Connecting Infrastructure and Power

I was intrigued by a post from my wonderful friend and colleague, Eva Schiffer, on LinkedIn a while back. Coming off a conversation with the creative Gianluca Gambatesa, Eva quoted him with something that opened up a lot of questions in my mind about power. Gianluca said “There is a tight link between power structure and infrastructure. By making infrastructure more accessible, we can destabilize and open up power structures. Oh. So. Much. To. Unpack! Then Eva went on to ask for examples.

Before I can mine examples, I want to understand what we mean by infrastructure and power structure. In my group process work most often the aim is to distribute power out to engage everyone and support work that distributes agency and responsibility across a group. It is rarely a goal to destabilize power, but to distribute it. So the idea of “opening up” power structures resonates.

Decision making can be a good place to test ideas. In practice that might look like clarity of decision making (as opposed to fake consultation – I’ll listen to you but I already made up my mind), clarity of how power is exercised and by whom in decision making processes. Power structure is expressed in this case by who makes what decisions, how they are communicated and enacted.

So what is infrastructure in this case? In the LinkedIn thread most references were to collaboration tools: Google drive, Slack, etc. Accessibility to tools requires they are available, properly configured to distribute control of the tools, backed up so useful experiments don’t risk mass destruction of stuff, and skills for people to use those tools. Who can choose and mess with the tools is super important – something we learned in our research for Digital Habitats.

I immediately wondered about the role of transparency of tools, how they are configured and who controls them as one sort of accessibility. There are other layers of accessibility: is a tool friendly for those who cannot hear or see? Is it free of embedded bias? Are the use practices built on shared values and goals or is it a free for all? My bias here is finding the sweet spot between over control and under control. For a diverse group, is the tool accessible ENOUGH to allow access and support diversity? Eva, in a latter comment, noted “Transparency is part of it. But also: Does this structure make it easy for me to fully contribute if I’m not highly privileged?”

That takes us to the less visible side of tools-as-infrastructure – the processes we use with the tools, each other and our shared work. Who has the power (there is that word again) to, as Eva called it, “fully contribute” regardless of one’s priviledge and power.

Process is infrastructure. Lack of process is infrastructure. Workarounds to avoid or change process is part of infrastructure as far as I’m concerned. Yet it is rarely noted in ones “infrastructure plans,” eh? It is the place where power is exercised with little visibility, or perhaps little accountability.

Some other stuff:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2019/08/08/facebook-and-electio
n-influence-will-history-repeat-itself/

Renee Diresta gave a superb talk at Long Now about the difference
about social media which Long Now retweeted about:

"When people say propaganda has always existed, they're absolutely
right. But what has not always existed is inexpensive,
sophisticated, precision targeting."
- Renee DiResta (@noUpside) on how social media algorithms help
spread propaganda on altogether new scales.

https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1518706648730140672

Disability Justice Audit Tool

Screenshot of the cover of the audit tool reading: Disability Justice: An Audit Tool. Written by Leah Lakshmi, Piepzna-Samarasinha, envisioned by Stacey Park Milbern and Leak Lakshmi Piepzan-Samarasinha
Cover page

I recently downloaded Northwest Health’s “Disability Justice: An Audit Tool” at https://www.northwesthealth.org/djaudittool# – it is a quick, free download. From the website their description:

Disability Justice: An Audit Tool” is aimed at helping Black, Indigenous and POC-led organizations (that are not primarily focused around disability) examine where they’re at in practicing disability justice, and where they want to learn and grow. It includes questions for self-assessment, links to access tools, organizational stories and more.

While white facilitators aren’t the target audience, this is a terrific and more broadly useful piece. For me it stems from Intersectionality, one of the ten principles of disability justice. Intersectional work is one of the essential practices we all need to learn and use, especially those of us who call ourselves facilitators. While the checklist is organizational oriented, it is great food for thought and ACTION.

First, what is disability justice? From the tool:

Disability justice is a term and a movement-building framework (i.e. a way of envisioning the ways people can organize around and think about disability) that centers the lives and leadership of disabled Black, Indigenous and people of color and/or queer, trans, Two Spirit and gender nonconforming people.
To paraphrase Patty Berne, disability justice leader and co-founder of DJ performance and political collective Sins Invalid, disability justice steps into the “cliffhangers” left over from the disability rights movement.

Disability Justice: An Audit Tool

I was particularly taken by Patty Berne’s description about the cliffhangers left oer from the disability rights movement. It make me wonder about how we overlook something because we are focusing on something else we think is important. I reflect upon my feminism as a white woman and how it so thoroughly distracted me from racism for so long.

If we are not intimately involved in the issues of disability rights, we can forget about it. Time for action.

The action I put forth to myself is to read, journal and reflect upon the tool to identify first where I have an am falling short on disability justice in my life and work. It has been gratifying to see how many people have started to pay attention to things like access issues in online meetings, so that opens the door a crack for more and more fundamental changes. The checklist can help me go deeper. Thanks, NW Health and all the individuals who created this tool.

Read this Report Now: Black Women Thriving

Ericka Hines of Every Level Leadership and her network launched this project to deeply understand and provide data about Black women in the workforce. I’ve just starting reading and already find it full of compelling, clear data and recommendations. So I don’t want to wait to spread the word. From all Ericka’s good work, comes possibility for the rest of us to take action. THRIVING!

Black Women Thriving Report

From the Archives: Bridges I was missing

Two large rocks in a bay with a macrame bridge of circles connecting the two.

One of the things my “lying fallow” period has afforded me is more time and focus to learn about important things I have either avoided or missed. Racism and white supremacy are some of the big ones. So as I review old blog drafts, there is sadness to see how I picked up signals in 2014 but did little to nothing to act on them. Yeah, “too busy” is a crap excuse. So with a dip back to 2014, I realized some part of me was picking up on equity issues, and on decolonization (which really confused me at first and it is a huge embarrassment. I apologize.)

So take a stroll with me back to On Equity Issues in the Maker Movement, and Implications for Making and Learning | Empathetics: Integral Life. As usual, you will get more out of this by reading the full, original post, but I appreciated the lessons, as they are another example of how boundaries trick and fool us, and finding ways to bridge across them (even if we create those same boundaries in our own minds).

There are some lessons that I think we can glean from these examples, lessons that can be heeded by others interested in making and learning who want to make sure we keep equity at the heart of the conversation. The first lesson is to bridge making practices into valued cultures of non-dominant youth. Dreamyard, as an example, has teens creating musical instruments, and brings fashion crafting into its programming. The second is to link making practices with taking action on social justice issues. Both NySci and MOUSE do this when they, respectively, engage in making for the purposes of shedding light on environmental conditions in a neighborhood or creating technologies that make life easier for those with disabilities. And a final lesson is to design maker education initiatives with, not just for, local communities. Brooklyn College Community Partnership is a wholly grassroots organization, and in figuring out what the maker movement might mean for their educational programs, they made sure that a full range of stakeholders, especially youth, were at the table. In many ways these lessons are not new – theories of culturally relevant pedagogy, funds of knowledge, co-design and participatory design would all suggest creating learning environments in similar ways. We just need to remember to continually apply, and advance, such ideas as we explore this intersection of making and learning.….

…And we can look to examples that are rooted in the work of innovative, equity-oriented educators to see what good practice looks like so that, as Buechley says, the new boss doesn’t look the same as the old boss.

I am continuing my learning journey, making mistakes along the way. I don’t write about it much because I worry that that is all writing, no action. So this is a rare moment.

From the Archives: Sharing Science Knowledge Through Music

Dang, now THIS looks like fun!

YouTube Video

One of the challenges among scientists is to describe the work they do in language the rest of us can understand. That’s the idea behind a new program at the University of Tennessee that uses music to bridge that communication gap.

The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, or NIMBioS, isn’t a place for intellectual lightweights. The whiteboards are tagged with the frenetic graffiti of advanced math, and the conversations are dense with the mysterious jargon of advanced science. So the last thing you’d expect to see there is an office door with a sign reading, “Songwriter in Residence.”

Jay Clark is one of five Songwriters in Residence who will move in and out of NIMBios this year. Each has one month to write two songs that put the scientific experience into words and music.

“A week and a half, two weeks ago, when I told someone about it, they’d look at me like, ‘What the hell you going to write?’ ” Clark says. “My answer would be, ‘You know, I’m not real sure yet. I’m just hoping it will come to me.’ “

The Songwriter in Residence program is the brainchild of NIMBioS director Louis Gross. Gross noticed that the scientists and mathematicians with whom he works aren’t always that good at communicating their ideas in a concise, accessible way. Moreover, he says, most people don’t really have the time or patience to wade through complicated explanations of scientific theory. As a result, we don’t always have a good sense of what scientists are doing.

“The better that we are at getting the ideas across without going into all the detail that often people are not that interested in, the better off we are as a nation and as a community of scientists,” Gross says.

via Scientists And Musicians Compare Notes : NPR.