Storytellers of Minor Computing

“Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness” (2023) is a creative research project by South African artists Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson. In fabricating a fictional institute and its archive, the artists explore and imagine vernacular technological practices operating across the African continent. It invites to ask: what if the origins and histories of technologies were told from African histories, cultures and traditions? This project also won the Mozilla Creative Media Award. See also other endeavours by Lo-Def Film Factory [112].

Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence working group that published their position paper that explores questions of Indigeneity and relationship to AI, AI’s place in different Indigenous cosmologies, and Indigenous AI futures. This group’s work led to the establishment of Abundant Intelligences programme [113].

INDIGENOUS AI

Resources is a collection of readings the organizers drew upon to develop the workshops as well as texts suggested by the participants. We encourage others to explore these texts to find inspiration as we have.

https://www.indigenous-ai.net/

Full Stack Feminism is a project of writings and resources on working from intersectional feminist perspectives across the full stack of technological research, development and design, namely: data and archives; infrastructures, tools and code; and access, experience and integration [114].

Full Stack Feminism

Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities responds to calls within DH and broader fields to take action against bias and implicit, as well as explicit, forms discrimination that manifest in our digital worlds and technologies.

https://fullstackfeminismdh.pubpub.org/

The ‘Working Body’: Interrogating and Reimagining the Productivist Impulses of Transhumanism through Crip-Centered Speculative Design [115]

This text investigates how technologies work and fail for disabled people, employing a disability justice perspective. Would full body exoskeletons leave their users stranded in case of failure? What technologies of intimacy create joy and pleasure? What might decentralised, de-individualised assistive tech look like? As the authors state, “Rather than being invincible, the cripborg's relationship with technology is complicated by the ever-present functional and financial constraints of their assistive devices” [115].

The ‘Working Body’: Interrogating and Reimagining the Productivist Impulses of Transhumanism through...

Appeals to ‘nature’ have historically led to normative claims about who is rendered valuable. These understandings elevate a universal, working body (read able-bodied, white, producing capital) that design and disability studies scholar Aimi Hamraie argues ‘has served as a template […] for centuries’ (2017: 20), becoming reified through our architectural, political, and technological infrastructures. Using the framing of the cyborg, we explore how contemporary assistive technologies have the potential to both reproduce and trouble such normative claims. The modern transhumanism movement imagines cyborg bodies as self-contained and invincible, championing assistive technologies that seek to assimilate disabled people towards ever-increasing standards of independent productivity and connecting worth with the body's capacity for labor. In contrast, disability justice communities see all bodies as inherently worthy and situated within a network of care-relationships. Rather than being invincible, the cripborg's relationship with technology is complicated by the ever-present functional and financial constraints of their assistive devices. Despite these lived experiences, the expertise and agency of disabled activist communities is rarely engaged throughout the design process. In this article, we use speculative design techniques to reimagine assistive technologies with members of disability communities, resulting in three fictional design proposals. The first is a manual for a malfunctioning exoskeleton, meant to fill in the gaps where corporate planned obsolescence and black-boxed design delimit repair and maintenance. The second is a zine instructing readers on how to build their own intimate prosthetics, emphasizing the need to design for pleasurable, embodied, and affective experience. The final design proposal is a city-owned fleet of assistive robots meant to push people in manual wheelchairs up hills or carry loads for elderly people, an example of an environmental adaptation which explores the problems of automating care. With and through these design concepts, we begin to explore assistive devices that center the values of disability communities, using design proposals to co-imagine versions of a more crip-centered future.

https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/soma.2020.0326

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds [116]

An article that explores how to shift perspectives from individual technological objects in their design, to assemblages of infrastructures, practices, people and artefacts and how speculative design might help in that.

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper examines the role of technoscientific speculation in large-scale development projects in postcolonial spaces, building on recent work in STS, design research, and postcolonial studies in and beyond CSCW. We analyze two historical cases of ...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3313831.3376515

Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design [41]

This book, and the corresponding website, proposes to see design as “investigative and activist, personal and culturally situated, responsive and responsible”. Rosner recovers and reclaims minoritized stories of computing and design, such as NASA’s “little old ladies” - women who built storage for Apollo’s missions through the labor of weaving, towards different modes of design and computing practice [41]

Toward a hauntology on data: On the sociopolitical forces of data assemblages [123]

Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s work on science, blackness, and the human, Ezekiel Dixon-Román “examines the ways in which data become haunted by sociopolitical relations of racialization. The article then points toward alternative futures by arguing for Wynter’s proposed Autopoetic Turn/Overturn praxis of science to critically examine the sociogenic codes toward reconstituting the human” [123].

Toward a hauntology on data: On the sociopolitical forces of data assemblages

This article engages the philosophy of science of data, with a focus on the extent to which data are always already imbued with racializations.As Alexander Wehe...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0034523717723387

Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject [124]

Couldry and Mejias suggest an understanding of the conversion of daily life into data through the history of colonialism, thus understanding data relations as enacting “a new form of data colonialism, normalizing the exploitation of human beings through data, just as historic colonialism appropriated territory and resources and ruled subjects for profit” [124].

Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject

We are often told that data are the new oil. But unlike oil, data are not a substance found in nature. It must be appropriated. The capture and processing of so...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1527476418796632

V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media [125]

Situated in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, V2_ Lab for Unstable Media is an interdisciplinary center for art and media technology. Founded in 1981, V2_ “presents, produces, archives and publishes research at the interface of art, technology and society” [125].

V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media

V2_ is an interdisciplinary center for art and technology in Rotterdam (the Netherlands).

https://v2.nl/

Masakhane: A grassroots NLP community for Africa, by Africans [110]

“Masakhane is a grassroots organisation whose mission is to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans. Despite the fact that 2000 of the world’s languages are African, African languages are barely represented in technology. The tragic past of colonialism has been devastating for African languages in terms of their support, preservation and integration. This has resulted in technological space that does not understand our names, our cultures, our places, our history.“ [110]

Crip Technoscience Manifesto [120]

In a special issue on Crip Technoscience, starting from a place of disability justice, community, activism, and scholarship, “this manifesto calls attention to the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of what we name as “crip technoscience,” practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world.” [120]

Crip Technoscience Manifesto

As disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we are effective agents of world building and dismantling toward more socially just relations.The grounds for social justice and world remaking, however, are frictioned;technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference that matters. This manifesto calls attention to the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of what we name as “crip technoscience,” practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world. Disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life. But we also harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability. Attentive to the intersectional workings of power and privilege, we agitate against independence and productivity as requirements for existence. Instead, we center technoscientific activism and critical design practices that foster disability justice.

https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29607

Feminist Cybernetic, Critical Race, Postcolonial, and Crip Propositions for the Theoretical Future of Human-Machine Communication [121]

“The authors review theoretical trends in HMC research, as well as recent critical interventions in the HMC journal that usefully reshape and expand our research terrain. […] Feminist cybernetic, critical race, postcolonial and crip theoretical approaches are offered, examining how they fill research gaps in HMC, expanding content areas explored, and addressing diverse intersectional pressures, situated, and time/space dynamics that impact human machine interaction.” [121]

Feminist Cybernetic, Critical Race, Postcolonial, and Crip Propositions for the Theoretical Future of Human-Machine Communication

The authors review theoretical trends in HMC research, as well as recent critical interventions in the HMC journal that usefully reshape and expand our research terrain. Conventional research such as positivist and quantified approaches are identified as restraining research questions and delimiting understandings of concepts including subjects, agency and interactivity. Feminist cybernetic, critical race, postcolonial and crip theoretical approaches are offered, examining how they fill research gaps in HMC, expanding content areas explored, and addressing diverse intersectional pressures, situated, and time/space dynamics that impact human machine interaction. The authors suggest these shifts are essential to expanding HMC research to address diverse populations, regional realities around the globe, and engage in vibrant scholarly debates occurring outside HMC. They contend these shifts will outfit HMC to weigh in on important issues of justice, equity, and access that arise with emerging technologies, climate change, and globalization dynamics.

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/hmc/vol8/iss1/2/

Transreal Tracing – Queer-Feminist Speculations on Disabled Technologies [122]

Drawing on speculative design and Barad’s Transmaterialities, the author introduces the “Transreal Tracing Device reimagines our bodies as surfaces of possibility, encouraging explorations into how disabled bodies do and could look like. The speculative device offers an opportunity for positive renegotiations of disabled bodies as malleable and desirable – as ontologically indeterminate and transcendent” [122].

Transreal tracing: Queer-feminist speculations on disabled technologies

In a world where technologies often serve to amplify the persistent rendering of disability as an undesired deficit, what we need are empowering utopias concern...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14647001221082299

“All Names are Pseudonyms”: A Critical Reflection on Pseudonymizing Names in HCI: “All Names are Pseudonyms” [119]

This article sheds a light on the pseudonymization processes within in HCI. It ends with “a call to the HCI community to acknowledge the power and privilege in renaming participants with three recommendations for consideration” [119].

“All Names are Pseudonyms”: A Critical Reflection on Pseudonymizing Names in HCI

The human-computer interaction community has made some efforts toward racial diversity, but the outcomes remain meager. We introduce critical race theory and adapt it for HCI to lay a theoretical basis for race-conscious efforts, both in research and ...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411763.3450376

Computational Textiles and Architecture [118]
by
Felecia Davis

Data Quilts: Exploring Environmental Data Through Textile Art [117]

A blog article by Nancy Smith with many great references.

Data Quilts: Exploring Environmental Data Through Textile Art – Data Science by Design

Nancy Smith

https://datasciencebydesign.org/blog/exploring-environmental-data-through-textile-art

Forum InformatikerInnen für Frieden und gesellschaftliche Verantwortung e.V.

“Das Forum InformatikerInnen für Frieden und gesellschaftliche Verantwortung ist ein Zusammenschluss von engagiert-kritischen Fachleuten aus Wissenschaft und Praxis der Informati(onstechni)k.” [111]

translated to: “The Forum Computer Scientists for Peace and Social Responsibility is an association of committed and critical experts from the science and practice of information technology (informatics).”

On FIfF’s history:

“Das FIfF wurde 1984 – also vor 40 Jahren – aus einer historischen Situation heraus gegründet, als es galt, das Schweigen einer Zunft zu brechen, die so maßgeblich an der Entwicklung automatisierter und informatisierter Kriegsführung beteiligt war. Die Gründungsmitglieder leisteten dem NATO-Doppelbeschluss offen Widerstand, sie wollten die Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie vor allem als Mittel der Völkerverständigung genutzt wissen. Seit damals haben sich unsere Ziele ausdifferenziert, doch unsere Wertevorstellungen sind nach wie vor die gleichen.” [111]

translated to: “The FIfF was founded in 1984 - 40 years ago - out of a historical situation in which it was necessary to break the silence of a guild that had played such a decisive role in the development of automated and computerised warfare. The founding members openly resisted the NATO Double-Track Decision and wanted information and communication technology to be used primarily as a means of international understanding. Since then, our goals have become more differentiated, but our values remain the same.”