Queer Tech Futures: STS & Community-based Technology Education

• In Event: Alternative Pedagogies at the Crux of Interdisciplinarity: Promises and Pitfalls of “Innovating” Education - II

Abstract

This paper describes the potential for participatory and speculative design practices to act as a bridge between queer, feminist and decolonial STS and community-based technology pedagogy. The author will describe initial outcomes from a collaboratively developed, social justice focused participatory game design workshop for LGBTQ youth tech campers and a university-based speculative design Hack-4-Queer Youth Futures. These types of collaborations and ‘making-and-telling’ practices are vital to imagining inclusive and livable futures. Daily life is increasingly entangled in large scale socio-technical decision-making systems supported by ubiquitous data collection, hidden algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning applications. One response to these emerging ethical and social challenges has been the call for more transparency and democratic control over the design and implementation of such systems. Diverse LGBTQ and non-binary youth voices are rarely central to discussions of ethical implications and societal impacts of these emerging technologies and socio-technical systems. This is despite the fact that youth are particularly vulnerable to intersectional marginalization, micro-targeting and incursions into privacy and autonomy within daily life. This paper discusses initial outputs from the ongoing development of a community-based technology curriculum that centers the lives of LGBTQ and non-binary youth, and imagines queer bodies as central to any future we wish to inhabit.

Author

• Kendall Roark, Purdue University