1245 - Designing for Social Justice? The Politics of Technology

Session Submission Type: Paper Session 100min

Description

From “data for good” movements using metrics to support evidenced-based policy, to proposed solutions to global “energy poverty,” technologies have come to sit at the center of attempts to reduce inequality and democratize technoscience. The conceit that technological design may embody a range of both deliberate and unintended social assumptions is central to many of these efforts. This panel session will highlight scholarship on efforts to “design for social justice”–-be it through the creation of alternative, liberatory technologies, or via the reverse-engineering or hacking of black boxes for more equitable ends. Papers will explore what engineering and design practices tell us about the interplay between the intent, use and outcome of technological systems, about the durability of technological affordances, and about the relationship between technoscience and politics.

Sub Unit

• Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology / Designing for Social Justice? The Politics of Technology

Session Organizer

• Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study

Presider

• Julia B. Ticona, University of Pennsylvania

Individual Presentations

• 'Big Brother's Bigger Brother': Militarized Surveillance and Citizen Sousveillance in Baltimore - Benjamin H Snyder, Williams College

• The New Safety (Inter)Net: The Politics of Portable Benefits Meets the Promise of Alia’s Technology - Alexandra Chase Gervis, Rutgers University

• The Technopolitics of Data-Driven Society: The Difference End-Users Make with Information Technology and Data Analytics - Taylor M. Cruz, California State University, Fullerton

• Undone Science and Technological Innovation: The Case of Electronic Voting Machines in Postcolonial India - Arafaat A. Valiani, University of Oregon; Patrick Jones, University of Oregon

Discussant

• Julia B. Ticona, University of Pennsylvania