Making Sense of Imbrication: Popular Technology and “Inside-Out” Methodologies

Nancy Campbell and Virginia Eubanks

Proceedings Participatory Design Conference 2004

The authors argue that “popular technology education assumes that individuals already possess vast experience with information technologies and thus come to technological literacy programs as knowledgeable and asset-bearing. Most technology training programs assume that those who seek technology education are inexperienced or skill-deficient.” The authors took a different approach and tried to cultivate a tacit critique by workshop participants that they were being marginalized by in the “new economy.” (65), taking a critical pedagogical approach to ICT / new media education.

The authors’ stance “establishes a place to open inquiry that begins with a consciousness located in a particular local site’ [38:74],” builds on “Situated Actions (Suchman),” because they “have found that contextualizing personal experiences offers a route to macro-structural analysis of the ‘information age’.” I’m not sure why such an inquiry would not apply just as well to any other “age.”

The authors try to explain the distinction between “literacy,” and “training,” moving to a general explanation of critical literacy by discussing the work of Paulo Freire. They extend Freire’s arguments to their own work: “traditional technology training does not necessarily, or even commonly, lead to economic, social, or political empowerment of marginalized populations [8, 25: 95].” However, “If technology training was reconceived as training for critical citizenship it would look and feel different.”

The authors tried to develop methods for validating participants. They list five: Situation, Collaboration, Scale Change, Methodological Flexibility, Social Justice Goals; of which “‘Meeting people where they are at,’” seems most significant. They discuss Haraway and Suchman and “Standpoint Epistemology.” “A ‘standpoint’ is a cognitive, emotional, and political achievement ‘crafted out of located social-historical-bodily experience– itself always constituted through fraught, noninnocent, discursive, material, collective practices.’ [19 304-305, n32].” All of is an attempt to define “situated experience.”

First of all, the fact that experience, action, etc. need to have the word situated placed in front of them seems completely crazy. Its seeming redundancy helps us understand that our denial of human nature is expressed by and enforced by language. Everything is situated.

I think it may be a good idea to contrast this with Vaneigm re: the subjective. Since I’m reading these articles to develop a critical framework for facilitating technological literacy through the participatory design of robotic or telepresent technologies, the relationship of situated robotics to “standpoints” are significant. These ideas could also be discussed in terms of resource allocation and conformity enforcement functions in complex adaptive systems behavior.

So, a standpoint is the “outcome of an analytic or social process,” while Friere tries to establish “the total impossibility of being neutral before the world.”

Much of the rest of the paper is devoted to describing the results of workshops the authors carried out, often through transcripts of conversations. A lot of what the authors promote just seems like common sense: don’t treat people like objects and objects like people, but our perceptions have been inverted. Should probably read Friere or Bordieau.