New Tools to Organize Old Practices: Activism in the Food Justice Movement

• In Event: Social Movements, Learning Sciences, and Possibilities for Transformation

Abstract

Purpose
Our community-based design research seeks to understand (a) how learning becomes consequential across historical, spatial, and social scales of activity; and, (b) how members of an immigrant and economically-struggling community organize for a more equitable future. This poster reports on the process of university researchers collaboratively designing technology tools with community activists to enhance the transformative potential of a local social movement for food justice.

Perspectives
Our research focuses on the efforts of a non-profit that works closely with residents of what the U.S. Department of Agriculture has identified as a food desert. The non-profit’s main initiative involves using community leaders, known as promotoras, to increase food access by growing vegetable gardens in residents’ backyards.

Since the start of the garden program in 2009, promotoras have expanded their initial aim of growing food to include a desire to challenge inequitable relations of power through reorganizing residents' access to social, educational, and economic resources. As the promotoras’ work has expanded, they have felt a corresponding need to increase their access to resources, networks, and practices that can support their activism. To this end, we have worked with the promotoras to co-design a software application that extends the reach of their activism and the efficiency of their methods.

Methods
When designing tools with historically marginalized communities, it is important to consider how technology can be a tool for expanding freedom and a source of unfreedom. Technology is a source of unfreedom “...when people feel or are forced to use technologies which do not reflect the lives they value” (Kleine, 2011, p. 42). This view informs our participatory design work with the promotoras. Our goal has been to generate empowering technology that enhances promotoras’ activism.

We have collected a variety of data sources over the course of this 4-year ethnographic and design-based study. These include: observations of promotoras’ work, video/audio recordings of collaborative design work, artifacts documenting community activism, and interviews with promotoras.

Results
The software application that we co-designed has allowed promotoras to collect quantitative and qualitative data on their work in the community. Using this tool, promotoras can document the number of vegetables grown in a garden, the challenges that residents face that include, but go beyond, food access, and strategies they use to assist residents in managing the struggles of living in a poorly resourced neighborhood. The tool has powerfully enabled promotoras to reflect on the value of their work. It has also increased their technological fluency, which has the potential to translate into social and economic benefits.

Significance
Locating this work within the food justice movement provides a powerful lens through which to understand how communities are challenging social, historical, and spatial injustices. This view is significant because it helps us, as design researchers, to identify how, where, and why to collaborate with communities so that we can create sustainable and meaningful interventions.

Authors

• Leah Anne Teeters, University of Colorado - Boulder

• A. Susan Jurow, University of Colorado - Boulder