Kavita Philip, Paul Dourish, and I co-authored a piece for Science, Technology, and Human Values called Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey. The piece brings together feminist science technology studies with postcolonial understandings of culture and theory to offer some tactics for detangling contemporary temporary politics. Enjoy! We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Inspired by an article on turn-of-the-19th-century American whiteness this morning, I made my first tumblr-style triptych. 

Today we’re greeted again by images desecration, brutality, and celebration as YouTube screenshots hit the news showing Marines urinating on dead Taliban soldiers — with other Marines out of frame filming it, of course. Hillary Clinton condemned the acts and claimed that they are utterly incompatible with the values of “the American people” and the discipline of the military. Consistently, the behavior is located in the aberrant soldiers that we as a nation can come together to declare as the exception that emphasizes our distance from this event.

What if making these films isn’t the exception? What if it is instead the symptom — the eruption — of a culture of media spectacles of domination by forces convinced of their opponents inhumanity — or their own righteousness? I submit as evidence the t-shirt declaring “God will judge our enemies * We’ll arrange the meeting.” I spotted this shirt on a flight from Newark to Orange County two months ago. I was shocked that somebody would wear that in public, that they would wear that in public in such a regionally heterogeneous place as an airport, and at the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the shirt — the this man is god’s sweeper.

The video of the marines urinating isn’t just evidence of men urinating. It is evidence of a social milieu where you can get those people behind the frame to film this thing. It’s evidence of a milieu where marines felt like this act should be commemorated in the larger public that is YouTube viewership.

In a Radical History Review piece on Abu Ghraib, Nicholas Mirzoeff points out that breaking people into lumps of bare life is a documented interrogation strategy for the CIA and the army: “Declassified CIA and Army interrogation manuals make it clear that the point of all humiliation was to break down what the military understands as the civilized veneer of the mind to break through to the supposedly primitive core, where resistance is less effective” (2005:52). Freud gone wild.

These strategies of breaking down and unleashing primitivism isn’t just reserved for the interrogated. I had a high school friend who joined the Marines who explained that part of Basic Training was to break soldiers down to a primal place. He told me about an exercise where the marine to be placed in a deep hole and left to scream at the sky as loudly and deeply as they could muster until their superior tells them they can stop.

Jennifer Terry, professor of Women’s Studies at UCI, has also shown that making such videos is also a routine part of military action for documenting operations, proving the effectiveness of particular violent techniques, to inspire adherents to one’s cause, and to mock opponents. “They are part of larger and psychological and affective dimensions of this kind of war,” (“Killer Entertainments” in Vectors Journal). You can view the US military and opposition force videos that Terry collects, curates, and juxtaposes in Vectors multimedia journal. Videography is routine.

I’m no fan of the Taliban, but it is downright deceptive to declare that these recurring videos of violence are just the work of bad apples.

The Guardian is hosting a large digital literacy campaign. (Thanks for the reference via Nana and friends).

Yikes! All the gender, race, technology, and education bromides of yesteryear warmed over and gussied up in a 2012 all-you-can-eat buffet. They’re so clichéd that it would be insufferably dull to list pedantic critiques, so let’s play some party games:

1. Spot the girl-child-of-color receiving her digital training!

In both of the two main campaign-launch photos, the foreground, on the margin and slightly blurred, shows a white child; the center face, in sharp focus, is a girl (varies from Asian- to Afro- British). At first glance simply centering diversity (and contesting the digitial divide) in a standard techno-progress narrative, it also feeds the anti-immigrant / anti-Black narratives that see white British citizens’s education as somehow marginalised, or usurped, by people of color and immigrants. Here the Asian-geek stereotypes and the Afro-British centering would occupy different fear-filled roles in the racist narratives of improving British education. Hmm, a rather clever photo if your intention is to attract a range of left- and right- wing readers to this live blog on digital literacy…

2. Spot the deterministic story about inherent gender differences !

“Geek perception of computer science putting off girls, expert warns.” Groan. There’ve been almost two decades of critique of this model. The article hits all the major stereotypes – everything from spreadsheets to war games is said to be an automatic turn-off for girls – and, believe it or not, it actually ends on a “positive” note by naming Engineer Barbie among girl-encouraging initiatives.

3. Spot the story about university-industry partnerships!

Workers of the future must be digital, not analog. So there’s the warning to schools and universities to look sharp about training workers for real-world employment, or risk becoming dead-end educators. There are predictable quotes from Mercedes engineers and Education ministers about modernising education. The shiny rewards here are slightly more exciting than Engineer Barbie:successful education programmes are offered the chance to create students who will design the next generation’s scenes of Death Eaters flying across the river Thames – this is, surely, enough incentive to cross art, design, and computational pedagogy? Jokes apart, this reminds me of critiques (such as Zelda‘s, or The Simpsons‘) of art-school graduates who are tracked toward sweatshop-design-labour, and also of the untimely death of truly experimental interdisciplinary programmes like ACE.

4.  Spot the Hollywood script !

Yeah, of course, Mark Zuckerberg features in this feel-good story. And there’s the predictable Brilliant-libertarian-geek-versus-Stodgy-Government accompanying story: “What governments don’t seem to understand is that software is the nearest thing to magic that we’ve yet invented.” Not far behind is the summons to change the world by coding it:  ”All you need to change the world is imagination, programming ability and access to a cheap PC.” Voilå: ICT4D! Just 3 short steps from hollywood to academic script.

I could go on. There are, of course, good intentions and some nice ideas buried somewhere here, but for the most part, this is vacuous stuff. Party-game jokes aside, it’s depressing, and no laughing matter, that debates on science education in a supposedly progressive newspaper are still framed in such clichéd ways, when they could draw on years of critical work from STS, science education, and popular movements (ranging from the Levellers to Creative Commons). More food for thought for us : we’re in fields that are now becoming more interesting and complex in their insights on these questions, but, apparently, as our understanding improves, we grow more and more distant from the things that get called “real world pragmatics” – those issues that drive the apparent constraints of recession economics. We could easily pick holes in every term in the previous sentence. But also, more practically: I think that more public funding for these purportedly esoteric areas would actually result in measurably better results in many of the areas the Guardian cares about, as well as some of the areas we care about. But sketching that out is a difficult and challenging task (and not one that our careers easily allow time for).

Thoughts?

It looks like feminist-claimants like Sarah Palin have stirred National Organization of Women to speak intersectionally. I may be particularly surprised after reading these notes from the trenches of trying on trying to deal with white feminist privilege in non-profit organizations from DailyKOS. I wonder if NOW is doing anything more than sending out surprisingly with-the-decade emails.

I wonder if their attention to poverty is at all connected to Smiley and West’s Poverty Tour bringing class back into the public American conversation after decades of McCarthyite chilling.

Today you are going to receive tons of requests for donations from women’s organizations because today is Women’s Equality Day. We aren’t asking you for any money. Not because we don’t need it; we do. But we aren’t asking because the equality path we have been on must end!

We are a long way from women being fully recognized as fully human in this country. There are many reasons for this, but one is especially highlighted today – the definition of equality. I know what our definition of equality is – that all human beings are born free, equal in dignity and rights, and must enjoy the equal protection of the law against discrimination based on sex, sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, age or other actual or perceive classification.

Sadly, this year actually shows huge gains for the kind of equality too many of our mothers and grandmothers worked for (equality only if you can prove you’re like a man)…more women have reached the ranks of millionaires and billionaires and more women are running for higher office. But is that what our mothers and grandmothers really wanted for women? Is that what we’re fighting for – a world where women occupy half of the 1% of 1% who own more than 99.9%? Is our job done when women participate “equally” in an economy that requires women’s free labor and forces 90% of women children and elderly to live in poverty ? No!

Is it equality when women running for the highest political offices believe that other women’s bodies should be controlled by an ever more intrusive big government? Is it equality when women claw their way to the top of predatory corporations exploiting other women, children, the disabled, the infirm and the elderly? No!

We have to stop celebrating kyriarchal* equality because the forward momentum we have achieved is driving us down a hole with no ladder out! The way forward is not to leave behind the 99.9% of women and their families. We must stop rewarding the women who continue to promote the kind of feminism that excludes women of color, young women, poor women, sick women, uneducated women and any woman who doesn’t have the right pedigree.

We must work to become intersectional feminists; understanding that our liberation is bound to each other’s liberation and knowing that the time to achieve success wasn’t yesterday and isn’t tomorrow. The time is today.

Register to vote, work, act to insure that everyone you know registers to vote, then work, act to educate everyone you know and encourage, facilitate others to do the same because when people lead, leaders follow. Women must lead moving all us toward the path of real freedom and equality – a path free from dominance.

Wow – Oprah’s a billionaire! How’s that working for YOU?

Linda Long
Action VP, California NOW

Think. Talk. ACT!

* kyriarchal: the structures of domination working together as a network – not just one group dominating another.

Donna Haraway recently delivered the Wellek Lectures at UC Irvine , an annual series at UC Irvine that brings leading critical theorists to build on their work in the UCI community.

The lectures are available for free online:
* Day 1: “Playing Cat’s Cradle with Companion Species: Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, and a Feminist Multispecies Open” (with introduction by Kavita Philip)
* Day 2: “Love in a Time of Extinctions and Exterminations: Staying with the Trouble” (with introduction by David Theo Goldberg)
* Day 3: Zoopolis: feminist multispecies worlding for old cities yet to come (with introduction by Gabi Schwab)

The talks build on When Species Meet, urging us to respond rather than represent. Haraway calls us academics, makers, breeders, eaters, architects, and undercutters to stay with the troubles thrown up by living in necessarily uninnocent ways, in a world that lives through its messy entanglements of labor, history, intimacy, and power. Enjoy!

illustration of Louise Brigham's box furniture, from a 1910 article in the Ladies' Home Journal

Recently, in the course of preparing an exhibition in Los Angeles, I stumbled across an early 20th century designer and teacher named Louise Brigham. I’d never heard of her, and I’ll bet you haven’t either. She turned up in a hundred-year-old copy of the Ladies’ Home Journal, which probably isn’t high on anyone’s reading list. In it was an article by Brigham entitled “How I Furnished My Entire Flat from Boxes.” The accompanying illustrations showed rooms filled with early-modernist furniture, strikingly more austere than either the conventional furniture designs of the day or the then-avant-garde Mission and Prairie styles being popularized by Gustav Stickley, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others. Brigham was inspired in part by the rectilinear designs of the Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann, but her work has a raw simplicity that won’t surface again until the 1930s, in the ‘crate furniture’ of Gerrit Rietveld.

living room, ca. 1900

But what really startled me was that all of the furniture was built out of recycled packing crates—the soap boxes, canned-corn boxes, and gelatin boxes that would otherwise have been tossed on a scrap heap. Brigham had, in fact, designed an entire program of such furniture and published a book about it the prior year, entitled Box Furniture. In this book, she gives not only plans for a hundred different pieces of furniture, but also instructions in basic carpentry and color schemes for entire rooms.

Gustav Stickley plant stand, 1900

Unlike most design in any period, Brigham’s book is aimed squarely at working people of very limited means; her intention was to bring both practical skills and advanced design to those who might otherwise not be able to afford either. She wrote Box Furniture at a time when the average American worker earned less than $400 a year and a single piece of new furniture could cost a week’s wages. Brigham went on to furnish her own New York apartment almost entirely from box furniture, as a kind of model and advertisement for her system, at a total cost of $4.20.

Gerrit Rietveld, crate stool, ca. 1934

She also proselytized for her system widely in Europe and the United States, and she built a number of pieces into settlement houses, as she was an active champion of the settlement movement. She founded a workshop for teaching basic box-furniture carpentry to boys (and later girls), the Home Thrift Association; it had its first headquarters in New York’s Gracie Mansion. I was intrigued by what seemed an early appearance in the United States of an ethos of sustainability in design and wondered why I hadn’t heard of Brigham. Perhaps I had come across her and just forgotten? But when I went to google her, I discovered that very little has been written about her since her heyday, apart from a tiny handful of recent articles that argue for her as a pioneer of sustainable and affordable design. She did not even have a Wikipedia page. She does now, because I wrote one for her.

Louise Brigham, design for quadruple desk to be built out of 8 soap boxes

I got so interested in Brigham that I dug out the contemporary newspaper articles on her, and I got a copy of her book (it’s also available as a PDF download from several websites, including Google Scholar). Working from these sources and two fine articles by Larry Weinberg and Jessica M. Pigza, I’ve reconstructed as much of her life as I was able to in a little over a week of digging, but huge gaps remain. I’m working on filling in some of the gaps, because the questions that occurred to me when I first saw Brigham’s work are still unanswered: What kind of person was she? What was her family background? What kind of art education did she get? Why did she not become a professional designer to the well-to-do like her friend Hoffmann? Did her ideas directly influence the De Stijl designers, and if so, how? How did she get involved in the settlement house movement? And most of all: how is it that this visionary spirit has all but disappeared from the historical record?

Louise Brigham's Wikipedia page

Box Furniture received a good deal of initial exposure; it went through several editions and was translated into a number of foreign languages. It is one of the earliest design projects to incorporate the idea of modular or sectional units and to organize an entire program around both social and aesthetic objectives. It is a direct precursor of today’s do-it-yourself and sustainable design movements, as well as of consumer-assembled kit furniture such as Ikea produces. Yet none of Brigham’s work is known to have survived, and her box furniture project is all but unknown today, barely rating a footnote in the canonical story of 20th century furniture design.

The reasons for this erasure deserve closer examination, as part of the larger story of women’s role in the history of art, design, and technology. Right now, there are too many gaps in the story of her life to draw secure conclusions. So I invite anyone who knows something of Brigham to contact me, or to add to her Wikipedia page. And everyone in the Los Angeles area is invited to visit a small exhibition about her work that I’ve created—in tandem with another writer, Ruth Coppens—at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry. Entitled Evidence of Evidence,  it will be up until March 30th. (I’ve written a bit about how that exhibition came about here.)

We’ve all been following the wikileaks story, so here’s an invitation to conversation. On the face of it, the issue should be at the heart of all that is Feminist Technoscience. A sexist geek helping data to live free?  Most of us are rolling our eyes and waiting for the world to catch up with the fact that data lives in networks that are always already public and private, that there have been long histories of sexist men with power-lust on all sides of geo-politics,  that technological tools have long been part of a democratization of power, embodying all the contradictions of democracy itself , and that Assange himself (neither Neo nor Caligula, just an everyday misogynist geek, ‘cept David Fincher hasn’t yet made a movie about him) is not astonishingly new.

There have been many good reasons for us to withhold comment: the odd incompleteness of media reportage (there are always pieces missing, but this one’s remarkable for being almost all gaps, despite the sheer abundance of data at the heart of the story); the silliness of the op-ed pieces both in support of Assange (“He’s Neo! We’re in The Matrix !”) and against (“He’s a hacker ! They have no respect for authority!”).

If rendering Assange heroic or evil is not interesting, most of what remains worth following in the media coverage is the historical context. Two interesting contexts are (1) the historical effects of leaking secret documents on the emergence of geo-political terrain-grabs, as in the examples here and (2) the historical effects of narratives of rape, as here and here .

But then, we’re not in the business of just observing historical context here, are we? Here’s the part that I think needs more feminist technoscientific comment: If he is a sexist (all evidence points to “yes”), or a rapist (much evidence points to a possibility), does that mean his intentions toward data are depraved?

Birth or Not website (screen cap)

I imagine I’m not the only one on DiffEng who’s been following the strange history of the Birth or Not website, which was created by a couple named Pete and Alisha Arnold and invited internet visitors to vote on whether Alisha should abort her pregnancy. As one of the site’s taglines put it:

You can vote and choose whether we abort or keep our unborn child. For the first time, your vote on the topic of abortion can make a difference.

Right.

Leaving aside for now the misguided notion that ‘other’ votes on abortion don’t matter—such as voting for a pro-choice senator over an anti-abortion senator—what are we to make of this? Articles and interviews elsewhere on the web suggest one of two impulses behind this website: either it was a nasty stunt by Pete—who’s been outed as an anti-abortion polemicist active in right-to-life forums—that was designed to disgust people with abortion by offering them a personalized (but entirely fake) intervention; or, as Alisha states in a Nov. 24th blog post, it was the couple’s attempt to find their way out of an impasse since Alisha is pro-choice and initially disagreed with Pete over whether to terminate her pregnancy (she has since decided to have the child). Or, just possibly—a bit of both.

The vote was closed down on Nov. 28th, and as of this writing the 2 million votes registered on site (raw score: 78% for abortion, 22% against) were being analyzed for—I love this part—election fraud.

What I mainly see when I consider this story is a use of internet technology to enable something that looks new—voting on an abortion—but is actually just a sheeped-up old wolf of a problem. The central, bedrock issue in abortion is always the same: who controls the (pregnant) woman’s body? Those opposed to abortion don’t want to grapple with this easily answered question so they always try to change the debate to the much more elusive question of when an embryo can be considered ‘alive’, ‘viable’, ‘ensouled’, ‘human’, etc. Or they make claims about the woman’s inadequacy to the task of managing her own body—hence those recurrent suggestions about putting ‘crack mothers’ in jail.

Allowing a stranger on the internet to tell a woman if she can have an abortion is no different from allowing a legislator or judge or doctor to tell her this. Offloading the hard decision in any of these cases implies that the woman does not need to be in control of her own body and—worse—is perhaps even incapable of it. The Birth or Not site may have helped Alisha make her own decision (although it has blown back on her as well, if the reports that she lost her job over the website are true), but it has harmed, in a small way, every woman who has fought for this most basic right of control over her own body.

The fact is that Alisha wouldn’t even have the option of putting her decision up to a bunch of netizens if a lot of votes hadn’t been cast over a lot of time to create the current legal protections—shaky as they are—for her right to decide for or against an abortion. Those were the votes that ‘made a difference’.

Objectifying from Lilly Irani on Vimeo.

I made a version of this video for a Delhi public photography exhibit called Blow Up. It is based on ideas that Kavita and I have been talking about for a while. I will avoid captioning too much, but I’ll say that I’m reminded of Donna Haraway’s reminder in When Species Meet that we are all in “differential relations of dying.” This is my first foray into video production so I’d love discussion — constructive feedback, tips, and thoughts on film as a medium for critical academic output.