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1. Automation for the artisanal economy: enhancing the economic and environmental sustainability of crafting professions with human–machine collaboration

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-019-00915-w  

   Eglash, Ron; Robert, Lionel; Bennett, Audrey; Robinson, Kwame Porter; Lachney, Michael; Babbitt, William (October 2019, AI & SOCIETY)

   Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to eliminate millions of jobs, from finance to truck driving. But artisanal products (e.g., handmade textiles) are valued precisely because of their human origins, and thus have some inherent “immunity” from AI job loss. At the same time, artisanal labor, combined with technology, could potentially help to democratize the economy, allowing independent, small-scale businesses to flourish. Could AI, robotics and related automation technologies enhance the economic viability and environmental sustainability of these beloved crafting professions, perhaps even expanding their niche to replace some job loss in other sectors? In this paper, we compare the problems created by the current mass production economy and potential solutions from an artisanal economy. In doing so, the paper details the possibilities of utilizing AI to support hybrid forms of human–machine production at the microscale; localized and sustainable value chains at the mesoscale; and networks of these localized and sustainable producers at the macroscale. In short, a wide range of automation technologies are potentially available for facilitating and empowering an artisanal economy. Ultimately, it is our hope that this paper will facilitate a discussion on a future vision for more “generative” economic forms in which labor value, ecological value and social value can circulate without extraction or alienation. 

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2. Counter-hegemonic Computing: Toward Computer Science Education for Value Generation and Emancipation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3449024  

   Eglash, Ron; Bennett, Audrey; Cooke, Laquana; Babbitt, William; Lachney, Michael (December 2021, ACM Transactions on Computing Education)

   Students’ lives, both in and out of school, are full of different forms of value. Wealthy students enjoy value in the form of financial capital; their fit to hegemonic social practices; excellent health care and so on. Low-income students, especially those from African American, Native American, and Latinx communities, often lack access to those resources. But there are other forms of value that low-income students do possess. Most examples of what we will call Counter-Hegemonic Practice (CHP) in the African American community involve some mixture of Indigenous African heritage, contemporary innovation in the Black community, and other influences. Moving between these value forms and the computing classroom is a non-trivial task, especially if we are to avoid merely using the appearance of culture to attract students. Our objective in this paper is to provide a framework for deeper investigations into the computational potentials for CHP; its potential as a link between education and community development; and a more dignified role for its utilization in the CS classroom. We report on a series of collaborative engagements with CHP, largely focused on African American communities. 

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3. Computational reparations as generative justice: Decolonial transitions to unalienated circular value flow

   https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231221732  

   Eglash, Ron; Robinson, Kwame P; Bennett, Audrey; Robert, Lionel; Garvin, Mathew (March 2024, Big Data & Society)

   The Latin roots of the word reparations are “re” (again) plus “parere” which means “to give birth to, bring into being, produce”. Together they mean “to make generative once again”. In this sense, the extraction processes that cause labor injustice, ecological devastation, and social degradation cannot be repaired by simply transferring money. Reparations need to take on the full sense of “restorative”: the transition to a decolonial system that can support value generators in the control of their own systems of production, protect the value they create from extraction, and circulate value in unalienated forms that benefit the human and non-human communities that produced that value. With funding from the National Science Foundation, we have developed a research framework for this process that starts with “artisanal labor”: employee-owned business and worker collectives that have people doing what they love, despite low incomes. Focusing primarily on Detroit's Black-owned urban farms, artisanal textile businesses, Black hair salons, worker collectives, and other community-based production, with additional connections to Indigenous and other communities, we have introduced digital fabrication technologies, sensors, artificial intelligence, server-side apps and other computational support for a transition to unalienated circular value flow. We will report on our investigations with the challenges at multiple scales. At each level, we show how computational supports can act as restorative mechanisms for lost circular value flows, and thus address both past and ongoing disenfranchisement. 

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4. Race-positive Design: A Generative Approach to Decolonizing Computing

   Eglash, Ron; Bennett, Audrey; Lachney, Michael; Babbitt, William (April 2020, Human factors in computing systems)

   Removing racial bias from algorithms or social process is necessary, but alone it is insufficient. The “bias” framework tends to treat race as unwanted noise; best when suppressed or eliminated. This attitude extends to classrooms, where an attempt to be “colorblind” leads to what Pollock calls “colormute”; fearful of even mentioning race. Just as feminists developed “sex-positive feminism” in the 1970s, we now need race-positive design. Thinking about race as positive presence—as cultural capital; histories of resistance; bindings between lands and peoples—can be a generative force in computing development. Here we detail the application and assessment of African fractals, Native American bio-computation; urban artisanal cyborgs and other hybrid forms in which race-positive technology design can make important contributions. These include community-based CS education; computational support for sustainable architecture; unalienated labor in human-machine collaboration, and other forms of generative justice. 

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5. Redesigning On-Line Food Consumption to Enhance Racial and Social Inclusion Through Generative Production Networks

   Johnson, Keesa V.; Eglash, Ron (June 2021, New design ideas)

   Bennett, Audrey; Eglash, Ron (Ed.)

   The food system in the US has supported growing dominance of industrial agriculture, corporate distribution chains, and other means by which power is exerted at the expense of environmental sustainability, citizen health and wealth inequality. Economic impacts have been most damaging to low resourced and racialized communities. Online purchasing creates new opportunities--particularly in the context of the covid epidemic--but barriers may arise that are also along race and class divisions. This paper examines an initial data set for two Black led collaborative Food System projects (two urban farms and a mobile farmers market initiative), all of which are primarily staffed by African American leadership and serve a diverse set of community members with Black consumers being of the majority. While issues such as government benefit payments constitute formal economic barriers, other challenges are better illuminated through the lens of the extraction of value: the loss of community connections and increased dependency on modes of production that do not return value to the community. We define “generative production networks” as those which maximize unalienated value return rather than value extraction. We utilize this framework to examine alternative online systems to overcome these barriers. 

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