Articles & Book Chapters

Learning, Technology, and the Instrumentalisation of Critique by Cristo Sims

This chapter sketches how anthropological critiques of dominant theories of learning and technology have a tendency to be absorbed and instrumentalised by the hegemonic projects they target. In particular, the chapter traces how anthropological critiques of mainstream cognitive theory and artificial intelligence research during the 1980s and early 1990s were adapted and deployed in the early 2000s as part of an effort to ‘reimagine’ learning institutions for the digital age. In tracing this history, the chapter argues for the importance of attending to the institutional relations that structure the production, circulation, and application of not just technologies and sociotechnical interventions but also anthropological critiques.

Critical Affects: Tech Work Emotions Amidst the Techlash by Lilly Irani
Norman Makoto Su, Amanda Lazar

Techlash encapsulates a breaking point reached with the critique of technology companies. To investigate how this whirlwind of rage, inquiry, and accountability affects the lives of tech workers, we conducted interviews with 19 tech workers. Our methodological approach and contribution adopts a style of writing and analysis associated with anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, where we focus on the affective textures of everyday life in an attempt to redirect the temptation to representational thinking to a slowed ethnographic practice. This paper dwells on the affects of tech workers facing critique and scrutiny. Through this approach, we find that emotional habitus conditions the possibilities of personal and political action and inaction in response to critique. By emotional habitus, we refer to the emotional dispositions honed among tech workers by tech culture's rationality and optimism. This habitus must shift if people are to access new ways of relating and acting. We argue for more fruitful attitudes and practices in relation to critique.

Guests of the Guerrilla: Integrated Spectacle and Disintegrating Peace, an Ethnographic Analysis of the FARC's Tenth (and Final?) Guerrilla Conference by Alex Fattal

During a week in September of 2016, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC) held its tenth guerrilla conference, the Décima, in the plains of Yarí in southern Colombia. The guerrilla group blew the event open to the media, orchestrating a festival cum eco-conflict-tourism extravaganza to mark its transition to legal politics. This photo/ethnographic analysis of the Décima illuminates the FARC's symbolic and discursive formation at a pivotal transitional moment and how the group imagined its political possibilities at the cusp of its demobilization. By engaging with Guy Debord's concept of ‘integrated spectacle’, I argue that the FARC's vanguardist structure led it to brand itself as the leader of a broad political mobilization, even as it struggled to retain the allegiance of its former combatants. The article considers the ongoing relevance of the integrated spectacle for scholars and activists and opens a path for further research into the politics of spectacle in Latin America.

“Greater than fear”: theorizing affective blockage in social movement rhetoric by Marwa Abdalla
Luke Winslow

FAKE NEWS AND THE COVID KIT: AN ANALYSIS OF DISCURSIVE PRACTICES OF SCIENCE COMMUNICATORS AND MISINFORMATION ON TWITTER by Bárbara Tauffner de Souza

In this research, I analyzed messages from science communicators in the social media diffusion space of Twitter, observing three of the most prominent voices of Brazilian scientific communication that seek to clarify questions about the "cure" and treatment of COVID-19, understanding this theme is impregnated with fake news. In addition, denialist replies to these messages seeking for the interdiction of scientific discourses were analyzed. Thus, it was possible to measure the power of this misleading information in prompting social questioning and discredit towards science itself, in addition to making it clear how the politics of truth is connected to the current historical moment and how institutions assume it, making their desired truths a statute for the prevailing truth.  

Platformization of Truth: Covid-19 Vaccination Discursive Groups on Twitter by Bárbara Tauffner de Souza

This work discusses the relationship between the will for truth regarding COVID-19 vaccination and the different discursive groups in the so-called society of platform on Twitter. Specifically, this research is conducted through (1) understanding the network structure through Social Network Analysis and (2) evaluating the discourses of the groups based on the analytical concept of ‘plataformization of truth.’ Both the proposition of this concept and the contextualization of this research are rooted in Michel Foucault’s tools. Mixed methods are used to analyze the data collected on vaccination from December 2020 to January 17, 2021, on Twitter. Social Network Analysis was used to assess the composition of retweets on the topic, enabling the identification of antagonistic groups in the network. Subsequently, the concept of platformzation of truth is applied to qualify the content of a subset of the collected sample. The results indicate that two discursive groups were evident on the social network platform, with one cluster displaying an anti-vaccine stance and two clusters forming the pro-vaccine wing. The pro-vaccine wing employs different methods to disseminate the will for truth in favor of vaccination, with one group using humor and memes, and another group using predominantly scientific, journalistic, and/or political language. In the case of the anti-vaccine group, the discourse revolves around distrust of vaccines combating the coronavirus, especially CoronaVac. As a limitation, it should be noted that data collection is carried out from a segment of social media on a specific subject, which does not portray the entirety of the content present on the platform regarding that subject.

Making Innovation in the Mexican Silicon Valley: The Early Years of El Centro de Tecnología de Semiconductores (1981-2001) in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing by Verónica Uribe del Águila

Abstract: This article tells the early story of El Centro de Tecnología de Semiconductores (CTS) as a site of innovation. It argues that, along with economic and scientific development goals, CTS furthered political and geopolitical change agendas for IBM and Mexico. These included reorganizing labor around global supply chains and maintaining specific power dynamics between the Global North and South. Throughout the nineties, CTS was key in Mexico's innovation project. It operated as a laboratory for business models built directly on computing supply chains and was an example of successful industry-academia alliances. However, not everyone in the cluster benefited from Mexico's search for innovation. The country's innovation policies involved the adoption of “outsourcing”—a flexible labor regime that remade labor in the cluster by weakening workers’ rights. In so doing, the article also explores the logistical dimension of the prototype and innovation.

When We are in Crisis: Youth-Centered Transitional Justice, Police Violence, and Political Imaginaries by Patrick Anderson, Christina Aushana, and Caroline Collins

This article describes youth involvement in the voter-mandated transition to a fully independent, powerful community commission overseeing the San Diego (California) Police Department. We begin by describing the historical context of police violence against communities of color in San Diego, and previous attempts to practice transparency and accountability in public safety. We then situate our work with local high school students to engage directly in the transition process, and to imagine future models of public safety with youth justice at its core.

Affective Economies in Blood Banks and Biobanks: Vital Accounting from US Transfusion Medicine to Genetic Research by Kathryn Metcalf

Medical blood banks and research biobanks are frequently figured as immobile middlemen in the larger machinations of biomedicine, possessing little power to influence the meaning or mobilisation of the biomaterials they accumulate. However, as the institutions that facilitate the collection and circulation of blood for a variety of purposes, blood and biobanks—much like their financial namesakes—legitimate certain practices and constitute the conditions of possibility for others. By following the ‘banking’ metaphor from its origins in 1930s US blood banking through global research specimen collection in the latter half of the century, this essay argues that economic rhetoric has worked to reproduce systems of classed and raced inequity within the circulation of blood through US medicine and research, in turn shifting the affective valences of raced and classed bodies as donors, patients and research subjects.

On Technologies of Enchantment at Apple's Corporate Headquarters by Christo Sims

Apple's corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley has become an object of public fascination for its technical marvels and green magnificence. However, architectural critics and urbanists have widely critiqued the campus for being socially retrograde and ecologically injurious. This essay queries this divergence in public responses to Apple's headquarters by examining how the campus has been designed to counter a growing disenchantment with neoliberalism, its technologies, and its environmental defilements. In doing so, the essay argues for the analytical potential of adapting anthropological theories of enchantment and magic to the study of contemporary uses of the built environment for branding and public relations purposes.

Living Theory: Gender Play and Learning to Live a Life Less Ordinary by Christo Sims

Learning, Technology, and the Instrumentalization of Critique by Christo Sims

Materialities of Shiny Surfaces: A Case of Chrome by Akshita Sivakumar

This talk interrogates the representational stakes of shiny surfaces in the designed world. I work through two surfacing processes, which although analogous in visual effect are worlds apart in process and material effect— rendering of chrome graphical objects and decorative chrome plating of physical objects. I demonstrate how a situated and embodied approach to the process of surfacing casts it as not only a technical accomplishment, but also a social one. By expanding the site of this sociotechnical accomplishment, I present a taxonomy of the work involved in producing shiny surfaces, and the visual, cultural, and political representations that encode them.

Press Freedom and Media Reform in a Populist Regime: How Ecuadorian Journalists and Policy Actors See the Correa Era by Manel Palos Pons and Daniel Hallin

This article considers the debates about press freedom raised by an important case of populist media reform in Latin America, drawing on interviews with Ecuadorian journalists, policy makers, and commentators involved in the policy process. Whereas these cases are commonly understood, following a “libertarian” conception of press freedom, as threats to an independent press, interviewees saw a more complex picture. The majority agreed that press freedom was threatened under former president Rafael Correa’s regime in Ecuador; at the same time, most of respondents considered media regulation necessary given a history of “media capture,” and believed that journalistic professionalism had improved in Correa’s period. These results suggest that press freedom is a multidimensional reality in which the state plays a key role, proposing a further discussion about media regulation and populism in contemporary societies.

So, it’s like you’re swimming against the tide”: Didactic avowals and parenting as intersectional Muslim women in the United States by Marwa Abdalla
Yea-Wen Chen

Muslim parents in the United States negotiate their intersecting identities and roles as parents amidst increasing (white) nationalism and anti-Muslim racism. In this qualitative study, we draw on cultural identity theory (CIT) to examine how sixteen cis-heterosexual/educated/able-bodied Muslim women parenting children in the United States make sense of their identity negotiations as individuals and parents. Our analysis identifies three overlapping themes highlighting struggles and resilience while parenting. We offer the concept of “didactic avowals” that describes contextually-contingent avowals aimed at instructing and disrupting hegemonic stereotypes and conclude by discussing the implications of these findings in light of CIT.

The Disneyfication of Authorship: Above-the-Line Creative Labor in the Franchise Era by Shawna Kidman

 The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects by Stuart Geiger

Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions. In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly.

Critical Affects: Tech Work Emotions Amidst the Techlash by Lilly Irani

Techlash encapsulates a breaking point reached with the critique of technology companies. To investigate how this whirlwind of rage, inquiry, and accountability affects the lives of tech workers, we conducted interviews with 19 tech workers. Our methodological approach and contribution adopts a style of writing and analysis associated with anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, where we focus on the affective textures of everyday life in an attempt to redirect the temptation to representational thinking to a slowed ethnographic practice. This paper dwells on the affects of tech workers facing critique and scrutiny. Through this approach, we find that emotional habitus conditions the possibilities of personal and political action and inaction in response to critique. By emotional habitus, we refer to the emotional dispositions honed among tech workers by tech culture's rationality and optimism. This habitus must shift if people are to access new ways of relating and acting. We argue for more fruitful attitudes and practices in relation to critique.

HCI Tactics for Politics from Below: Meeting the Challenges of Smart Cities by Lilly Irani

As crucial public functions are transferred to computer systems, emerging technologies have public implications that are often shaped beyond public influence and oversight. "Smart city" and "modernization" projects are just some examples of such transformations. This paper focuses on struggles over the acquisition, control, and maintenance of these public, digital infrastructures. We focus on the forms of HCI knowledge and practice that proved useful to a coalition of community organizations claiming rights of input into and political oversight over surveillance technology. Their claims were a response to their exclusion from decision-making about smart city implementation in San Diego. We offer tactics "from below" as a way to attune HCI to the needs and practices of those excluded from power over widespread technology infrastructures. Ultimately, we argue that HCI cultivates a variety of capacities beyond design and redesign that can strengthen struggles to shape real-world technologies from below.

Transportation for Smart and Equitable Cities: Integrating Taxis and Mass Transit for Access, Emissions Reduction, and Planning by Lilly Irani

Policy report synthesizing independent research on impacts of transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft on local safety, economies, and social equity. Outline of a vision for creating publicly regulated and supported "first mile last mile" transportation" that overcomes these issues.

Broken Promises of Civic Innovation: Technological, Organizational, Fiscal, and Equity Challenges of GE Current CityIQ by Lilly Irani

The claimed public benefits of the Intelligent Cities project, billed as the 'the World’s Largest Smart City Platform' by thecity, were promoted as creating data for sustainability, promoting civic innovation, and saving energy on lighting. The City states that this project 'is a tremendous technological benefit to the city and our citizens', and that 'from easier parking and decreased traffic congestion, enhanced public safety and environmental monitoring, enhanced bicycle route planning, to enhanced urban and real estate development planning, this platform can improve the quality of life in our city and boost economic growth'. The city has already spent three years and millions of dollars on this platform implementation. Yet these aspirations for civic empowerment and sustainability data have not been realized. This project has been limited by technical breakdowns, organizational limitations, and an opportunity structure that adversely affects lower-income San Diegans. Instead, the city is left with a surveillance system that pervasively records video in public thoroughfares and near homes, workplaces, and places of worship –and the city, not citizens, access and use the data. Ongoing data recording incurs costs of data storage, data transmission, and the electricity required to maintain operations of the networked computer system. This report summarizes the results of investigation of the system at the Institute of Practical Ethics and Design Lab at UC San Diego into the implications of CityIQ smart streetlights for privacy and inequality.

Dramaturgies of Policing: Performance Theory, Police Violence, and the Limits of Accountability by Patrick Anderson

This essay invokes performance theory about liveness and mortality to consider the relentlessness of police violence in the contemporary United States. Shifting among analytical, expository, and ethnographic modes of writing, the author considers officer weapons training as a form of dramaturgy that sets the stage for such violence to unfold, and then turns to the practice of civilian oversight to examine how communities have attempted to effect change in the culture of policing. Anderson draws from his service on an oversight board in San Diego, California, using this experience to highlight uncomfortable moments when police rhetoric echoes or evokes the vocabulary of performance theory, and asks: Just as performance theory might have something to teach us about policing, what might policing have to teach us about performance theory? And should these overlaps prompt us to reexamine our disciplinary vocabularies? In response, the essay argues that police “accountability” and “transparency” operate, in the current system, like theatrical devices designed to distract from the relentlessness of police violence—indeed, from the intensity with which police violence occupies the very heart of contemporary policing.

How Secrecy Leads to Bad Public Technology by Lilly Irani

Guns, germs, and public history: A conversation with Jennifer Tucker by David Serlin