Engaging the Dynamics of Identity, Culture, and Power When Organizing Participatory Design Teams (Poster 3)

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Designerly Thinking and Participatory Design With Students, Teachers, Administrators, and Community Members

Abstract

We engage in critical participatory design research because working with the people who are most harmed by the systemic problems we desire to solve is necessary for advancing justice (Fine, 2016; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Shea & Sandoval, 2020). Justice, understood in a broad sense, includes developing ways for people to live together that promotes dignity (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014), fosters healing from historical and ongoing traumas (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2002), and creates space for “radical openness and possibility” that can support individual and community-determination (hooks, 1990). Participatory design research and how we evaluate its outcomes thus depends greatly on who is doing the work (Teeters & Jurow, 2018). Using this poster, we - scholars who have engaged in critical participatory design research projects focused on a range of topics, with partners from diverse backgrounds, and in multiple institutional contexts- share stories about how we have composed our teams. While this is a topic that has both “ideal” and “pragmatic” consequences for the work of advancing justice (Gutiérrez, Jurow, & Vakil, 2020), it has rarely been written about in the literature on participatory design. When it has, people’s identities are typically treated as static categories (e.g., “educator,” “researcher,” “Spanish-speaking,” “woman”) and do not grapple with the vicissitudes of power and positionality as they play out in dynamic contexts. When we begin with the assumption that identities are situated culturally, historically, and interactionally, the question of who should be on a participatory design research team becomes increasingly complex and necessary to answer.

We use storytelling to share our practices of composing teams. Storytelling as a methodology involves both knowledge production and analysis that builds relationships, contextualizes experiences, and invites listeners to participate in meaning-making processes (Marin et al 2020; Archibald, 2008). Inspired by Davis (2013), our approach “urge(s) us to think things together that appear to be separate, and to de-segregate things that appear to naturally belong together.” As such, we reflect on our decisions regarding the composition of our teams, recognizing the links between the people with whom we partner and how these were shaped by and resisted forces including colonialism, racism, linguicism, and patriarchy. We explore how repertoires of identities (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) are more or less consequential depending on the context, presenting practical suggestions to mitigate the risk that identity categories are overly simplified, purified, and/or essentialized. Via collective storytelling, we offer ways to uncover, with vulnerability, our decision-making processes about composing teams.

As a set of three scholars, who have worked on one critical participatory design project together, we share lessons learned and ongoing tensions based on our research and design experiences. The projects that ground our stories come from studies of a community-based food movement, a community run after-school STEAM program, and multimodal storytelling for social change. Our ongoing relationships with each other, as advisor/students/collaborators enrich the stories we tell, how we listen to each other, and how we create spaces for learning and teaching through stories.

Authors

• Leah Pena Teeters, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Molly V. Shea, University of Washington

• Susan Jurow, University of Colorado - Boulder