Computing, Ethics, and Surveillance: Exploring the Role and Implications of Political Identity

• In Event: Dis/Connecting With Computing: Designing for Critical Identities and Equitable Inquiry in K–12 Computer Science Education

Abstract

Objective: Public debate in recent months has underscored the urgency of attending to intersections of ethics, politics, and technology. In particular, recent scholarship has illuminated the ways in which computational technologies have profound implications for the lived experiences of nondominant communities (Benjamin, 2016; Noble, 2018). Yet, despite calls for equity within K-12 CS education, students have limited access to opportunities to learn about the complex intersections of civics and technology (Vakil & Higgs, 2019; Vakil, 2018). In this study, we draw on participatory methods to design and study a learning environment organized explicitly around new technologies, police surveillance, and ethics. Specifically, we ask: How do learning environments organized around ethics and technology mediate students’ political/civic identities? And, how does such a learning environment shape students’ perceptions/images of CS learning pathways?

Conceptual framework: Sociocultural perspectives suggest learning is a process of becoming. At the heart of this perspective lies the notion that learning environments have an enormous responsibility in either supporting or constraining particular kinds of identities. We also know from the youth development literature that adolescence and early adulthood are critical developmental periods where individuals begin to ask themselves questions such as, “Who am I?” “What are my values?” and “Who will I become?” Yet, in STEM education, we haven’t brought these two ideas together. In other words, how do values, ethics, ideology, and power intersect with learning and identity processes? In this study, we draw and build from political identity research (Yates & Youniss, 1988) to understand the ways in which STEM learning contexts mediate students’ political and civic identities in ways that have direct implications for their perceptions of particular disciplines and career pathways (Vakil, forthcoming).

Methods and Preliminary Findings: We drew on participatory methods in education to co-design a learning environment focused on ethics, race, surveillance, and policing in a large midwestern city. Our design partners include a youth development organization serving low-income youth of color and an organization of technologists and journalists focused on surveillance. With our partners, we have designed interactive technical demonstrations to provoke ethical deliberation around three specific domains: object recognition, cell phone surveillance, and social media monitoring. During Summer 2019, ten high school students will explore these technologies and the ethical questions they give rise to in a 3-week summer program. Our data set includes interviews, video recordings, field notes, and artifacts of students’ work. Our findings will be organized through case studies depicting how students’ political identities were mediated throughout the course of the design, and relatedly how their perceptions and images of technology/computing may have been shaped through their participation in the program.

Significance: This research will contribute to a reimagining of a civic learning that centers both interactions with technology as well as issues of ethics, race, and power. Second, exploring how political identity functions in STEM learning environments opens up new ways to consider enduring questions of equity and diversity in these domains.

Authors

• Sepehr Vakil, Northwestern University

• Jessica Marshall, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Learning Sciences

• Will Pierce, Lucy Parsons Lab

• Cyriac Mathew, Sullivan High School