SYTYD-SJI2022: [So, You Think You’re Doing] Social Justice Informatics: Foundations, Challenges, Lessons, Communities, and New Directions Syracuse University Syracuse, NY, United States, August 13, 2022 |
Conference website | https://tinyurl.com/sytyd-sji2022 |
Submission deadline | July 20, 2022 |
Traditionally relegated to the margins, calls for justice in data, information, technology, and related fields seem to have started being heard and taken up in the mainstream. As bell hooks aptly points out, however, the journey to the center of a discipline is often accompanied by the treacherous processes of oversimplification, commodification, and loss of context, which often scrubs anti-oppressive approaches of their emancipatory potentiality and turn them into what they were meant to dispel – discriminatory practices inflicting harm, dispossession, trauma, and alienation.
This led us to ask, “So, you think you’re doing social justice informatics?” as a way of promoting reflexivity and examining how our scholarship, practice, and commitments can be evaluated to ensure that we do not unwittingly leave justice behind in the course of our critical explorations. Our goal is not simply to identify challenges and failures but also to celebrate the work of our justice-oriented communities and coalitions and arrive at constructive future directions collectively.
To this end, we invite participation in a day-long workshop seeking to arrive at a collective understanding of the communities, practices, theories, and pedagogies emerging out of social justice informatics (SJI) and to discuss the tensions, blind spots, and unintended consequences of the existing scholarship. In doing so, we hope to chart new ways toward justice-oriented knowledge and praxis.
Submission Guidelines
Abstracts (500-1,000 words) detailing the reflections of interested community members, activists, students, scholars, and practitioners on coalition-building, research, practice, pedagogy, or personal experiences related to the challenges in pursuing equity and justice in information and technology are welcomed. Abstracts should be submitted to social.justice.informatics@gmail.com. Possible topics of submission include, but are not limited to:
- developing accountability frameworks for justice-oriented work in informatics, data, and technology
- engaging in critical reflections on critical data studies and related fields
- centering critical perspectives in data, information, and technology work
- discussing the challenges of building transdisciplinary connections between humanistic theories and computational methodologies
- voicing the struggles of social justice advocates, activists, initiatives, coalitions, and collectives in data, information, and technology
- responding to social science and digital humanities studies using intersectionality “in name only”
- countering the invisibilization of individuals and communities in justice-oriented computational work
- restoring subjectivity, interrelationality, and kinship to those whose experiences have been flattened and objectified by well-intentioned social science research
- experiences of digital/data colonialism inflicted by social science research seeking to engage BIPOC, diasporic, and non-Western communities
- experiences of hypervisibility, precariousness, or alienation among older adults, LGBTQI+ and people with disabilities participating in social science research.
*This is a free event and you do not need to submit an abstract if you would like to participate but not present, however registration is required to attend.
Venue
This is a hybrid event and can be attended both online and in person, at Syracuse University.
Organizing Committee
- Jasmina Tacheva - Human-Centered Computing and Design Lab, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
- Srivi Ramasubramanian - CODE^SHIFT, S.I. Newhouse School Of Public Communications, Syracuse University
- Elizabeth Carter - Civil & Environmental Engineering, Engineering & Computer Science, Syracuse University
Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed to Jasmina Tacheva at ztacheva@syr.edu.