On June 4, Stefania will give a TEDx talk at the TEDx Youth event of the Amsterdam International Community School. Entitled ‘error 404. social life not found. (but you can take it back)’, Stefania’s talk will contribute to this year’s theme ‘Next Nature’: what is the next nature of the human experience as we enter the technological age of big data, consumerism and automation? Read more on the TED website. You can also download the presentation.
by Anna Carlson
What might ‘good data’ look like? Where to look for models, past and emerging? In this series of three blog posts, Anna Carlson highlights that we need to understand data issues as part of a politics of planetary sustainability and a live history of colonial knowledge production. In this first instalment, she introduces her own search for guiding principles in an age of ubiquitous data extraction and often dubious utopianism.
I’m sitting by Cataract Gorge in Launceston, northern Tasmania. I’ve just climbed a couple of hundred metres through bushland to a relatively secluded look-out. It feels a long way from the city below, despite the fact that I can still hear distant traffic noise and human chatter. I pull out my laptop, perhaps by instinct. At around the same moment, a tiny native lizard dashes from the undergrowth and hovers uncertainly by my bare foot. I think briefly about pulling out my cracked and battered (second-hand) iPhone 4 to archive this moment, perhaps uploading it to Instagram with the hashtag #humansoflatecapitalism and a witty comment. Instead, I start writing.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the politics and ethics of data and digital technologies. My brief scramble up the hill was spent ruminating on the particular question of what “good data” might look like. I know what not-so-good data looks like. Already today I’ve generated a wealth of it. I paid online for a hostel bunk, receiving almost immediate cross-marketing from AirBnB and Hostelworld through social media sites as well as through Google. I logged into my Couchsurfing account, and immediately received a barrage of new “couch requests” (based, I presume, on an algorithm that lets potential couch surfers know when their prospective hosts login). I’ve turned location services on my phone on, and used Google Maps to navigate a new city. I’ve searched for information about art galleries and hiking trails. I used a plant identification site to find out what tree I was looking at. Data, it seems, is the “digital air that I breathe.”
Writing in the Guardian, journalist Paul Lewis interviews tech consultant and author Nir Eyal, who claims that “the technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions. […] It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.” And this addictive quality is powerful: digital technologies are credited with altering everything from election results to consumer behaviour and our ability to empathise. Indeed, there’s money to be made from a digitally-addicted populace. Encompassing everything from social media platforms to wearable devices, smart cities and the Internet of Things, almost every action we take in the world produces data of some form, and this data represents value for the corporations, governments and marketers who buy it.
This is the phenomenon commonly referred to as Big Data, which describes sets of data so big that they must be analysed computationally. Usually stored in digital form, this data encompasses everything from consumer trends to live emotional insights, and it is routinely gathered by most companies with an online presence.
The not-goodness of this data isn’t intrinsic, however. There is nothing inherently wrong with creating knowledge about the activities we undertake online. Rather, the not-goodness is a characteristic of the murky processes through which data is gathered, consolidated, analysed, sold-on and redistributed. It’s to do with the fact that few of us really know what data is being gathered about us, and even fewer know what that data will be used for. And it’s to do with the lineages that have structured processes of mass data collection, as well as their unequally distributed impacts.
Many of us know that the technologies on which we rely have dark underbellies; that the convenience and comfort of our digital lives is contingent on these intersecting forms of violence. But we live in a world where access to these technologies increasingly operates as a precondition to entering the workforce, to social life, to connection and leisure and knowledge. More and more workers (even in the global north) are experiencing precarity, worklessness and insecurity; experiences that are often enabled by digital technologies and which, doubly cruelly, often render us further reliant on them.
The ubiquity of the digital realm provokes new ethical conundrums. The technologies on which we are increasingly reliant are themselves reliant on exploitative and often oppressive labour regimes. They are responsible for vast ecological footprints. Data is often represented as immaterial, ‘virtual,’ and yet its impact on environments across the world is pushing us ever closer to global ecological disaster. Further, these violent environmental and labour relations are unequally distributed: the negative impacts of the digital age are disproportionately focused on communities in the Global South, while the wealth generated is largely trapped in a few Northern hands.
Gathering data means producing knowledge within a particular set of parameters. In the new and emerging conversations around Big Data and its impact on our social worlds, much focus is placed on the scale of it, its bigness, the sheer possibility of having so much information at our fingertips. It is tempting to think of this as a new phenomenon – as an unprecedented moment brought about by new technologies. But as technologist Genevieve Bell reminds us, the “logics of our digital world – fast, smart and connected – have histories that proceed their digital turns.” Every new technological advance carries its legacies, and the colonial legacy is one that does not receive enough attention.
So, when we imagine what “good data” and good tech might look like now, we need to contend with the ethical quagmire of tech in its global and historical dimensions. To illustrate this point, I examine the limits of contemporary digital utopianism (exemplified by blockchain) as envisioned in the Global North (Episode 2), before delving into the principles guiding “good data” from the point of view of Indigenous communities (Episode 3).
Acknowledgments: These blogposts have been produced as part of the Good Data project (@Good__Data), an interdisciplinary research initiative funded by Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Law, which is located in unceded Meanjin, Turrbal and Jagera Land (also known as Brisbane, Australia). The project examines ‘good’ and ‘ethical’ data practices with a view to developing policy recommendations and software design standards for programs and services that embody good data practices, in order to start conceptualising and implementing a more positive and ethical vision of the digital society and economy. In late 2018, an open access edited book entitled Good Data, comprising contributions from authors from different disciplines located in different parts of the world, will be published by the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences Institute of Network Cultures.’
Stefania Milan is the co-organizer with Emiliano Trere (Cardiff University) and Anita Say Chan (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) of two panels at the forthcoming conference of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), in Barcelona on May 23-26.
The (slightly revised) lineup:
About LASA 2018
Latin American studies today is experiencing a surprising dynamism. The expansion of this field defies the pessimistic projections of the 1990s about the fate of area studies in general and offers new opportunities for collaboration among scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists around the world. This can be seen in the expansion of LASA itself, which since the beginning of this century has grown from 5,000 members living primarily in the United States to nearly 12,000 members in 2016, 45 percent of whom reside outside of the United States (36 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean). And while the majority of us reside in the Americas, there are also an increasing number of Latin American studies associations and programs in Europe and Asia, most of which have their own publications and annual seminars and congresses.
Several factors explain this dynamism. Perhaps the most important is the very maturity of our field. Various generations of Latin Americanists have produced an enormous, diverse, and sophisticated body of research, with a strong commitment to interdisciplinarity and to teaching about this important part of the world. Latin American studies has produced concepts and comparative knowledge that have helped people around the world to understand processes and problematics that go well beyond this region. For example, Latin Americanists have been at the forefront of debates about the difficult relationship between democracy, development, and dependence on natural resource exports—challenges faced around the globe. Migration, immigration, and the displacement of people due to political violence, war, and economic need are also deeply rooted phenomena in our region, and pioneering work from Latin America can shed light on comparable experiences in other regions today. Needless to say, Latin American studies also has much to contribute to discussions about populism and authoritarianism in their various forms in Europe and even the United States today.
With these contributions in mind, we propose that the overarching theme of the Barcelona LASA Congress be “Latin American Studies in a Globalized World”, and that we examine both how people in other regions study and perceive Latin America and how Latin American studies contributes to the understanding of comparable processes and issues around the globe.
Stefania will present on “Questioning data universalism” with Emiliano Treré (Cardiff University) and she will be chairing the session on Data Activism (14.00 – 15.30 Parallel Sessions B).
Becky will present on “It Depends On Your threat Model: Understanding strategies for uncertainty amidst digital surveillance and data exploitation” as part of the Civil Society and Data (chair: Isobel Rorison).
About the data justice conference (website, program)
Date: 21-22 May 2018
Location: Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Host: Data Justice Lab, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
The collection and processing of massive amounts of data has become an increasingly contentious issue. Our financial transactions, communications, movements, relationships, all now generate data that are used to profile and sort groups and individuals. What are the implications for social justice? How do we understand social justice in an age of datafication? In what way do initiatives around the globe address questions of data in relation to inequality, discrimination, power and control? What is the role of policy reform, technological design and activism? How do we understand and practice ‘data justice’? How does data justice relate to other justice concerns?
This conference will examine the intricate relationship between datafication and social justice by highlighting the politics and impacts of data-driven processes and exploring different responses. Speakers include Anita Gurumurthy (IT for Change, India), David Lyon (Queen’s University, Canada), Evelyn Ruppert (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK), Rob Kitchin (Maynooth University, Ireland), Sasha Costanza-Chock (MIT Center for Civic Media, US), Seeta Peña Gangadharan (London School of Economics, UK), Solon Barocas (Cornell University, US and FAT/ML).
Organising, together with the Data Justice Lab (Cardiff University) the following session:
The Fight Against the Institutional Datafication of Social Life: Challenges and Tactics
Friday 18 May, 4pm
Chair: Stefania Milan, Datactive Ideas Lab, University of Amsterdam
Speakers: Arne Hintz, Data Justice Lab, Cardiff University
Malavika Jayaram, Digital Asia Hub
Nandini Chami, ITforChange
Javiera Moreno, Datos Protegidos
Anita Say Chan, University of Illinois
Mitchell Baker, Mozilla (tbc)
This session will serve to discuss challenges and opportunities for civil society advocacy in response to data analytics by governments. While the use of data analytics, scoring and identification systems by state institutions is advancing rapidly, often underpinned by tightening surveillance legislation, civil society efforts to address the datafication of citizens and its consequences have faced difficulties. We will map these challenges, in view of exploring potential tactics and forms of influence. The session will allow participants to share knowledge about innovative strategies of intervention; engage in a dialogue on how citizens can have a say in the adoption and implementation of big data analytics; and advance a transnational mobilization connecting struggles on the consequences of datafication with the social justice and human rights agenda.
About Rightscon
As the world’s leading conference on human rights in the digital age, we bring together business leaders, policy makers, general counsels, government representatives, technologists, and human rights defenders from around the world to tackle pressing issues at the intersection of human rights and digital technology. This is where our community comes together to break down silos, forge partnerships, and drive large-scale, real-world change toward a more free, open, and connected world.
Next Wednesday, the artist and researcher Mimi Onuoha will be with us for another session of the DATACTIVE speaker series.
Mimi Onuoha is a Nigerian-American, Brooklyn-based artist and researcher whose work examines the implications of data collection and computational categorization. She uses code, writing, interventions, and objects to explore missing data and the ways in which people are abstracted, represented, and classified.
If you’re around Amsterdam and wish to attend, drop a line to guillen@data-activism.net.
Cheers!
Part of de Denkplaats [space to think], hosted by the Utrecht public library, Jeroen gave a talk named “About data, governance, and the role of the citizen”. The talk aimed to engage bevrijdingsfestival visitors with questions of governance of online public space, distribution of responsibility and accountability and the surveillance rationalities underpinning these practices.
About the Denkplaats (in Dutch):
De Denkplaats is voor één keer op het Bevrijdingsfestival. We praten verder over social media.
Google en Facebook verdienen bakken met geld aan hun gebruikers. De persoonlijke gegevens van die gebruikers zijn de grondstof van deze miljoenenbedrijven. Meer dan de helft van alle mensen gebruikt hun diensten. Gebruikers mogen gratis gebruikmaken van die diensten, het liefst lekker veel.
Wat weten al die mensen eigenlijk van de intenties en methodes van deze kolossen? Is er sprake van een eerlijke ruil; wij het gemak van snelle, gratis communicatie, zij onze gegevens? Of zijn gebruikers ongemerkt handelswaar geworden?
Zorgen digitale diensten grote vrijheid in communicatie of juist voor onvrijheid omdat de bedrijven er achter aan de haal (kunnen) gaan met onze gegevens?
Kom bij ons langs op het Vrijheidspodium!
This is already the last blog posts of the series ‘Designing the city by numbers? Bottom-up initiatives for data-driven urbanism in Santiago de Chile’, by Martín Tironi and Matías Valderrama Barragán. Please find here the first blogpost ‘Hope for the data-driven city‘ and the second ‘Digital quantification regimes of cycling mobility‘.
For our final post in this series, we explore the case of the social game for smartphones, KAPPO. It was developed in early 2014 by four Chilean entrepreneurs with the goal of engaging citizens with cycling. It is structured around levels in which each trip on the bike gives experience points, virtual coins and rewards to the player, and the highest level of the game is the “Capo”2. It also offers a series of challenges and rankings for competing with friends or other KAPPO players. Though this gamified design, KAPPO puts together a narrative focused on its ability to “provoke,” “motivate”, “create the habit” of regularly using the bicycle and improving the user’s health. As suggested by Kappo in one of its promotional ads, the app promises to “show the cyclist inside of you”.
Although KAPPO did not have great success in Chile initially, it started to grow in adopters abroad in other countries, receiving funds and making public-private partnerships with municipalities in Denmark. Since then, its founders sought to position the app as “more than a game” for smartphones, seeking out different ways of capitalizing on the data generated through its use. For example, KAPPO would develop a competition event called “Cool Places to Bike” where organizations compete on the grounds of which best encourages the use of the bicycle measured by KAPPO. It also developed “Health and Well-being Programs” for companies, promising to improve productivity and well-being of workers by increasing bike use through the use of KAPPO. Local governments have also become KAPPO clients through the development of “KAPPO Insights”, a web platform which allows public planners and officials to process and visualize anonymized routes tracked by the app to decision-making.
The data obtained by KAPPO, however, present biases and is not representative of cyclists of Santiago. Instead of emphasizing the scientific narrative of RUBI regime, the narrative deployed by KAPPO is one that aims to convince city officials based on three aspects: an inexpensive method, data capture in real time, and allowing a “strong” participatory citizen involvement that encourages bicycle use. Via such aspects, KAPPO’s analytics and flow maps acquire value and foster decision making that modifies the city in a rapid, experimental cycle, guided by the “real” movements of cyclists gathered in non-declarative ways. KAPPO thus does not seek to measure and quantify cyclists’ mobility representatively like RUBI, but seeks to intervene directly by encouraging greater bike use, and presenting increases in cycling statistics biannually in order to legitimate this digital quantification regime.
The politics of digital quantification: Some points to an open debate
With these very brief vignettes of digital quantification regimes developed in Latin America, it is interesting to note how initiatives like KAPPO and RUBI that are born in the South and adopt a grammar of citizen participation, also try to differentiate themselves from competing foreign technologies. But they nonetheless end up replicating the rationalities and logics of nudge and automation when they try to escalate to the global market to survive as technological entrepreneurship, diminishing at once the possible capacity of activism or citizen engagement in the planning processes. This opens up a debate around the actual political capacities of sensors and tracking technologies to enhance citizen participation and the agendas behind its developers.
Second, it is relevant to consider the different specificities of each regime of digital quantification. Each regime design and mobilises materialities, narratives and economic interests in order to justify their databases, algorithms and analytics as the most convenient, objective or useful for knowing, planning and governing the city in a data-driven way. As a result, the ecology of quantification regimes is always heterogeneous, diverging and relating to their contexts and interests, and combining various technologies of justification (beyond the device or app). From this perspective, we found interesting elements on the goals of each regime and their capacities. For example, KAPPO exacerbated the participatory or citizen nature of the app under a commercial logic from its inception. By contrast, the RUBI regime initially emphasized participatory and bottom-up elements but the agency of cyclists was gradually displaced by more automated designs to obtain “scientifically correct” data. They also try to differentiate from other methods like surveys and devices, both digital and analogue, invoking limitations and biases. In short, capitalizing on digital data requires various strategies of justification (Bolstanski and Thévenot, 2006) that should not be taken for granted and that goes beyond the generation of data alone. Before going into a priori definition of digital data, users or urban space, it is crucial to delve into these strategies and interests, as well as the reasons on why some regimes of digital quantification end up prevailing, whereas others are ignored.
Third, despite the discrepancies between the cases analysed, we note that both cases start from a shared imaginary of data-driven city governance inspired by the North. In this imaginary, opening and sharing data on the mundane practice of riding a bicycle is invoked as a means of empowering citizen involvement with the capacity to make the city smarter and more bike-friendly. However, this imaginary can lead, first, to a reconfiguration of government as “clients of data” and citizen participation towards more passive, invisible versions that are free of true effort, and in which the exchange of data and is used for the benefit of certain stakeholders with interests other than democratic ends. Before turning cyclists into “co-designers” or “participants” in city planning, they are situated in practice as data producers without ever being informed of the real use of the data generated in a government decision or other use by third parties. And the process of automation of the devices or gamify the design of devices is in direct connection with these forms of participation. This point leave us with the question on which other responses for everyday breakdowns and idiotic data could be enacted to promote an active digital activism. And also, which modalities of experimentation allow for the consideration of those imperceptible murmurs that tend to be marginalized from the prevailing cannons of smart culture3?
Fourth, a data-driven planning and governance initiative opens up the discussion of how notions of “expertise” and “politics” are reconfigured. These regimes of digital quantification promote the belief that the decision-maker, without necessarily being an expert on the topic, can make decisions in a primarily technical manner driven by the “real” behaviour of the citizens and not by opinions, ideological differences or party pressures. Political factors are framed as something that must be eradicated through the gathering and processing of data on people’s behaviour. This politics of technify-ing decision-making is nothing new. As Morozov (2014) has written, the idea of an algorithmic regulation evokes the old technocratic utopia of politics without politics: “Disagreement and conflict, under this model, are seen as unfortunate byproducts of the analog era – to be solved through data collection – and not as inevitable results of economic or ideological conflicts.”
In this sense, a data-driven urbanism would carry the risk of believing not only in a neutrality or immediacy of data, but with it a depoliticization of urban planning and government in favour of technocratic and automated decision-making systems. Behind the apparent technical reduction of discretion in decision-making by these regimes of digital quantification, in practice, we can see how many political or discretionary decisions are made in how these regimes are enacted and made public.
References
Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006). On justification: Economies of worth. Princeton University Press.
van Dijck, J. (2014). Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and secular belief. Surveillance & Society, 12(2), 197-208.
Espeland, W. N., & Stevens, M. L. (2008). A sociology of quantification. European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 49(3), 401-436.
Esty, D. C. & Rushing, R. (2007). Governing by the Numbers: The Promise of Data-Driven Policymaking in the Information Age. Center for American Progress, 5, 21.
Gabrys, J. “Citizen Sensing: Recasting Digital Ontologies through Proliferating Practices.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, March 24, 2016.
Goldsmith, S. & Crawford, S. (2014). The responsive city: engaging communities through data-smart governance. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Brand.
Goodchild, M. F. (2007). Citizens as sensors: The world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal, 69(4), 211-221.
Kitchin, R. (2014b). The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. London: Sage.
Mares, N. (2018). What if nothing happens? Street trials of intelligent cars as experiments in participation. In S. Maassen, Dickel, S. and Schneider, C. H. (Eds), TechnoScience in Society, Sociology of Knowledge Yearbook. Nijmegen: Springer/Kluwer.
Mayer-Schönberger, V. and Cuckier, K. (2013). Big Data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Morozov, E. (2014). The rise of data and the death of politics. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/20/rise-of-data-death-of-politics-evgeny-morozov-algorithmic-regulation
About the authors: Martín Tironi is Associate Professor, School of Design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He holds a PhD from Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI), École des Mines de Paris, where he also did post-doctorate studies. He received his Master degree in Sociology at the Université Paris Sorbonne V and his BA in Sociology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Now he’s doing a visiting Fellow (2018) in Centre of Invention and Social Proces, Goldsmiths, University of London [email: martin.tironi@uc.cl]
Matías Valderrama Barragán is a sociologist with a Master in Sociology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He is currently working in research projects about digital transformation of organizations and datafication of individuals and environments in Chile. [email:mbvalder@uc.cl]
This Spring Niels ten Oever hit the road and gave different talks about the Internet architecture and infrastructure at:
– the Alan Turing Institute in a Workshop on Protocol Governance: Internet Standard Bodies and Public Interest questions.
– the University of Gothenburg’s School of Global Studies, Department of Political Science and Department of Social Work in a Conference on Internet Governance and Human Rights.
– the Humboldt Instut fuer Internet und Gesellschaft in a Workshop: “We are on a mission”. Exploring the role of future imaginaries.
This helped Niels to gather feedback on his preliminary findings in his research on Internet imaginaries, architecture consolidation, and quantitative mailinglist analysis. Next to that he got to engage with other Internet governance researchers on Internet imaginaries and governance innovations.
The questions, comments and talks by other researchers led to a lot of insights which Niels is now reworking into two forthcoming articles.
Author: Charlotte Ryan (University of Massachusetts, Lowell/Movement-Media
Research Action Project), member of the DATACTIVE ethics board.
This is a response post to the blog ‘Tech, data and social change: A plea for cross-disciplinary engagement, historical memory, and … Critical Community Studies‘ written by Kersti Wissenbach.
To maximize technologies’ value in social change efforts, Kersti Wissenbach urges researchers to join with communities facing power inequalities to draw lessons from practice. In short, the liberating potential of technologies for social change cannot be realized without holistically addressing broader inequalities. Her insights are many, in fact, communication activists and scholars could use her blog as a guide for ongoing conversations. Three points especially resonate with my experiences as a social movement scholar/activist working in collaboration with communities and other scholars:
Anyone interested in the potential of civic tech—activists, scholar-activists, engineers, designers, artists, or other social communication innovators—will warmly welcome Wissenbach’s vision of Critical Community Studies. She proposes not another sub-specialty with esoteric journals and self-referential jargon, but a research network of learning communities expanding conceptual dialogs across the usual divides. And, she recognizes the urgent need to preserve and broadly disseminate learning about technologies for social change.
I agree but cautiously. It is just what’s needed. But the academy tends to resist engaged scholarship. We need to think about where to locate transformative theory-building; sadly, calls to break with traditional research approaches may be more warmly received outside academic institutions than within. The academy itself, at least in the United States, is under duress. How would Critical Community Studies explain itself to academic institutions fascinated by brand, market niche, and revenue streams? Critical Community Studies is not likely to be a cash cow generating more profits faster, and with less investment. The U.S. trend to turn education into a profit-making industry may be extreme, but it raises the need to look before we leap.
Like Wissenbach, I entered the academy with deep roots in social movements and community activism. Like her, I want the academy to produce knowledge and technology for the social good. Like her, I want communities directly affected to be fully vested in all phases of learning. Like her, I am eager to move beyond vague calls for participation and inclusion. My experiences to date, however, give me pause for thought.
Caption: Thirty years in buttons
In the mid-1980’s, I was among a dozen established and emerging scholars who formed the university-based Media Research Action Project (MRAP). We were well-positioned to bridge the theorist-practitioner divide; many of us had begun as movement activists and we had ties to practitioners. This made it easier for MRAP to work with under-represented and misrepresented communities and constituencies to identify and challenge barriers to democratic communication and to build communication capacity.
U.S. based social movements face recurring challenges: our movements hemorrhage learning between generations; we still need to grapple with the legacies of slavery, colonialism and jingoism; our labor movement has withered. Living amidst relative plenty, U.S. residents may feel far removed from crises elsewhere. Competitive individualism, market pressures, and dismantled social welfare programs leave U.S. residents feeling precarious —even if we embrace liberatory ideals.
In light of these material conditions, MRAP wanted to broaden political dialogs about equality and justice. At first, we focused on transferring communication skills—one and two-day workshops. We soon realized that we needed ongoing working relationships to test strategies, build infrastructure and shared conceptual frameworks. But it took years to find the funds to run a more sustained program. Foundations—even when they liked our work—wanted us to ‘scale up’ fast (one national foundation asked us to take on 14 cities). In contrast, we saw building viable working relations as labor-intensive and slow. One U.S. federal agency offered hefty funding for proposals to “bridge the digital divide.” MRAP filed a book-length application with ten community partner organizations, eight in communities of color. The agency responded positively to MRAP’s plan, they urged us to resubmit but asked that we dump our partners and replace them with mainstream charities, preferably statewide.
And so the constraints tightened. Government and foundations’ preference for quick gains could marginalize (again) the very partners MRAP formed to support. To support ourselves, we could take day jobs, but this limited our availability. Over and over, we found—at least in the U.S. context—talk of addressing power inequalities far exceeded public will and deeds. Few mainstream institutions would commit the labor, skill, and time to reduce institutionalized power inequalities. Nor did they appreciate that developing shared lessons from practical experiences is labor intensive. (Wissenbach notes a number of these obstacles).
Despite all of the above, MRAP and our partners had victories. One neighborhood collaboration took over local political offices; another defeated an attempt to shut down an important community school; others passed legislation; and made common cause with the Occupy Movement to challenge the demonization of poor people in America. We won…sometimes. More often, we lost but lived to fight another day. And we helped document the ups and downs of our social movements. It was enormous fun even when it was really hard. As the designated holders and tellers of these histories, MRAP participants deepened our understanding of the macro-mezzo-micro interplay of political, social, economic, and cultural power.
From hundreds of conversations, dozens of collaborations, and gigabytes of notes, case studies, and foundation proposals, came a handful of collaborations that advanced our understanding of how U.S. movement organizations synchronize communication, political strategizing, coalition building, and leader and organizational development, and how groups integrate learning into ongoing campaigns.
We have begun to upload MRAP’s work at www.mrap.info. But those pursuing a transformed critical research tradition, should acknowledge that the academy has resisted grounded practice, and that the best critical reflections were often led by activists outside the academy rooted in communities directly facing power inequalities. In light of this, Wissenbach’s insistence that communities directly affected “be at the table” becomes an absolute.
Let me turn to Critical Communication Studies more specifically. To maximize publishing, U.S. scholars tend to communicate within, not across, disciplines. Anxious regarding slowing their productivity, they tend to avoid the unpredictability of practical work. For their part, the civic tech networks and communities facing inequalities find themselves competing for resources, a competition that can undermine the very collaborations they want to build. Even if resources are located, efforts may fade if a grant ends or a government changes hands.
So while I welcome the call for researchers to join practitioners in designing mutually beneficial projects, I want to do it right and that may mean do it slow. First off, who is the “we/us” mentioned twenty times by Wissenbach (or an equal number of times by me)? We need a real “we”: transforming institutional practices and priorities whether in academic or communication systems is a collective process. An aggregate of individuals even if they share common values does not constitute “us,” social movements as dialogic communities that consider, test, and unite around strategies. (As Wissenbach underscores, “we” need to shift power, and this requires shared strategies, efficient use of sustainable resources, and a capacity to learn from experience).
In short, transforming scholarly research from individual to collective models will take movement building. A first step may be recognizing that “we” needs to be built. Calling “we” a social construction does not mean it’s unreal; it means it’s our job to make it real.
Conclusion
I share Wissenbach’s respect for past and present efforts to lessen social inequalities via communication empowerment. I agree that “only inclusive communities can really translate inclusive technology approaches and, consequently, inclusive governance.” And I know that this will be hard to achieve. Progress may lie ahead but precarity and heavy work lie ahead as well. A beloved friend says to me these days, “Getting old is not for the faint of heart.” Neither is movement building.
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