blocks filled with flowers that slowly melted in the early spring sunlight, in outside locations and in the campus gallery, to create conversations that speculated on ways to build community.

Weiling Deng will present a third-year digital research method course titled “Bodies in the Surveillance State.” The course adopts a feminist/queer approach to understand and interrogate new forms of digital surveillance technologies that subject human bodies to the punitive state power worldwide. As a key part of the Digital Humanities debates about surveillance apparatusses and their complicity in human rights abuses, the feminist/queer focus on the body highlights the material, affective, labor-intensive, and situated characters of contacts with computation. The course will introduce forensic architecture and counter-narrative art projects that negotiate with the porous human-machine boundary. The final project takes two steps. First, students will conduct fieldwork and use GIS/Google Earth to make three surveillance maps of Burlington on the levels of law enforcement, cultural othering, and corporate CCTV. Then, on these maps, they will visualize and envision queer transgression of the policed boundaries and create an “Atlas of Undisciplined Bodies.”

This roundtable is a conversation between members of the Strategic Transparency Network: a network of artists working to build solidarity and find voice within the structures of Big Tech and surveillance capitalism. The discussion will focus on the role of artists in building better technical systems, and the steps creative practitioners can take to advocate for and build the digital tools we want to see in the world. It will feature seven artists who center technology and society in their work, and will be moderated by Roopa Vasudevan, the initiator of the Network and an artist and researcher examining the entanglements between artists, industry, and conceptions of innovation.

The participants on this panel are all contributors to a book entitled We Refuse, We Want, We Commit: The Manifestos for Creative Resistance in Technology (releasing online in February 2023 and in print (self-published) mid-2023, and supported by the Next Web Seed Grant, an initiative of NEW INC and Meta Open Arts; Vasudevan discusses her participation in this granting initiative in detail in both her PhD dissertation (more below), and outlines the grant and its role within the publication itself). The project contains a collection of manifestos authored during a series of workshops on conceptions of creative resistance and artistic agency, which Vasudevan facilitated between 2020 and 2022. The workshops, begun as part of Vasudevan’s participation in Eyebeam’s virtual Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future fellowship in 2020, offered a space for artists and creative technologists to come together in small groups to reflect on conceptions of “creative resistance”: the ways in which we can meaningfully subvert, engage, refuse, and find agency within dominant technological systems. Artists who participated in the workshops examine what resistance means in their practices, look meaningfully at how these conceptions might cause harm or reinforce oppressive power structures, and make commitments for their work going forward. The workshops incorporated free writing and group discussion in response to the following prompts, designed to encourage critical self-reflection about participants’ own use of and entanglements with technology and its attendant industries and ideologies.

“We are...”
“In our practices, we...”
“We see resistance as...”
“We are concerned by...”
“We refuse...”
“We want...”
“We commit to...”

Each session ended with participants collaboratively writing a “manifesto” outlining who they are, what they are concerned by, and what they envision for their futures. These documents form the core of the book, and outline the principles that these new media artists and creative technologists seek to align themselves to in their future work and processes.

The manifestos exist in the publication alongside new contributions solicited from past workshop participants. These contributors explore notions of virtual space, decentralization and ethics from a diverse array of perspectives—community building, the human microbiome, embodiment, domesticity, climate and more—but they ultimately all offer perspectives and approaches to building the Internet we want to see as artists, not just one that we have to get used to living in. The practices of these artists span a wide variety of forms, methods and approaches—from movement and dance, to extended reality, to meme-making, to creative coding, and beyond. Their contributions, and the publication as a whole, offers a way to reflect on the collective knowledge that has been produced through the workshops and related efforts—and, importantly, devise ways that this knowledge could be used to make things better. We’re hearing so much about new paradigms for the Web, but right now they all threaten to repeat and intensify the inequities and harms that already exist. We’ve been here before, and we’ve experienced the dire consequences of a myopic, profit-driven Internet. What if the ethical foundation for Web3 was set not by monolithic companies seeking to grow and make money as fast as they can, but by the artists who have always been relied upon to lay the groundwork for what could be possible?

The roundtable will bring seven of the book's contributors—plus Vasudevan as moderator—together in a dialogue around themes of ethical technology, cautionary tales from the current Web, and artist approaches to building technology we want to see. This discussion, and the publication it draws from, aims to open up the conversation about how artists and cultural workers can begin moving in solidarity to make meaningful change in technology—with the hope that just maybe, by reflecting on the current state of the Web, we can avoid repeating the same mistakes yet again as we move into its next version.

The Network emerged from Vasudevan's PhD dissertation research into the complex relationships between new media artists—artists who expand, reinvent, or misuse technological expression in their work—and the technology industry, which controls and operates many of the tools and protocols on which these practitioners rely. Drawing from theories of scientific and technical infrastructure (Bowker & Star, 1999; Latour, 1987), “imagined affordances” available to users of technology (Nagy & Neff, 2015), and creative labor (Becker, 2008; Bourdieu, 1993; Kondo, 2018), Vasudevan argues that although new media artists are often assumed to hold an innate mastery over technological tools and systems, they work on top of an infrastructural foundation that has already been established for them by the technology industry. This foundation, often invisible and taken for granted within everyday practices, fundamentally serves to shape decisions, perspectives, and affordances available to artists whose creative work utilizes it—consequently bolstering the priorities of the powers it serves. The workshops and the Network itself have emerged as a mode of practical engagement on these topics with the community most affected by them, and a way of nurturing community care, support, and collective action to find agency within power structures that are intimidating and overwhelming to resist on an individual basis. The project, as it exists now, is a starting point in the process of bringing artists together in open conversations about these issues; moving forward, the group will be a space for connection, collaboration, and ideation about critical projects that can respond to and reflect on tech inequity without reifying these systems.

For more on the Strategic Transparency Network and the Manifestos for Creative Resistance, visit these links: https://strategictransparencycollective.net/manifestos
https://github.com/strategictransparency/manifesto

For more on the publication, you can watch the video here: https://vimeo.com/763002860/a4f10a78c7 and visit this site: https://book.strategictransparency.network/