Event Alert! Join Me this Friday at the Social Justice Informatics Workshop @ Syracuse University (in-person/virtual
Can data make the world a better place? I believe so, but not without an intentional, reflexive, and collaborative process built into how we think about and work with data.
You are invited to join me and a panel of leading researchers this Friday morning (8/17/22) for a conversation about the role of data in creating a more fair and just world. J. Khadijah Abdurahman will be giving the keynote and my colleague Srividya Ramasubramanian who runs the new Code^Shift institute is a co-organizer.
Following the initial conversation, there will be a hands-on component where you’ll get apply your interests and skills to advancing the discussion. Come get your nerd on.
Join us in person or online at Syracuse University. Breakfast is at 8:30 am. The workshop goes from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm. See the description below for an in-depth description.
Workshop Description
Traditionally relegated to the margins, calls for justice in data, information, technology, and related fields seem to have started being heard and taken up in the mainstream. As bell hooks aptly points out, however, the journey to the center of a discipline is often accompanied by the treacherous processes of oversimplification, commodification, and loss of context, which often scrubs anti-oppressive approaches of their emancipatory potentiality and turn them into what they were meant to dispel – discriminatory practices inflicting harm, dispossession, trauma, and alienation.
This led us to ask, “So, you think you’re doing social justice informatics?” as a way of promoting reflexivity and examining how our scholarship, practice, and commitments can be evaluated to ensure that we do not unwittingly leave justice behind in the course of our critical explorations. Our goal is not simply to identify challenges and failures but also to celebrate the work of our justice-oriented communities and coalitions and arrive at constructive future directions collectively.
To this end, we invite participation in an interdisciplinary, collaborative workshop seeking to arrive at a collective understanding of the communities, practices, theories, and pedagogies emerging out of social justice informatics (SJI) and to discuss the tensions, blind spots, and unintended consequences of the existing scholarship. In doing so, we hope to chart new ways toward justice-oriented knowledge and praxis.
Potential topics to be covered during the workshop include, among others: accountability frameworks for justice-oriented work; critical data studies; transdisciplinary connections between humanistic theories and computational methodologies; voicing the struggles of social justice advocates and collectives; intersectional issues; restoring subjectivity, interrelationality, and kinship to those whose experiences have been flattened and objectified; digital/data colonialism as experienced by BIPOC, diasporic, and non-Western communities; and experiences of hypervisibility, precariousness, or alienation among older adults, LGBTQI+ and people with disabilities participating in social science research.
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