While changing engineering departments to become more inclusive and equitable is a common goal, research repeatedly confirms that such change is rare. Notably, change efforts commonly fail in higher education institutions (Kezar 2011), and this failure is typically attributed to faculty resistance, ineffective leadership, competing values, and conservative traditions (Klempin and Karp 2018). Recent nationwide National Science Foundation-funded efforts to revolutionize engineering departments provide insight into the salience of power dynamics as drivers of or barriers to equitable, lasting change. We interviewed members of these change teams to understand the challenges they encountered and how they navigated these. Using an intersectionality framework (Collins & Bilge, 2016) we explored four lenses on power relations: (1) from a structural lens, we see that policies may affect individuals differently based on their social and role identities; (2) from a cultural lens, ideas and culture organize power, often blinding those with privilege from noticing bias; (3) from a disciplinary lens, people train and coerce each other to behave in certain ways and to sustain norms; and (4) from an interpersonal lens, we see that an individual’s social (e.g., gender, ethnicity) and role (career, position, voluntary memberships) identities can shape how they experience bias. Using these lenses, we characterized ways members positioned themselves in relation to change efforts and the degree to which they held substantive power or were endangered through their participation. In many cases, disciplinary norms revealed clashes between the original structures and cultures, and the sought-after changed structures, cultures, and disciplinary practices. For some, such clashes revealed a veneer of change progress; for others, clashes served as inflection points. We share strategies for deliberately engaging power relations in change projects.
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“The revolution will not be supervised”: Consent and open secrets in data science
The social impacts of computer technology are often glorified in public discourse, but there is growing concern about its actual effects on society. In this article, we ask: how does “consent” as an analytical framework make visible the social dynamics and power relations in the capture, extraction, and labor of data science knowledge production? We hypothesize that a form of boundary violation in data science workplaces—gender harassment—may correlate with the ways humans’ lived experiences are extracted to produce Big Data. The concept of consent offers a useful way to draw comparisons between gender relations in data science and the means by which machines are trained to learn and reason. Inspired by how Big Tech leaders describe unsupervised machine learning, and the co-optation of “revolutionary” rhetoric they use to do so, we introduce a concept we call “techniques of invisibility.” Techniques of invisibility are the ways in which an extreme imbalance between exposure and opacity, demarcated along fault lines of power, are fabricated and maintained, closing down the possibility for bidirectional transparency in the production and applications of algorithms. Further, techniques of invisibility, which we group into two categories—epistemic injustice and the Brotherhood—include acts of subjection by powerful actors in data science designed to quell resistance to exploitative relations. These techniques may be useful in making further connections between epistemic violence, sexism, and surveillance, sussing out persistent boundary violations in data science to render the social in data science visible, and open to scrutiny and debate.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1751314
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10325939
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Big Data & Society
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2053-9517
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 205395172110356
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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While changing engineering departments to become more inclusive and equitable is a common goal, research repeatedly confirms that such change is rare. Notably, change efforts commonly fail in higher education institutions (Kezar 2011), and this failure is typically attributed to faculty resistance, ineffective leadership, competing values, and conservative traditions (Klempin and Karp 2018). Recent nationwide National Science Foundation-funded efforts to revolutionize engineering departments provide insight into the salience of power dynamics as drivers of or barriers to equitable, lasting change. We interviewed members of these change teams to understand the challenges they encountered and how they navigated these. Using an intersectionality framework (Collins & Bilge, 2016) we explored four lenses on power relations: (1) from a structural lens, we see that policies may affect individuals differently based on their social and role identities; (2) from a cultural lens, ideas and culture organize power, often blinding those with privilege from noticing bias; (3) from a disciplinary lens, people train and coerce each other to behave in certain ways and to sustain norms; and (4) from an interpersonal lens, we see that an individual’s social (e.g., gender, ethnicity) and role (career, position, voluntary memberships) identities can shape how they experience bias. Using these lenses, we characterized ways members positioned themselves in relation to change efforts and the degree to which they held substantive power or were endangered through their participation. In many cases, disciplinary norms revealed clashes between the original structures and cultures, and the sought-after changed structures, cultures, and disciplinary practices. For some, such clashes revealed a veneer of change progress; for others, clashes served as inflection points. We share strategies for deliberately engaging power relations in change projects.more » « less
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Abstract Informed by decades of literature, water interventions increasingly deploy “gender‐sensitive” or even “gender transformative” approaches that seek to redress the disproportionate harms women face from water insecurity. These efforts recognize the role of gendered social norms and unequal power relations but often focus narrowly on the differences and dynamics between cisgender (cis) men and women. This approach renders less visible the ways that living with water insecurity can differentially affect all individuals through the dynamics of gender, sexuality, and linked intersecting identities. Here, we first share a conceptual toolkit that explains gender as fluid, negotiated, and diverse beyond the cis‐binary. Using this as a starting point, we then review what is known and can be theorized from current literature, identifying limited observations from water‐insecure communities to identify examples of contexts where gendered mechanisms (such as social norms) differentiate experiences of water insecurity, such as elevating risks of social stigma, physical harm, or psychological distress. We then apply this approach to consider expanded ways to include transgender, non‐binary, and gender and sexual diversity to deepen, nuance and expand key thematics and approaches for water insecurity research. Reconceptualizing gender in these ways widens theoretical possibilities, changes how we collect data, and imagines new possibilities for effective and just water interventions.
This article is categorized under:
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211035673
