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Module 9 – Wrap up!
Hey everyone,
Thank you so much for your time and commitment this semester. If any of you had a semester like mine, it wasn’t easy, but we’re at the end! We did it!
I’m not going to bog you down with more modules, there’s no final exam for this, no final assignment, I just want to say thank you for joining me on this journey and if you ever need anything at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Good luck with your finals and whatever you’re on to next and keep shining!
Don’t read, skim!
Hey everyone! I hope you’re thriving. I have covid again and would never advocate working while sick. I’m a hypocrite! No, I actually just feel this crushing responsibility to you all that you get something out of this course this semester so I wanted to keep us moving along since we’re quickly getting towards the end.
So I want to share this tip/trick that I thought of last semester, the mostly unacknowledge tool of “skimming” or “scanning” as a teachable reading technique.
It’s something I’ve done in shame, in “I’m cheating” or “I’m not paying attention to the author” or “I’m skimming this and what if I miss something important and draw the wrong conclusion”
Still to this day, many years into my academic career, I typically pick up a book or an article and read it from start to finish (aka I don’t get as much reading done as I’d like). My grandmother taught me to be a reader and she was very strict about reading cover to cover and never starting a new book before you finish the one you’re reading.
I wish I had known that wasn’t an *actual* rule in the world and instead just her preference. My reading trajectory would’ve probably been much less stressful.
So now, for those of you who have never been given this gift, I’m going to tell you that skimming and scanning are acceptable and even promoted reading strategies for getting through lots of different texts.
I tried to find a procedure for scanning/skimming that I liked, but they’re all sort of bland and say the same thing. This link was the clearest, simplest, version I could find after an evening of searching. It comes from the University of North Carolina’s Learning Center and it outlines strategies for academic reading.
Full disclosure: I started thinking about scanning/skimming because the article I want you to read on electronic miniaturization is 22 pages (with sources). The article stays on our topic of thinking about disability and technologies that can/should be inclusive. It’s also interesting because it gives a history of how this type of electronic miniaturization was created by disabled people to support their desire for hearing aids.
Please skim/scan the article attached and tell me something new that you find both from the technique of skimming/scanning and about electronic miniaturization.
Enjoy the day!
Algorithmic Justice
Hey all!
We’re more than halfway through the semester (I think) and we’ve been deliberately taking our time. Please DM me if you need any support or feel lost or just want to say hello. I’m here for you and hope this asynchronous space can still feel human.
Let’s jump back into thinking critically about the fields inside engineering. This goes for everyone, but especially for Computer Science majors — have you considered the ways in which your field has bias? the ways your field has a profound impact on how society is shaped?
I’m not sure if these questions are being raised in your Grove courses (I hope they are! Tell me if they are!) and since we’re considering both rhetoric and composition, these questions must be taken into account.
For this week, I would like you to watch this 13 minute talk by Dr. Joy Buolamwini about facial recognition and the effects when the sample set skews white and male.
For the module comment, I would like you to consider the following:
Take note of 2-3 rhetorical issues Dr. Buolamwini raises that speak to you. For me, it was her reframing of the “under-sampled majority” as a way to think about who is represented in most technological spaces and who is erased. So often we say “minority” when speaking about the people of the global majority who are not white and that set standard creates an intentional bias which has real implications (think policing, thinking community funding, think incarceration rates).
Have you ever considered algorithmic bias when using your devices?
What are some ways we can shift the dominant data set?
If you have an experience of algorithmic bias that you want to share, I welcome it in this space but it is not required.
Thanks everyone for staying engaged and enjoy the rest of your week!
Module 4 – Crafting new worlds
Hi everyone!
Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments in the last section. You raised some really good points about the uneven distribution of resources from environmental cleanup to military funding. I wanted to start with Science Under the Scope, because I think it unveils the reality in how our environments (not just natural, think social systems too) shape our reality. It’s much more palatable to believe that science is neutral and that large institutions (academia, government, large corporations) have our best interest in mind, but we see the reality now.
Your classmate Annah raised a very important point about how people might be “drawn to these industries that typically more privileged groups benefit from (ex: consumer electronics, pharmaceutical services)… as a way of getting a share of the pie, especially if we do not have the same privileges of the wealthier groups heavily profiting off our labor…” and also how we “follow the wealthy out of necessity and generational values.”
What if we decided to make a different pie entirely? A pie that was abundant and not deficient? Capitalism and whiteness will always be extractive and create unbalanced hierarchies; that is their function. Is there a way for people to experience abundance outside of these systems? What if we put our energies into crafting that type of world? There are people already working towards a world outside these rotting constructs. We can look to Black women and femmes who have been sharing with us Afrofuturistic dreams forever.
In Octavia Butler’s science fiction, there is room for disable Black femmes, they are often the heroines. This isn’t a literature course, but I highly recommend reading any of Butler’s post-apocalyptic work where the systems that were in place failed and it’s up to the true innovators to create something new.
Okay maybe that was a bit of a tangent from our text, but it’s all connected. I had a friend come over for dinner a few weeks ago, they’re a designer, and they challenged me to think about how much my life is impacted by other people’s decisions. They said “look at your phone, Steve Jobs and his team designed that, would you have done it differently?” Olivia McKayla Ross is doing some very cool work as a “cyber doula” – I didn’t get into the course, but I love this question she poses (ig link) “what if software was made by people who love us?”
For this week, let’s finish up Science Under the Scope sections nine, ten, and eleven. And please respond to any two of the questions I posed to you in this module (lol I posed a lot). I want to hear from you!
Next week we’ll change gears a bit and look at some writing in the field of engineering so that we can practice the form.
Thanks everyone!
Who “benefits” from science
I hope you’re all thriving this week! Thank you for your patience, as I mentioned on Slack, last week the kids were out of daycare, I was sick, and it was just too much! I hope that if you too are experiencing a bottleneck of overwhelm that you’re able to take some time for yourself and relax.
I was planning on finishing up Science Under the Scope, but I think we can break it up between this week and next week just to really take our time and round it out. A lot of these considerations around the neutrality and impact of science are probably new to you… and there’s no rush! we have nowhere to get to! Urgency is a trait of ableist white supremacy culture, it perpetuates the myth that we need to be productive to be valuable, that we need to be doing labor to have value. Fuck that noise.
We will take our time, let’s let this all marinate.
Segments eight, nine and ten of Science Under The Scope dive deeper into the real world impacts of uneven resource distribution and how that siphoning of resources by the overly resourced (usually white people) will intentionally minoritize other people and keep hold of power. Wang shows us this through breaking down “who benefits” from science industry funding. This is not the science we think about when we’re dissecting frogs (do the youth even still do that? I’m old and I still remember those little frog organs omg).
The example Wang gives is the difference between scientific research funding for cystic fibrosis (which predominantly affects white people) and sickle cell anemia (predominantly affects Black people).
How does this under representation happen? “The reason the answer to all of these questions is kind of the same – (middle class folks, white folks, folks with access to science ed, folks who see themselves represented in science, by science, as scientists) – is not by chance or some inherent factor of culture or biology. The reason is because our world’s histories of injustice, oppression, marginalization, and white supremacy have created this segmentation, this privilege.”
And so when we start to think about the intentional and systemic oppression of non-white people by white people and people who uphold white supremacist ideals, it becomes clearer how scientific research and data skews to favor a specific group.
For this week, please read eight, nine, and ten, and share two or three areas of research or technological development that might have bias towards people in power. Extra points if you can find something like this in your field (we’ll be doing writing project later this semester, you might want to use the content you find now).
Thanks everyone! Next module we’ll finish up Science Under the Scope. Have a great week!
Science isn’t neutral. Womp.
Hey everyone!
I hope you enjoyed the first three sections of Science Under The Scope. Before we jump into the content of the text, I want to mention why I chose it. This course is a “writing composition” class so we get a chance to consider different forms of “writing”. Most of my students think that writing is the five paragraph argument essay they had to do in high school, but it’s so much more! I love this graphic text because it shows how something “non-traditional” can advance critical science discourse. Remember that there are always ways to communicate beyond the written word! I’ll talk more about this throughout the course, I just wanted to point it out for anyone who’s been into comics or coding and thought those genres weren’t writing.
I want to consider this statement at the top of the third section “the biggest danger of objectivity is that it allows us to pretend that science is entirely neutral” → this fixation on “objectivity” is a way to distract us from the reality that nothing is neutral because no science is created in a vacuum. But let’s sit with this for a second, because I feel like students frequently get uncomfortable pushing up against the myth of neutrality. What does it mean for you that science needs to be neutral? How does it challenge your understanding of the field if it turns out the science is biased? Does it make you uncomfortable? (spoiler, it’s okay if the answer is yes, it made me uncomfortable the first time I realized it).
Now let’s tie this into writing composition: the same hypothesis holds true – most research journal articles that contain this “objective” research are crafted in a genre (specific format) meant to elicit authority (voice). “The information contained here is important because we said so (that’s rhetoric!).” The way facts are displayed is deliberate and makes it difficult to refute (intentionally, again rhetoric). So what does it mean if a journal article looked more like this text that we’re reading and contained critique of the existing systems that are in place?
For this week, please continue to read Science Under the Scope. I’d like you to get through section four, five, six, and seven and then consider: who didn’t go into science because of one or more structural barriers and what impact does that have on how we currently perceive scientific accomplishments? Throw your ideas in the comments section please!