skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Counter-hegemonic Computing: Toward Computer Science Education for Value Generation and Emancipation
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1930072
PAR ID:
10331458
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ACM Transactions on Computing Education
Volume:
21
Issue:
4
ISSN:
1946-6226
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 30
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Community–academic partnerships (CAPs) are being increasingly used to study and address health disparity issues. CAPs help to create new bodies of knowledge and innovative solutions to community problems, which benefits the community and academia. Supported by a grant, a partnership was formed between an academic research team and a community health organization to analyze and interpret data collected from the caregivers of asthmatic African American children living in urban low-income households. Using a case study approach, we discuss how we built a healthy CAP and the lessons learned from the process. Our analysis was guided by the six main factors that facilitate success in developing collaborative relationships, including (1) environment; (2) membership; (3) process and structure; (4) communication; (5) purpose; and (6) resources. Based on these six factors, we describe our collaboration process, challenges, and areas for improvement. We aimed to provide a “points-to-consider” roadmap for academic and community partners to establish and maintain a mutually beneficial and satisfactory relationship. Collaborating with community members and organizations provides unique opportunities for researchers and students to apply their skills and knowledge from textbooks and the classroom, engage with community members, and improve real-life community needs. Building a constructive CAP involves efforts, energy, and resources from both parties. The six major themes derived from our project offer suggestions for building a healthy, collaborative, and productive relationship that best serves communities in the future. 
    more » « less
  2. 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. 
    more » « less
  3. Extractive economies pull value from a system without restoring it. Unsustainable extraction of ecological value includes over-fishing, clear-cut logging, etc. Extraction of labor value is similarly objectionable: assembly line jobs for example increase the likelihood of cardiovascular disease, depression, suicide and other problems. Extraction of social value-vacuuming up online personal information, commodification of the public sphere, and so on-constitutes a third form. But all three domains-ecological value, labor value, and social value-can thrive in unalienated forms if we can create a future of work that replaces extraction with generative cycles. AI is a key technology in developing these alternative economic forms. This paper describes some initial experiments with African, African American, and Native American artisans who were willing to experiment with the introduction of computational enhancements to their work. Following our report on these initial results, we map out a vision for how AI could scale up labor that sustains "heritage algorithms", ecologically situated value chains and other hybrid forms that prevent value alienation while flourishing from its robust circulation. 
    more » « less
  4. null (Ed.)
    Communities of color are disproportionately burdened by environmental pollution and by obstacles to influence policies that impact environmental health. Black, Hispanic, and Native American students and faculty are also largely underrepresented in environmental engineering programs in the United States. Nearly 80 participants of a workshop at the 2019 Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) Research and Education Conference developed recommendations for reversing these trends. Workshop participants identified factors for success in academia, which included adopting a broader definition for the impact of research and teaching. Participants also supported the use of community-based participatory research and classroom action research methods in engineering programs for recruiting, retaining, and supporting the transition of underrepresented students into professional and academic careers. However, institutions must also evolve to recognize the academic value of community-based work to enable faculty, especially underrepresented minority faculty, who use it effectively, to succeed in tenure promotions. Workshop discussions elucidated potential causal relationships between factors that influence the co-creation of research related to academic skills, community skills, mutual trust, and shared knowledge. Based on the discussions from this workshop, we propose a pathway for increasing diversity and community participation in the environmental engineering discipline by exposing students to community-based participatory methods, establishing action research groups for faculty, broadening the definition of research impact to improve tenure promotion experiences for minority faculty, and using a mixed methods approach to evaluate its impact. 
    more » « less
  5. Fostering equal design partnerships in adult-child codesign interactions is a well-documented challenge in HCI. It is assumed that adults come into these interactions with power and have to make adjustments to allow childrens’ input to be equally valued. However, power is not a unilateral construct - it is in part determined by social and cultural norms that often disadvantage minoritized groups. Striving for equal partnership without centering users’ and participants’ intersectional identities may lead to unproductive adult-child codesign interactions. We codesigned a game, primarily facilitated by a black woman researcher, with K-5 afterschool programs comprised of students from three different communities – a middle-class, racially diverse community; a low-income, primarily African American community; and a working-class rural, white, community over a period of 20 weeks. We share preliminary insights on how racial and gender biases affect codesign partnerships and describe future research plans to modify our program structure to foster more effective adult-child interactions. 
    more » « less