Participatory Design for Intergenerational Democratic Practice in Daily Life

• In Event: On the Ground Responses to the Anthropocene Context: Civic and STEM Engagement as Global Citizenship

Abstract

In community learning contexts, we have found that democracy is typically conceptually understood as a form of governance or as a philosophy. Democratic practice in everyday life is less clear to people as a tool for shared life. As such, people frequently fall back on cultural- historical hierarchies of authority. When and how can people actively develop a sense of shared life while negotiating concerns and differences? We focus on intergenerational and systemic communication that shapes meaningful participation.

Democracy Lab has identified storytelling as founding intergenerational practice for negotiating power relations and mutually producing shared life. Co-production, negotiation, and circulation practices in storytelling (Hall, 1985; Langellier & Peterson, 2011) surface and extend our abilities to engage with participatory politics (Rosaldo, 1994; Soep, 2014), make mutual change (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Downing-Wilson, Lecusay, & Cole, 2011), and pursue equity in social and scholastic practice (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016). The public good and the Anthropocene are mediated through relations that are situated in socio-historically distinct ways; Democracy Lab’s design attends to mediators in existing structures of authority and ethical expressions of shared life (Booker, 2016).

Our 12-year partnership with Town and Country Learning Center (TCLC), located in an affordable housing apartment complex, has enabled us to build a participatory design research program (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). We work with community members to create opportunities for civic and democratic practice that draw together Southeastern San Diego families, local organizations, and University faculty and students. Undergraduates enroll in a practicum course where they learn to apply participatory research methods and theories of critical pedagogy and media co-production in situ. They receive a community invitation to work, play, teach and learn with the resident youth and adults. We aim to develop relational practices that bridge community and institutional contexts to help us recognize and build on interdependence in the communities to which we belong.

Our data includes field notes, informal on-the-spot interviews, and co-produced artifacts. Artifacts include edited videos, a community quilt, and program artifacts like a community- organized farmers’ market and a prototyped production studio. This analysis focuses on field notes and artifacts gathered from fall 2016 through spring 2019. As our program design is relational, content is negotiated and includes health, housing precarity, STEAM topics, and educational goals.

We have found that storytelling made material—through mediated artifacts of remembrance (community quilt production) and play-based media production rooted in local community interests and concerns (e.g., Bill Nye-style science videos, TCLC Cooking Show, and TCLC SportsCenter)—renders democratic practice increasingly accessible. These collective efforts generated opportunities to narrate and deliberate about shared concerns across socio- historical and institutionally-organized networks. As such, tenets of democratic practice become workable like a set of tools in a workshop that are locally identified and calibrated.

Both democratic and STEM frameworks for seeing the world are rooted in cultural historical conditions of power and authority. Becoming a fluent participant in these modes of thought and organization is critical to negotiating varied senses of public good(s) in the Anthropocene.

Authors

• Angela N. Booker, University of California - San Diego

• Camille Campion, University of California - San Diego