Reflexively engaging with technologies of participation: constructive assessment for public participation methods

The chapter provides a view of the ongoing innovation of ‘citizen panels’ as a method public participation. It shows how recourse to technoscientific modes of political ordering is met by reflexive engagements. Critical academic discourse, direct protest actions, and dedicated assessment exercises work together as a form of informal technology assessment. They counter the emergence of a transnational technocracy of political procedure. A closer look at an assessment exercise on the future development of ‘citizen panels’, carried out April 2014, reveals the potential and irony of reflexive engagements with technologies of participation. The conclusion extends this to other areas of social innovation.BMBF, 01UU0906, Innovation in Governanc

Narrating the (Im)Migrant Experience: 21st Century African Fiction in the Age of Globalization

This study examines the fiction of 21st century African writers as a product of engagement with the forces of globalization and the related notions of cosmopolitanism and the fact of South to North migration. Analyzing migrant experiences in the writings of Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2007), Chika Unigwe’s The Black Street Sisters (2009), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2011) and Teju Cole’s Open City (2013), I argue that third-generation African writers, while building on the works of previous generations, take a global turn, and in the process, push the borders of African literature beyond the continent. 21st century African fiction, I argue, converses with, complicates, and contextualizes complimentary claims that globalization enhances cosmopolitan ideals, promotes racial diversity and preserves human dignity. These mainly migrant literatures written by Africans who transit between the continent and the West reveal an emerging new face of contemporary 21st century African literature, indicating a transition from a previous preoccupation with parochial and national issues to narrating often dystopian experiences of African migrants to the West, a situation made possible primarily by the forces and processes of globalization. My dissertation focuses on the fiction of Third African Generation writers in order to show the ways in which their works enrich postcolonial theoretical discourse by navigating the complexity that describes African fiction’s imbrication in World Literature through the experiences of migrants. Through the prism of African migrant experiences, global issues like cosmopolitanism, racism and human trafficking are viewed and analyzed with the aim of illustrating the promises and failures of globalization. I offer an overview of globalization theory, marking out what Simon Gikandi calls “the dystopic version” of globalization as the form that contemporary African diasporic fiction engages with and questions. I conclude that the form of globalization that impacts many African countries still adheres to colonialist North-South hierarchies, ensuring the preservation of neocolonial center-periphery existences

Emotional Biosensing: Exploring Critical Alternatives

Emotional biosensing is rising in daily life: Data and categories claim to know how people feel and suggest what they should do about it, while CSCW explores new biosensing possibilities. Prevalent approaches to emotional biosensing are too limited, focusing on the individual, optimization, and normative categorization. Conceptual shifts can help explore alternatives: toward materiality, from representation toward performativity, inter-action to intra-action, shifting biopolitics, and shifting affect/desire. We contribute (1) synthesizing wide-ranging conceptual lenses, providing analysis connecting them to emotional biosensing design, (2) analyzing selected design exemplars to apply these lenses to design research, and (3) offering our own recommendations for designers and design researchers. In particular we suggest humility in knowledge claims with emotional biosensing, prioritizing care and affirmation over self- improvement, and exploring alternative desires. We call for critically questioning and generatively re- imagining the role of data in configuring sensing, feeling, ‘the good life,’ and everyday experience

Speaking with things: Encoded researchers, social data, and other posthuman concoctions

We apply our heuristics for ‘interviewing’ nonhuman research participants (Adams and Thompson 2011) to the digital things of qualitative research itself: recording devices, data analysis software, and other sociomaterial concoctions recruited at different stages of contemporary research projects. We suggest that these ‘inorganic organized’ entities participate as co-researchers that inevitably extend but also disrupt research practice and knowledge construction, introducing new tensions and contradictions. Counterpointing phenomenology and Actor Network Theory, we usher some of the hidden and coded materialities of research practice into view, and glimpse unexpected realities co-enacted. Such immersive entanglements raise ethical questions about the posthumanist fluencies now demanded in social science research practice and we outline several considerations

Games, Dystopia, and ADR

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Innovating public participation methods: technoscientization and reflexive engagement

We reconstruct the innovation journey of ‘citizen panels’, as a family of participation methods, over four decades and across different sites of development and application. A process of aggregation leads from local practices of designing participatory procedures like the citizens jury, planning cell, or consensus conference in the 1970s and 1980s, to the disembedding and proliferation of procedural formats in the 1990s, and into the trans-local consolidation of participatory practices through laboratory-based expertise since about 2000. Our account highlights a central irony: anti-technocratic engagements with governance gave birth to efforts at establishing technoscientific control over questions of political procedure. But such efforts have been met with various forms of reflexive engagement that draw out implications and turn design questions back into matters of concern. An emerging informal assessment regime for technologies of participation as yet prevents closure on one dominant global design for democracy beyond the state.BMBF, 01UU0906, Innovation in Governanc

Three decades of climate mitigation: why haven't we bent the global emissions curve?

Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve. However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Synthesizing the various impediments to mitigation reveals how delivering on the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement now requires an urgent and unprecedented transformation away from today's carbon- and energy-intensive development paradigm

Real-and-Imagined Spaces: Productive Play in a Multimodal Youth Writing Program

This ethnographic study is driven by the aim of understanding how an out-of-school learning program supports the development of youth artists and writers, particularly when it operates outside of institutional strictures such as mandatory grading, curricular guidelines, and tracking based on age and perceived abilities. The research is guided by the following overarching questions: 1) In what ways do Black, Latinx, and queer students demonstrate investment in critical multimodal literacies? 2) How do world-building projects reveal the possibilities and limits of the imagination? 3) What conditions can inspire youth to articulate their identities as evolving writers and leaders? This work argues that playing with multimodal projects and imaginative world-building opportunities provided generative conditions for young adults’ development as writers, creators, and mentors. By engaging in transdisciplinary projects that invited crafting, coding, urban planning, architectural modeling, and creative writing, youth participants contributed to a participatory learning environment that celebrated their inherent capacities as critical thinkers and actors. My research ultimately highlights the ways that critical multimodal literacies can promote powerful self-expressions, complex articulations of the future, and projections of self confidence through productive play and public engagement with wider audiences