Bringing Black Feminist's Thoughts, Self-Definitions, and Creative Agency to Digital Media and Technology Design

Abstract

Users from marginalized groups are often faced with the challenges that result from a lack of diverse thought in the design and implementation of media and technologies that we engage in our daily lives. It is these artifacts that result in the harm, erasure, and hyper-surveillance of Black and Brown people. We seek to disrupt problematic narratives present in tech and design fields by (re)inserting Black Feminism and leveraging our personal experiences to build on design methods. Though research centered on the importance of women's experiences and standpoints in tech practice is crucial, feminist scholarship has not always reflected the values and the liberation of women who are not white. This paper uses personal narrative to argue for the value of Black feminist thought and methods in the sub-disciplines of computing, such as digital media, human computer interaction (HCI) and human-centered computing (HCC).

The Bias Cut: Toward a Technopoetics of Algorithmic Systems

“…Think of surveillance scholar Simone Browne's (2019, 115) analysis of wrongful algorithmic determinations, such as the fingerprint readers used to establish Muslim American Brandon Mayfield as a suspect in the 2004 Madrid, Spain, train bombings. By turning a body into data, such techniques reinforce "a logic of prototypical whiteness" (Browne 2019, 162) that disciplines minoritarian subjects and renders fluid and intersectional identities unseen (Benjamin 2019;Bennett et al 2021;Bosley et al 2022;Browne 2019, 114). Back in the TEDx theater, the cultural bias that disproportionally affects people along existing lines of inequity (race, class, gender, disability) is on some minds, but it hasn't fully entered the public consciousness when it comes to technology.…”