Hacking Systems of Injustice: Reimagining Digital Futures through Participatory Community Tech

• In Event: Interrogating Education, Technology & Capitalism in Chicago and Beyond

Proposal

In today's rapidly evolving sociotechnical landscape, the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology has profound implications across all sectors of society (Makridakis, 2017). Beyond the specific influence of AI/ML, other intersecting and rapidly evolving technologies for communication and data processing present pressing curricular decisions when determining what’s most important for students to learn in order to participate in the new digital ecosystem. Though increasing accessibility to various technology courses is important, contesting the ideological boundaries of traditional computational learning by rejecting the purported neutrality of the discipline can reveal opportunities to discern and interrogate relationships between technologies and various socio-political-environmental realities that continuously shape the lives of our students and their communities (Morales-Doyle, 2017). In fact, deeply ingrained ideologies like technological solutionism (Morozov, 2013) and technological determinism (Costa et al., 2019) have significantly shaped the standards that bound computational learning, even though they disproportionately place the agentic power to drive and change society upon the technological tools themselves (Computer Science Teachers Association Standards Task Force, 2017). This presentation largely probes the discursive relationship between ever-evolving digital technologies and systems of social injustice in ways that contest the traditional aims and values of computational learning, particularly critiquing practices that have contributed to and sustained various forms of oppression and social injustice in minoritized communities both locally and globally. Drawing on a teacher-research study, this presentation explores the ways in which participatory technology education can catalyze the development of community-designed technologies, and how these efforts may contribute towards disinvested communities’ collective agency to self-determine.

This project began with high school physics students, who engaged in a multi-year initiative focused on designing solar energy systems to combat environmental racism and promote sustainable development on the West Side of Chicago (Author, 2024). Seeking to disseminate updates on our solar project and educate neighborhood residents about available renewable energy incentives, we recognized the complex role that Chicago’s existing digital divide played in awareness and participation gaps, and with it, the need for a hyper-local communication network to overcome these challenges. In the context of our summer technology program, students investigated contributing factors to the digital inequities on Chicago’s West Side, while simultaneously designing a community application (app) capable of circumnavigating broadband infrastructure disparities. Due to the nature of our app’s novel design, we defined our new communication framework as a “digital conversational network”, or DCN. Employing participatory design research, we critically analyze the pedagogical and curricular decisions that we negotiated to create the teaching and learning conditions that ultimately supported our students in designing the DCN. Furthermore, we employ video and interview data to explore how relational aspects and interactions embedded in the program contributed to participants’ meanings of individual and community self-determination. By articulating the particularities of the program design and community partnerships, we demonstrate how youth can be positioned as transformative intellectuals who enact their agency to reinscribe power dynamics embedded in everyday technologies in ways that cultivate ecosystems of digital care and contribute toward community self-determination.

Authors

• Jasmine Jones, M.Ed.

• David Jones, Fresh Supply Inc.