On STS and Critical Feminism Pedagogy: Repair and Reconnection in Community Data

• In Event: Interrogating STS as Critical Pedagogy I

Abstract

Feminist science and technology studies scholars have argued for alternative pathways to generate potentials for remaking worlds. Alongside global studies scholars, they argue for the need to foster “new arts of noticing” (Tsing 2015) and a “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) that could specifically allow researchers to get outside dominant frameworks and tempos of modernity around progress. This paper thus shares perspectives from one US public university’s campus-based design - The Community Data Clinic at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign – in efforts to foster “new arts of noticing” via an interdisciplinary pedagogy and lab engagements exploring other means for recognizing value and possibility in patient tempos, local scales, and non-forward motion. Acting as research collaborators with a local civic organizations’ data analysis efforts, the clinic’s engagements explore what new forms of value feminist qualitative research methods and analysis techniques can bring in dialogue with local civic network’ growing efforts to leverage data infrastructures and expand data methods. Centering new frames for patience, review and reconsideration, local situatedness over global scale, and reconnectivity over efficiency, as assets for responsible and accountable community data practice, the lab centers engagements with a local data actors and stewards – rather than large data-driven corporations that “big data” has tended to “fetishize” (Crawford and boyd 2014) – to reveal “new arts of noticing” in research methods.

Author

• Anita Say Chan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign