Pedro Ferreira - Vulnerable Communities and Local Knowledge

Thank you very much for inviting me this feels like I said this was a bit like coming home even if it's just over zoom I did my PHD at KTH and I was living in Stockholm for nine long and very nostalgic years under professor Kristina Höök which was in Mobile-Life which was an incredible privilege and a great time and place to be in and currently I am I'm an associate professor at University of Copenhagen and I'm affiliated in a kind of interdisciplinary research group called technologies in practice and I'm really as Mareike mentioned I'm really excited to talk to you today about this because it's not only a topic I'm very passionate about but it's also something I'm still trying to kind of make sense of so hopefully I've come some way in that sense making that I can hopefully communicate something of interest to you but also I'm very much looking forward to saving some time at the end for conversation and that this might be a little bit of a challenge because I end up having too many slides and so I am going to talk a little bit fast but I'm going to try to not skip things and I'm going to try to be coherent in how I speak but and a lot of what I'm going to talk about is I'm going to read a lot of quotes from other articles and from other work because this is work that is mainly based on looking at other literature and so like I'll try to connect those thoughts together so you'll be reading a lot of quotes that will be on screen I will also be reading them hopefully you can follow me I don't think I think I hopefully I'll make it like a transition that is like sufficiently clear and smooth that you can follow these ideas that are not in the end so complicated so to begin this is situated as Mareike said within ict4d or ictd which refers to information and communication technologies for development and it's essentially the field of international development where ICTs kind of take the center stage and so a lot of the projects either focus on understanding things like you know how to design and implement or study ICTs within like developing communities and in practice there's a lot of work that you know revolves around things like improving communications for farming to support farming or e-learning or issues around gender empowerment and so on and typically the project tends to be rather small-scale and short-lived serving mostly a research purpose and this is an example of my own so this is a project that I did when I was interning at Microsoft research in Bangalore in India it's called KrishiPustak and it's a social network that we developed that was meant for use by low-literate farmers and so the interaction was entirely based on image and sound and it's allowed us to explore and write about two distinct topics mainly one was around the interaction of low-literate users with digital technologies but also issues regarding the sharing of technology amongst rural communities something which is often called referred to as intermediation and I mean this is by no means a full picture this is just sort of to you know present with an example of my own rather than turning to others example but just to give you a bit of like an idea of the kinds of projects that's one of the types of projects that comes from this kind of from this field and so and because this deals with a kind of you know inherent asymmetry between you know western and developing world or you know different ways of talking about this kind of differences is kind of unavoidable to discuss this distinction when talking about this work because it is positioned very much in that distinction and so one of the main concerns historically is that you know the west has historically imposed its own kind of epistemic and technological structures onto a colonized developing world and that these are kind of by virtue of that these have been kind of inadequate right so these have been this approach of sort of like top down imposing of technology knowledge making practices and so on from the west to the developing world those that are kind of the targets of such interventions has been widely criticized in much literature but also within ICTD so for instance Kentaro Toyama who is who has this kind of idea of technology as not changing of social that his ideas that technology is an amplifier of social will or social structures but doesn't actually change them so he writes something I'm going to read the sentence so projects fail so ICTD projects fail because they don't design context-appropriate technology they don't partner with local organizations adhere to social cultural norms account for poor infrastructure build relationships with local governments invite the participation of the community provide services that meet local needs think through reliable financial model and provide incentives for all stakeholders and you know a lot of when reading this you know a lot of this kind of intuitively makes sense but of course it raises a big issue of okay so a lot of this has to do with you know engagement and the participation of the people who are you know going to benefits or receive these technologies and so it raises a key concern around okay so what does it mean what does this mean for participation how is participation thought of in ICTD how could it be how is it now how could it be better what are its failures and so on and so a lot of what I'm going to talk about is through the lens of participation even though I will look at it you know from like different terms but the main kind of concern is this idea of participation what is it and what does it do Peter Oakley in his book around projects with people where he looks at sort of like participation as like a concept it's one of a quite interesting book in the 90s where he's looking at sort of he established this kind of way to talk about participation it's kind of developing environments and so he says in the traditional approach to development it is well known that the administrator of development projects and the beneficiaries do not sit at the same side of the table so there is again here kind of similar to what Kentaro Toyama was saying before there is this notion that the interests of those doing the development and those receiving the development might not be aligned and there and this is kind of what drives pretty much all accounts of participation it's like we need to align these concerns we need to involve the person who was previously like uninvolved no more top down let's give a voice to those who were previously voiceless and so if we go back to Toyama's statement and we like highlight I just wanted to highlight this is kind of what I will do to a lot of the quotes that I will present today I'll highlight sort of some of the terms that I'm kind of interested in and so here is context appropriate local organizations adherence to social economic norms local governments participation community and local needs and we can immediately see how you know even though these things you know intuitively probably seem good and kind of intuitively good for most of us you can as you start looking at some of these things they immediately raise a lot of issues you know what are these you know social cultural norms what are these local needs what are what is a community right and so to shed light on this I have I've tried to look at this by looking at the use of the term local more specifically so that's kind of the point of departure and I'll discuss the details in a second so participation in this lens it's construed as something that we need to pay attention to and we need to do and it's you know it revolves it requires us to pay attention to context it's a power shift in the way it's framed it's a power shift it gives voice and power over to the people who are previously powerless and voiceless in determining their own sort of technological features you know we see this kind of in participatory design traditions when talking about sort of HCI or design more concretely it is an effort to include And it is yeah it is an effort to include which is you know not only like a moral obligation but a practical one, one that builds better systems that builds better interventions right so this is kind of how participation this is how I have sort of this is how I understand participation being talked about in this other world right this is what why people advocate for participation so this is kind of what I did this is just short methodological slides so I got all the papers that had ictd ict for between 2010 and 2015 from the ACM digital library I did this by hand because they don't have any way to do this automatically so this took me some time and this is why I haven't updated this corpus since 2016 when I got it at some point I'm gonna add some more papers to it but right now this is what I had and then I coded so I looked for all the instances of local and I just went around like I coded things you know what do I think that is implied in kind of this kind of stating of local and so on of course there's a lot of ways in which local is used in various problematic ways the local store you know it's known as like an issue with what the local store means and so on and so forth right and then there's a filtering for impact in that I you know for the purposes of the relevance of this analysis I tried to avoid sort of bringing out quotes from work that was kind of from more junior scholars or work that is not heavily cited or that not referenced at all just so to avoid making drawing my analysis on perhaps you know more vulnerable academics and so on and so forth so and also because I think the issues that I will talk about are kind of prevalent and not just something that you find here or there okay that's it so now I'll that's the kind of introduction and methodologists and I'm going to go through five findings or five themes that I think are kind of of emerge from looking at this corpus and this work so the first one is that local is presented in a way that everyone benefits so talking about like the alignment of goals sso this is from a paper I have the citations the references below I will share the slides if you want to have a look from an economic perspective researchers have found that small-scale local actors can actually have lower costs than larger ones by leveraging existing infrastructure similarly decentralizing these networks could potentially empower the local community increasing opportunities and freedom and so this is from this is a project that does this pilot installation of locally owned cellular networks so like in Papua New Guinea and so the idea being here that you know doing something local with this kind of local resources is not just it's actually technologically better and like economically more viable right so in the same paper they talk about we believe that local ownership and local profit incentivizes local actors to support the network and if local people profit from the network they are more likely to care when it fails so this is kind of assumption of course that local is economically viable so we don't have even we kind of don't have to deal with the morality of it we just you know it's just better in every possible way and so and of course you know this and of course this is again a kind of you know in many ways maybe like a reasonable assumption to make that people will care for also like this idea that people will care if something is local but it does of course immediately raise issues about you know how is locally assigned and who is who counts as local so who exactly is you know owning this because I mean of course you cannot just assign to like a local ownership some structures will eventually own it more than others who is actually this local that is profiting and what counts as you know local ownership and so on so in many ways there's you know there's an implication that there's like a property of local that you know is kind of unproblematic but actually raises you know more questions perhaps than it raises in the sense of like you know how is it just fine and to whom and so just to kind of wrap it up so you know this kind of everyone benefits themes that you know researchers participants share similar goals that they can share similar goals and that's drawing on local serves also these higher economic purposes and so on so like we don't need to you know we don't need to think too much about it and actually there's a move here that is a bit you know that can raise some eyebrows in the sense that you know it kind of removes in some ways the responsibility of you know deliberating and discussing kind of ethical considerations around engagement right so if it's good for everyone then the ethical answer is kind of the ethical question is kind of answered the other one is around knowing the local context this is just names that I've kind of tried to summarize what the idea is so this is from another paper that looks at like a paper-based tool for eliciting knowledge about like geographical surroundings from like local communities and so what they say this is a quote from the project as a sound understanding of the local context precedes any good development project or process we feel that Local Ground Local Ground is the name of the project being valuable in helping international support organizations communicate more effectively with the communities they serve so here there's this idea that you know we can understand the local context and we can do actually that before we engage in the project and in that sense you know the local context is you know not only knowable but it's knowable for the aims of the project and can be used productively that kind of knowledge once it is made is that can be used as an input to design and I'll get back to this later but here the thing to highlight it's very much this idea that you know there is such an object as local context that is stable enough that we can figure it out before we go into design in this kind of development project there's another there's actually a lot of themes I'll stick to five but there's another one that I find quite interesting is that while this local is knowable and we can describe it actually it also is usually portrayed as resisting formalization and so here is a sentence this is about work that is kind of disputing how apps that focus on like market mechanics are inadequate for like farmer use in China in rural China and so the quote is behind all these agricultural specific processes there are well-rooted traditions and habits that allow the formation and circulation of knowledge and news around the village this rich and layered local knowledge is mostly based on oral exchanges and face-to-face encounters and often relies on family ties and clan networks to evaluate the trustworthiness of the communication so what is kind of interesting is that this is kind of very much aligned with these anti-western knowledge making practices the rhetoric where the western knowledge is you know placed as attempting to kind of formalize knowledge and the knowledge is somewhat in some ways is protected from that formalization with an appeal to you know this knowledge being like reached layered and based on this kind of local norms or local culture that makes it so but makes it also very hard to formalize and to build into systems right so we can know about it but not maybe in the ways that like we know about other things and so yeah and so there's also like this other implication that the local kind of stabilizes over time and that these are you know processes that are generally to be preserved because they have this kind of mystical value in some way so the local resist formalization it's at odds with the western noise of knowing and the current logics of technology and it is stabilized through this idea of tradition that kind of stabilizes in kind of these mystical ways and it's seen as a move against western epistemics So this is the third point now the fourth one has to do with the researcher gaze so and here I'll jump straight to the quote so this is a case study of mobile phone applications looking at having people report on water quality issues these are prototypes so based on our experience and focus on rural environments our approach to ICT development has been that the investigation of the local context and solutions responding to local needs are more valuable and sustainable than a general one-size-fits-all design I think someone is unmuted that I'm getting some echo right is that it okay I think it's done yeah so the issue here you know in terms of like the researcher that I wanted to bring out in terms of the researcher guys is that there is you know there is this presupposition that like the researcher can know so we have talked about sort of how the context can be knowable but now we are talking about you know how the researcher can know so like based on our experience and so like the researcher has this kind of authority over the thing that is being observed and can talk about sort of you know local context and local needs kind of authoritatively more abstract way so the researcher can know and can they can go through experience and this experience comes from this like embeddedness in the field side which allows a researcher to then translate these complexities and speak for these complexities to you know not internally not to those communities obviously but to the wider academic world by their life publication networks that they are involved in So finally and to close the kind of this the more like empirical part of this there's this issue that is kind of one of the central issues also you know when you look when you read like postcolonial theory and so on which is the collapsing of multiplicity so the collapsing of complexity of those that are being observed those that are being looked at so and here local you know yeah so one example of this for instance this is this work that looks at like it looks at like a cross they look at 25 countries they interview 10 people in each country and they look at sort of costs to and barriers to public access of computing and they say at some point in a methodology section they say something like interview guides were prepared in each country depending on the local needs and context each country added questions that they felt were relevant to the local context which enriched the overall body of evidence and so there's a there's a few issues here with how the local is sort of produced here one of them is the main one actually I'd like to highlight is how quickly and often there's you know local can refer to many things from a village to in this case a country right so here you know there's 10 people that are you know 10 of the participants here are based in India and so the local context refers to India you know as a whole so they can adapt these questionnaires and they can adapt these methods to the you know the specific localness of India and so this is kind of a quite a common move that is often criticized in postcolonial literature which is this you know this move towards collapsing the complexity into ideas of like locality like the other can be sort of like localized in like very specific ways and sometimes even in like very broad ways like we could speak for like someone can speak for India authoritatively through this kind of like sampling and so on and of course there's a lot of other issues actually you know because also there's an issue of also kind of epistemic authority because people are recruited over like online forums so there's already like a very like specific framing of the kinds of people that are participating in this and so on and so forth but yeah so this collapsing of multiplicity you know kind of here I might be overstating some of the claims that are being made in this paper but it is just to bring out sort of some of the more long-lasting the more prevalent postcolonial points is that local knowledge is somewhat static and it is knowable to the developer the developer here is you know the researcher or the person doing the development in his initiative so the local knowledge is somewhat static it's somewhat knowable to the developer case and it's kind of extractable right so it's something that we can this is a little bit of a repetition of some of the points before but it's something that we can like extract from the context and put it to use for the benefits hopefully of the people that you know will eventually receive those benefits and so on and so forth okay so now I will shift to sort of some of the concerns because maybe I don't know some of you maybe find some of this stuff compelling but maybe some of you are thinking like so what like who cares about this you know this kind of so you're putting like names onto things who cares and I would say that there's actually like really deep issues of there's really deep concerns around how things are talked about in all in academic literature in general but specifically in ICTD and this kind of work where they are divided into four main categories the first concern is you know around participation the second concern is quite specific and it's actually about sort of epistemics and our knowledge is generated the third concern is one of the most important to me which is a more like ontological concern how the people are represented how the kind of objects of the sites the objects of development are sort of created and circulated and so on and then the last one is around deference and capture and I'll get to that in a second if you don't if this doesn't mean anything to you that's fine because I'll get to that at the end so around participation this book that came out last year by Sasha Costanza-Chock called Design Justice has a really really nice section about participation and participatory design and the way she talks about it is that she discussed participatory design in that so she writes well-meaning designers employ participatory design techniques for a wide range of reasons for one thing the process of working with community members is enjoyable it can be quite fun and it can feel empowering for both design professionals and community members unfortunately products patents processes credit visibility fame the lion's share goes to the professional design firms and designers community members are often are too often too often end up providing the raw materials that are processed further up the chain and so she's talking about his participation as this kind of extractive mode that is often concealed in these narratives of you know aid and developing and assistance it often doesn't come through the fact that you know it's often hard to see who is benefiting from this data that is collected from this analysis from the research that is produced from the papers that are produced and so on and so forth like at all levels like it is unlikely that you know ll these supposed recipients actually receive of anything of value in most of these projects like in the long term or even in the short term and so there's usually kind of this little bit mismatch between goals that is often you know if you go back to my first point about the goals being aligned being talked about as being aligned there's often more of a discrepancy than perhaps people would like to kind of talk about and Paul Dourish and colleagues wrote this paper also last year around On Being Iterated which kind of it's also has been also like really inspirational because it really is centers like iteration as like a design practice and they look at sort of you know the demands that these place on users so they talk about you know what iteration demands of users is that they have the stability to invest time and effort without immediate benefits that they be hopeful about the future and that they trust in promises made by people in power and so the article is definitely worth reading at length because it's much more much more interesting and deep in like I will be able to do justice here with this short sentence but essentially it's like looking at you know participation through the lens of iteration and through this kind of you know even this glorification of for instance failure you know like when we do iteration like we fail so that we can construct something better so failure is often like glorified so but what is not often discussed is that not everyone it's not easy for everyone to participate for some participation is not only it's not something that began in that project but that it's been ongoing historically because people have been forced to participate in all types of things and for whom failure implies at the very least a loss in time and resources for the purposes of participation so just you know just kind of this participatory concerns that are often overlooked when talking about you know communities in this way so yeah so just to sum up these participatory concerns you know Christopher Kelty wrote a book also it's called The Participant that talks about participatory design as well participation and so and discusses how a lot of these modes like a lot of the participation that ICTs promised and ended up being sort of perfunctory like in practice but then there's also this concern that you see in consensus around it being extractive it's being burdensome being burdensome people it's being asymmetric in very asymmetric in nature and then we have this kind of extra level that is the fact that you know because participation in so many ways it actually becomes participation niceties in so many ways has become actually obligatory in many ways there's many systems that we are forced to participate in to access public services we are you know tracked we are surveilled in this or this way we are participating in all these different ways now and so to think to like focus on participation as a goal in and of itself it's today I would argue a largely insufficient lens it's no longer at all I mean if it ever was it is definitely no longer kind of a good enough argument to just say we want to increase participation because it's participation for what and for whom and what are the conditions and the costs and so on and so forth what is time now let me just check okay that's okay it's like 10 minutes or 15 at least so the epistemic concerns so what we talked about was the participatory what does it do to participation now what does it do to the knowledge generator this is not the most important one but it allows me to go back to like a paper I published at the end of my PHD that is a called Why Play? and it was published at the Critical Alternatives conference in Aarhus in 2015 based on my PHD dissertation it kind of summarizes most of what I say in my dissertation so if you are interested in this but don't want to read my dissertation then this is definitely the place to go and so the scope of this paper and you can see here yeah KTH so my past KTH belonging and so the scope of this paper just very quickly was to look at ICTD through the lens of play enjoyment and leisure and the paper identifies tensions within kind of ICTD work that tends to kind of overlook or ignore or sometimes even constrain and limit the role that sort of enjoyment plays in how people and communities interact with technologies so an example that I use in the paper it's kind of been perhaps overused in some ways but it illustrates the point really well is how you know a particular ICTD initiative that deployed this kind of big ICT infrastructure across different rural areas in India was you know intended like that the point was to help people communicate you know knowledge about farming and tips and so on to sort of improve overall farming output and empower farmers to increase their sort of farming practice to improve their farming practices and so on and increase the their yield was then you know upon evaluation was that mainly used to watch like online videos share videos you know have some fun watch soap operas and so on and so forth which shouldn't really be surprising to kind of anyone but of course when you frame things in this way as you know people being first and foremost kind of deprived then you know and then these projects are intended to help people socioeconomically then of course it then is hard to evaluate these projects in any way other than that kind of frame so this project was you know deemed the failure and the whole ICT infrastructure even though it was you know a really great thing to have it was sort of removed because the project was deemed a failure right so this episodic concerns is that you know by doing by you know assigning this kind of going back to the local assignments like local idea of participation and community and so on to configure the participant in often oversimplified ways through like broad characteristics and by getting that framing then of course we get you know of course people have to like that conform with kind of how the researchers expectations of you know local and there's this whole like adaptation process going on but ultimately and foremost you fail to and that's the kind of the argument in my paper is that you essentially fail to have good empirical material because you are not engaging in you know anyway kind of an honest framing because people need to you know if they want to have that infrastructure they'll need to tell you kind of what you as a researcher is expecting to hear to just you know maintain that infrastructure and so on and so forth so it kind of demolishes like conditions for like a good you know good knowledge production and this is not the main point obviously because you know the people these people don't exist just for like the extraction of knowledge and so this is just a kind of point in between I think a much more important problem that is kind of related is that it is rooted in postcolonial thinking is how local is sort of ontologically configured and so here I build so first of all the local is kind of singular it's usually that's the collapsing of multiplicity I was talking about before local usually tends to be singular and knowable as I talked about and I will just sort of use the kind of postcolonial lands by drawing on this definition for this approach from Dibyesh Anand on his book geopolitical exotica where he focuses on like postcolonial representations in Tibet and this book is also it's phenomenal so if you really want to read something in postcolonial that really can just blows your mind sort of like every other page this is like the one to go to and so he starts by like at some point he's describing some of his stands and he says I use postcolonial to signify a position against imperialism and neurocentrism western ways of knowledge production and dissemination in the past and present are not taken for granted but put under scrutiny and what I find really striking here is that it really offers a kind of way to think about you know the point of departure of the use of like local as a way to kind of ascribe authority and return a voice to those that are kind of out there or that are in the kind of local space but ultimately he does that in a way that actually fails to like that perpetuates sort of the way that like that kind of knowledge is generated and is made so in one sense I mean to put it kind of simple it's like how I think about it is in one sense the move is let's give a voice to people to produce knowledge but because you know the way that the knowledge is then like condensed framed published but it actually in the end it's more of like an extraction of data that doesn't really like subvert the thing that's supposed to be subverted and it's just positions like sort of like the empirical lens onto something else right and I mean I don't know how you would do this differently but just like the kind of I think it's like an interesting positioning within this so local as singular and knowable fails to really challenge these western ways of knowing and thirdly kind of another issue within this is how you know it positions sort of the research and the researcher in this kind of like surveillance like the researchers case kind of going in and so this is from the same book sorry surveillance is a technique through which under an overpowering gaze the northwestern subject is rendered a knowable visible object of disciplinary power the case is not mere innocent curiosity to gaze implies more than to look at it signifies a psychological relationship of power in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze this is you know this is this would be like an unfair overstatement if this is what I was claiming that literature is doing I don't think that's what the literature is doing but explicitly but I do think that Anand makes a really compelling point about you know this relationship between who is being seen and who is talking about who is being seen and so on and so forth and the very idea that you know the researcher is not only visible but it's like it's the research is not only gazed upon but it's framed in a kind in a very you know in a very static mode of you know the local the context the community and so on and so forth and so under the researcher's gaze and emphasizes you know once more this idea of and these differences between who is looking in who is out who is in here looking out there and there's like a really nice paper from Alex Taylor that sort of discusses this on a much better level but it emphasizes rather than serving these purposes of aligning goals it does more to emphasize actually a different set of subjects latent to all of that kind of work there is always a sense of difference that is being created at least how I see it Finally and this is the last point that I will talk about in terms of concerns and but also one of my favorites five there is an issue of deference and capture and here I am really inspired by philosopher Olúfémi Táíwò's like really brilliant essay on Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference which I urge you all to read it's very short that it's really these points are really articulated every sentence feels like it's saying something very important and so I'm going to actually quote this article which is very short three times because I think the points made are really really a good way to wrap up this and also like a way that has really helped me frame sort of my analysis of this and so just to for some context so Taíwò reflects on you know being a black man and being asked to speak on behalf of black people for a particular topic he gives the context in the essay and this is something that he calls epistemic he called epistemic deference so he's saying it's deference because it defers the sort of knowledge making and the communication of that knowledge towards groups that share you know a characteristic of identity that is seen as granting of authority in and of itself and so and despite O. Taíwò of seeing himself as relatively like privileged socioeconomically and therefore you know he feels like he has little to say about the issues that he's being asked to talk about you know the prison system all of those things and the drugs are growing up poor all of those things like it doesn't relate to that and so that's the starting point of his essay like how do we deal with this you know being asked to speak on behalf of and so the first quote that I'll read for him because I love this essay is so the forms of deference that often follow are ultimately self and undermining and only reliably serve elite capture the control over political agendas and resources by a group's most advantaged people if we want to use standpoint epistemology to challenge unjust power arrangements it's hard to imagine how we could do worse and so this idea that you know like the act of deference the only thing that it does in practice is allow for you know the idea that you know you allow this abstract entity to speak whether it's you know because of your skin color because of your gender or because of your localness is very much open to kind of elite capture to serve you know implicitly those in those categories that will be able to sort of already are in those rooms or are able to sort of enter those rooms kind of seamlessly secondly and of course this very much connects with like researcher capture you know the ability of the researcher to then in turn you know kind of in a subsequent move to be able to speak authoritatively on behalf of these communities and so on like to others to the outside world to research communities and so on a second quote from this article I will read is for those who defer the habits can supercharge moral cowardice the norms provide social cover for the application of responsibility it displaces onto individual heroes a hero class or a mythicized past the work that is ours to do now in the present more importantly deference places accountability that is all of ours to bear on to select people and more often than not a hyper-sanitized and thoroughly fictional caricature of them and I think of course this speaks really closely to sort of but you know what I'm talking about in the sense that in two ways actually one because the ascribing of authority to a caricaturization or like a kind of you know a kind of implicit way of talking about groups of people but also you know even more importantly this abdication of responsibility right so like so it's the other the vulnerable the marginalized that is you know made if that is kind of the starting point that we need to give voices to marginalize then we are also you know putting all the responsibility to speak onto those that we are already have already decided are marginalized and so that's what it talks about like moral coverage which I think is kind of course like a strong statement it's like a really interesting way to think about sort of responsibility and you know abdicating that responsibility and finally when it comes down to it the thing I believe most deeply okay I'll give you a bit of context so it talks about I'll give you a bit of context just before diving into it because it talks about trauma and the way it talks about trauma is because he basically speaks says okay so the reason why we believe these communities or these people are vulnerable or marginalized and we need to give them a voice is because they have been subjected to trauma whether you know gender based trauma racial based trauma or in this case kind of western colonial based trauma and so this is the traumas talks about it like how why do we make people in trauma speak why do we so when it comes down to it's the thing I believe most deeply about deference epistemology is that it asks something of trauma that it cannot give demanding as the constructive approach may be the deferential approach is far more demanding and in a far more unfair way it has traumatized to shoulder burdens alone that we ought to share collectively and so again this is kind of similar to the point before but I just really like this formulation of you know asking of you know the trauma something that it cannot do to like solve its own conditions of its own trauma right So in many ways you know a perverse consequence of this kind of deferential move to defer the epistemic authority to the other is this you know it's a bit it goes a little bit counter to a real politics of solidarity whatever that would look like because obviously this is not these are not easy things to kind of address So yeah I'm almost done and I'll just speak about two quick things because of course at the end it feels like there should be you know a way forward and the obvious way forward is you know to be careful when we kind of use like simplifications when we use when we label people in this and this way but you know in a way that the issues are much deeper it's not about you know finding better words to say the same thing it's not about like deflecting to like a higher level of abstraction actually there's like a few things that I think are maybe important to like think about one is this idea of accountability versus deference and I think this is really and it is really central and here I'm also like not only inspired in old family times but also like Donna Haraway's situated knowledges and you know knowledge is kind of already very much situated in the sense that like it's an avoidable situation situated in the sense that we are producing it in specific material moments in time and so on and we are I mean if it wasn't situated it would mean that we as kind of researchers have this all-powerful way of communicating that is not tied to our own you know existence and none of us thinks of ourselves in that high regard I don't think so and so there is this kind of situated nature of knowledge production which puts the researcher of course as the center of like the whole analysis like in the knowledge making and it's a practice that is really hard to do and I think you know a lot of papers maybe at least I've been seeing a lot of papers in HCI and so on that deal for instance like vulnerable communities where there's statements of like identity people put like you know I am like this I am like that and I am like a white man in his 30s or something like that very privileged and people put those statements and I feel like that's very much inspired in this kind of situated knowledge to be accountable to make yourself accountable for your research but I would argue that that does actually very little to make yourself accountable and in many ways it actually makes yourself makes you less accountable because you have now excused preemptively your own behavior right there's no way that the reader has like an institutive way of saying oh this is why your identity matters this is why you're being a man or white or this matter like this is something the reader needs to like make in their own mind like from like this information this demographic often demographic information that you have given and so you are not doing the work of accountability necessarily when you write that And therefore like in the kind of perverse sense you know in many ways you could see that as like you know withdrawing from accountability by you know preempting that critique and saying like this is who I am according to these like axes and another thing that you know also Haraway so is this idea of like staying with the trouble that there is no obviously like if you are dealing with vulnerable as all of you that deal with vulnerable marginalized communities very well know there is no way to close off that complexity there is no way to and if you're dealing with trauma if you're dealing with all of the issues that you're probably dealing with in your research there is no way to close off that complexity and the kind of like the ways that you will be able to talk about it all of all of those things are very much always in the open there is never going to be like a clear solution to that and so everybody recommends you know she talks about sort of the importance of staying with the trouble in sort of like to not recoil from like the problematic encounters which is kind of what I'm trying to talk about here that's like this problematic encounter with like the local but rather maintaining our engagement with it and the issues that it raises so that you can sort of move forward like staying in trouble not trying to deflect it to something else not trying to create a category that allows you to sort of not describe more in-depth like the kinds of things that you are doing or dealing with like all the kind of open questions that people may have but actually like staying with that notion and dealing with that and to end I think it's like a turn also like to it's like a very simple things about this idea that Costanza also talks about in their work that design just as practitioners must also engage with the fundamental questions about the definition of community and therefore it is possible to criticize simplistic conceptions of community and representation without throwing up our hands and accepting the touch right position that there is no such thing as a society and so I just wanted to end with this because I do I know that and I feel that this comes across as kind of like you know where like defeatist or like a kind of attack on this kind of work that is being done and in a way it is a critique but in another way it's also you know very much an attempt to like improve and move forward you know how we think about these things and it's it's never in the spirit of disqualifying someone's work or anything like that but rather just you know finding what it is that we could be doing better when doing this kind of work so thank you very much for listening and thank you for having me today

2021-04-19 07:10

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