Notes

🔖 Step Inside The Museum of Obsolete Library Science –

🔖 WR: Mysteries of the Organism—Beyond the Liberation of Desire –

On the occasion of the birthday of Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev, who passed away last year, we explore what his classic 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism has to offer today’s struggles against nationalism, fascism, and dogmatism.

🔖 Kelly Pendergrast, "Disassembly Required" –

Instead, what would it look like relate to today’s machines as the 19th century weavers did, and make decisions about technology in the present? To look past the false promise of the future, and straight at what the robot embodies now, who it serves, and how it works for or against us.

🔖 Julia Viebach, "Transitional archives: towards a conceptualisation of archives in transitional justice", *International Journal of Human Rights*, 2020 –

This paper seeks to trouble and complicate core assumptions about transitional justice and archives and to critically examine the relationship between them. Records about conflict and dictatorship are like records in general never only a reflection of realities, but they constitute these realities. Following Harris’ plea to find ‘exigencies’ to the transitional justice paradigm it suggests the term transitional archives to highlight the multi-layered afterlife of human rights records. It thereby emphasises the open-ended nature, ‘the in-becoming’, of transitional archives. It argues that by including critical archival studies in our thinking of transitional justice and a violent past, we can push beyond the dominant discourse of healing, closure and reconciliation, and open up space to investigate not only how the past but also transitional justice itself is produced at the intersection of power, memory, narrative and violence.

🔖 Yolanda Rankin, Jakita Thomas, and Nicole Joseph, "Intersectionality in HCI: Lost In Translation" –

So how should researchers operationalize intersectionality in the context of HCI? Start by asking a series of questions: Are you thinking about everyone as you design this tool? Who is at the table to inform decisions about how this technology will be designed and for whom? Do the key stakeholders, intended users, and communities in which the technology is being situated for use reflect the diversity of humanity and respect for those who have a history of being disenfranchised and marginalized? How have I, as a person of privilege, co-constructed research engagements with marginalized scholars or communities? Am I conducting research on or with participants? In what ways have I interrogated my privilege (e.g., race or gender) to dismantle hegemonic systems of oppression that exist within HCI? Next, when summarizing findings in papers, be sure to include how power informs the research process. Scholars who use their findings to address intersectionality interrogate how widely accepted research traditions facilitate the social reproduction of whiteness. Calling this out in Method sections becomes an indicator of a scholar’s commitment to using intersectionality for social justice in HCI.

See also the authors’ proposed reading list for potential resources.

🔖 Eugenia Zuroski, "Holding Patterns: On Academic Knowledge and Labor" –

We know academic institutions have great desire and need for what we have to offer. We feel it in being incessantly called upon to give of ourselves. We want to contribute our expertise in ways that feel just, supported, acknowledged, duly compensated. Right now, we feel like it is taken from us, that we are a resource being mined. You frequently tell us you welcome our voice, but we do not feel silenced; we feel wrung out. Your current methods of working with us are unsustainable.