Is there a right to shape technology?

La creación de las instituciones democráticas modernas durante los últimos dos siglos ha venido acompañada de reivindicaciones de derechos humanos, incluyendo un conjunto mayor de beneficiarios y de condiciones. Un desarrollo paralelo es el reconocimiento cada vez mayor del papel que la tecnología juega en las controversias sobre los derechos humanos y las fronteras de la ciudadanía. Un movimiento global de personas discapacitadas que comienza en los años 60 revela la fuerte conexión entre las reivindicaciones de derechos humanos y modelos tecnológicos específicos. Este movimiento ofrece lecciones que apuntan a nuevas formas de pensar los derechos humanos y su puesta en práctica en la sociedad moderna

Political Artifacts In Scandinavia: An American Perspective

Abstract not available

Planet of the Apps

Reflexión sobre el origen y función actual del concepto de "innovación" y su aplicación al terreno educativo mediante la inyección de diversas TIC.Reflexión sobre el origen y función actual del concepto de "innovación" y su aplicación al terreno educativo mediante la inyección de diversas TIC.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Subjektivität, Technik & Politik: jenseits von Mitteln und Zwecken ; politische Dimensionen technologischer Wahl

Überlegungen zum Zusammenhang von Subjektivität, Technik und Politik werden angestellt. Auf den ersten Blick präsentieren sich neue Technologien in ihrem Gebrauchswert. (Wie können wir ein Werkzeug oder System am besten benutzen?). Sobald das Mittel aber verwendet wird, tauchen andere Merkmale als die reine Nützlichkeit auf. Das Gerät braucht Ressourcen und es stellt Ansprüche. In seinem Umfeld beginnen sich die sozialen und politischen Verhältnisse zu verwandeln. Während diese Phänomene oft als unbeabsichtigte Folgen bezeichnet werden, sollten sie von jedem, der verstehen möchte, wie Technologien das Gewebe des alltäglichen Lebens verändern, kritisch analysiert und vorhergesehen werden

Artefatos têm política?

Tradução de artigo de Langdon Winner Translation in portuguese of the article "Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, by Langdon Winne

Mapping the Margins: Navigating the Ecologies of Domestic Violence Service Provision

Work addressing the negative impacts of domestic violence on victim-survivors and service providers has slowly been contributing to the HCI discourse. However, work discussing the necessary, pre-emptive steps for researchers to enter these spaces sensitively and considerately, largely remains opaque. Heavily-politicised specialisms that are imbued with conflicting values and practices, such as domestic violence service delivery can be especially difficult to navigate. In this paper, we report on a mixed methods study consisting of interviews, a design dialogue and an ideation workshop with domestic violence service providers to explore the potential of an online service directory to support their work. Through this three-stage research process, we were able to characterise this unique service delivery landscape and identify tensions in services' access, understandings of technologies and working practices. Drawing from our findings, we discuss opportunities for researchers to work with and sustain complex information ecologies in sensitive settings

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

Algorithms, governance, and governmentality:on governing academic writing

Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls ‘‘social sorting.’’ Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic or value-centered design of such actors. In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin

Lets Talk about Race: Identity, Chatbots, and AI

Why is it so hard for chatbots to talk about race? This work explores how the biased contents of databases, the syntactic focus of natural language processing, and the opaque nature of deep learning algorithms cause chatbots difficulty in handling race-talk. In each of these areas, the tensions between race and chatbots create new opportunities for people and machines. By making the abstract and disparate qualities of this problem space tangible, we can develop chatbots that are more capable of handling race-talk in its many forms. Our goal is to provide the HCI community with ways to begin addressing the question, how can chatbots handle race-talk in new and improved ways