I continue to work through issues of difference and diversity. A couple of years ago I posted on difference as a resource, and I still agree with that principle. But especially this past year as I read through books like Robin Wall Kimmerer‘s Braiding Sweetgrass and Thomas King‘s The Truth About Stories, and have conversations with… Continue reading Beyond Diversity
I’ve been reflecting for several weeks on a growing emotion within me, not quite depression, not quite anger. Today I’m settling on the word despair, the loss of hope. In past years I would look forward in anticipation to the Christmas season — not the shopping, never the shopping — but the moments with family, the… Continue reading Despairing Christmas, Hoping for Advent
Engagement, especially when qualified with words like community, public, or civic, shows up in a lot of contexts. I recently wrote a post about librarians as engagement leaders, and in this post I want to follow up a bit further regarding my current thinking about the purpose of engagement. In a 2012 paper about community-based research, Randy… Continue reading Engagement and Two Forms of Social Change
I appreciate Virginia Eubanks’ expansion of information technology expertise outlined in her 2011 book Digital Dead End. This is not to say that everyone has the same expertise, by any means. But it is to challenge the primacy of those whose expertise is in the physical or software domains. A recent post touched on the concept… Continue reading EVERYONE is a Technology Expert
Technology education at all levels is inherently political. Knowledge of the world is socially constructed within specific historical and social contexts that are fundamentally mediated by power relations. Cyberlibertarianism and its underlying foundational frameworks can be understood, then, as a pivotal factor mediating political relations by becoming a core foundational design inspiration for, and means for reifying neoliberal influences and power relations through, our technologies. A critical lens complements a sociotechnical systems approach by exposing ways in which technology artifacts are socially constructed, intentionally and unintentionally, to reinforce exploitation, marginalization, and cultural imperialism.
