Politics are inescapable. When we conduct research, we play into these politics in many ways by the questions we ask, how we collect data, and how we talk about and disseminate our results.
"At another level, we can ask how our methods of organizing data, analytical interpretations, or findings as shared datasets are being used—or might be used—to build definitional categories or to profile particular groups in ways that could impact livelihoods or lives. Are we contributing positive or negative categorizations?" (Annette Markham, "OKCupid data release fiasco: It’s time to rethink ethics education," 2016, emphasis added)
Image source: Created by author in MS Word.
- What are assumptions that were already made before I got the data?
- What assumptions am I making?
- How does my own perspective and identity influence my approach? ("The Dance of Race and Privilege in Community Based Participatory Research" by Chavez and colleagues)
Let's discuss as a group:
- BRIEFLY, how are knowledge and power mutually constituted, according to the theorizations of Gramsci, Hall, Foucault, Freire, or others, perhaps from your own discipline?
- How might we apply the concepts below when thinking through ethics for digital research and projects?
- How do my assumptions and biases impact my research approach?
Some key concepts:
Hegemony (Antonio Gramsci)
“The ability of a dominant group to create [majority] consent and agreement [around a particular system of meanings] within a population without the use or threat of force” (Kenneth Guest, Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age, 2014, page 52)
Discourse (Michel Foucault)
- Discourses are competing ideologies (or individualized groups of statements), constructed by people and institutions in power over time, that become dominant amongst societies of people. Discourses produce knowledge in mediums that a society perceives as normative and generally does not question; in doing so, discourses pervasively shape how the people in that society think, act, and react (see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, 1969).
"Policing the Crisis" (Stuart Hall)
- "Policing the crisis" refers to the unnatural process by which certain actions (by certain people) become and continue to be understood, reported, policed, and sanctioned as a type of "crime." The police, the judicial system, and mainstream media "are actively and continuously part of [this] whole process" (Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 2013 [1978], page 54). Hall et al. focus on the emergence of "mugging" and its attendant social panic in Britain, beginning in the early 1970s.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Freire)
- "Pedagogy of the oppressed" is an approach to education and organizing to transform oppressive structures and create a more equitable, caring and beautiful world through action and reflection that is co-created with those who have been marginalized and dehumanized."One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding" (Paulo Freire., Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 2000, page 95).
For further readings, see the section "Key works (among many more!) on the politics of knowledge production and forms of knowledge" on the Resources page at the end of this workshop.
An example:
The hegemonic racial discourses that associate Blackness with criminality in the United States serve to justify police brutality towards and higher rates of criminalization and mass incarceration of Black people - and these higher rates of policing and incarcerating serve to justify the assumption of their criminality.
So then when, for example, someone attempts to make an algorithm to identify potential criminals that is produced through machine learning on "crime" data (e.g. the number of arrests or convictions in relation to demographic data) that algorithm will reproduce the racist ideologies and practices that lead to the policing and incarcerating of Black people at a much higher rate.
Further reading: