- Criticalcomputing-thirdspace

March 30, 2022: UofT Critical Computing Talk Series - Margaret Jack
by Critical Computing 29 Mar '22

29 Mar '22

Dear attendees, Thank you for your interest in attending Maggie Jack's talk tomorrow. Please find the joining link below: *Topic: Media Ruins: Infrastructural Restitution and Building Futures in Post-Conflict Cambodia Time: Mar 30, 2022 02:00 PM America/Toronto* Join Zoom Meeting https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/84569792433 Meeting ID: 845 6979 2433 Passcode: 506152 One tap mobile +16473744685,,84569792433#,,,,*506152# Canada +16475580588,,84569792433#,,,,*506152# Canada Dial by your location +1 647 374 4685 Canada +1 647 558 0588 Canada +1 778 907 2071 Canada +1 438 809 7799 Canada +1 587 328 1099 Canada +1 613 209 3054 Canada Meeting ID: 845 6979 2433 Passcode: 506152 Find your local number: https://utoronto.zoom.us/u/kekZqL8oED Join by SIP 84569792433(a)zoomcrc.com Join by H.323 162.255.37.11 (US West) 162.255.36.11 (US East) 69.174.57.160 (Canada Toronto) 65.39.152.160 (Canada Vancouver) Meeting ID: 845 6979 2433 Passcode: 506152 Join by Skype for Business https://utoronto.zoom.us/skype/84569792433 Best Regards, Organizers

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Fwd: Critical Computing Seminar (March 30): "Media Ruins: Infrastructural Restitution and Building Futures in Post-Conflict Cambodia"
by Ishtiaque Ahmed 25 Mar '22

25 Mar '22

Dear All, Hope you are doing well. We are back with our Critical Computing Seminar! Our next speaker is Maggie Jack and she will deliver her lecture online on March 30 at 2 pm. Please find the details about the event below (and how to register). Best Regards, Ishtiaque == Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science Faculty Fellow, Schwartz Reisman Institute <https://www.torontosri.ca/> The University of Toronto Program Committee Chair, ICTD 2022 <https://ictd.org/ictd2022/> Bahen Centre for Information Technology, Room 5262 Saint George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 2E4, Canada Ph: +1 647 220 3482 web: https://www.ishtiaque.net/ My Availability: Google Calendar Link <https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ishtiaque.uoft%40gmail.com&c…> == ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Priyank Chandra <priyank.chandra(a)utoronto.ca> Date: Fri, Mar 25, 2022 at 4:24 PM Subject: Critical Computing Seminar (March 30): "Media Ruins: Infrastructural Restitution and Building Futures in Post-Conflict Cambodia" To: ISCHOOL-FAC-REG-L(a)LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA < ISCHOOL-FAC-REG-L(a)listserv.utoronto.ca> Cc: Ishtiaque Ahmed <ishtiaque(a)cs.toronto.edu>, Robert Soden < robert.soden(a)utoronto.ca>, Adrian Petterson <a.petterson(a)mail.utoronto.ca>, Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat <rashidujjaman.rifat(a)mail.utoronto.ca>, Cansu Ekmekcioglu <cansu.ekmekcioglu(a)mail.utoronto.ca> Dear All, We are happy to announce the March edition of the Critical Computing seminar series. This a monthly online seminar where we invite scholars to discuss topics in critical computing. The objective of the seminar is to create a broader understanding of computing from different ethical, social, and cultural perspectives. You will find more information about this seminar series and upcoming speakers by following the link: https://sites.google.com/view/uoft-critical-computing/seminar-series This month (March, 2022), Margaret "Maggie" Jack, a postdoctoral scholar from Syracuse University will give a talk on “*Media Ruins: Infrastructural Restitution and Building Futures in Post-Conflict Cambodia*” on *Wednesday, March 30, 2am to 3:30pm EST.* We invite you all to join the seminar. Please check the following link for more details about the seminar at: https://sites.google.com/view/uoft-critical-computing/seminar-series/margar…. The registration link is at: https://bit.ly/CCS_MaggieJack. A flyer is also attached to this email, and I have appended the seminar details at the bottom of this email. Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone interested (within and outside UofT). We look forward to seeing you all at the seminar. Best Regards, Priyank Chandra (On behalf of the Organizers) Assistant Professor Faculty of Information University of Toronto *Media Ruins: Infrastructural Restitution and Building Futures in Post-Conflict Cambodia* Maggie Jack, Syracuse University, The School of Information Maggiejack.info @slouching_mags *Time:* 30 March, 2022 from 2-3.30 PM, EST The registration link is: https://bit.ly/CCS_MaggieJack This talk describes the ways that Cambodian new media creators commemorate lost artists and an imagined better way of life through finding, repairing, and disseminating historical film, photography and cinema artifacts from before the Khmer Rouge period, often using digital tools. Reconstructing such media artifacts through a process of *infrastructural restitution *is a mode of healing from decades of national conflict and a form of subtle political action in an increasingly authoritarian Phnom Penh. Building on theory at the intersection of infrastructure studies (Star and Ruhleder, 1996; Larkin, 2013) and media’s relationship to memory (Gordon, 2008; Larkin, 2008; Richards, 1994), the concept of infrastructural restitution allows us to (re)integrate the importance of memory, the affective, and the spiritual into scholarship of infrastructure. This case gives new insight into the tension in transnational technology use between creative appropriation and the problematic political economy of mainstream platforms. The empirical sections of this talk are based on my historical and ethnographic research in Phnom Penh beginning in January 2014, including 20 months of full-time research from June 2017-January 2019. *Bio:* I am a postdoctoral scholar on the NSF-funded project “Creating Work/Life <https://creatingworklife.com/>” with a team spanning Syracuse University (PI: Ingrid Erickson <https://ischool.syr.edu/people/directories/view/imericks/>) and University of California, Irvine (PI: Melissa Mazmanian <https://melissamazmanian.com/>). I am a research affiliate at the Digital Life Initiative <https://www.dli.tech.cornell.edu/> at Cornell Tech in New York City and an adjunct professor at NYU Tandon, teaching “Transnational Technology” in the spring of 2022. I hold a PhD in Information Science <https://infosci.cornell.edu/> (2020) from Cornell University, where I had a minor PhD concentration in Anthropology <https://anthropology.cornell.edu/> and was an active member of the Southeast Asia Program <https://seap.einaudi.cornell.edu/>. I use my past professional experiences in the technology industry in Silicon Valley and the international development sector and my academic background in the History of Science (BA Harvard University; MPhil University of Cambridge) to approach questions of contemporary computing with both scholarly and practical lenses. My writing is published in the *Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing *(CHI), * Interactions* *Magazine*, *The Information Society*, *Global Perspectives*, *Computer Supported Cooperative Work* (CSCW), and elsewhere. My book-in-progress *Media Ruins* is under contract in the Labor and Technology series at the MIT Press (Katie Helke, editor; Winifred Poster, series editor). *List of relevant work:* - *Margaret Jack* and Seyram Avle. “A Feminist Geopolitics of Technology”* Global Perspectives*. June 2021. <https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.24398> https://online.ucpress.edu/gp/article/2/1/24398/117347/A-Feminist-Geopoliti… - *Margaret Jack*, Sopheak Chann, Steven J Jackson, and Nicola Dell. 2021. Networked Authoritarianism at the Edge: The Digital and Political Transitions of Cambodian Village Officials.Proc. *ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.*5, CSCW1, Article 50 (April 2021). <https://www.maggiejack.info/s/Networked_Authoritarianism_at_the_Edge.pdf> https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3449124 - *Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Infrastructural Restitution and the Geopolitics of Technology*, forthcoming book

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DCI presents Vanessa Thomas – Defund Big Tech, Refund Community
by Christoph Becker 16 Mar '22

16 Mar '22

Hello all, I want to invite you all to the next DCI event<https://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/defund-big-tech-refund-community-reflection…>, in which Associate DCI Fellow Dr. Vanessa Thomas will build on the TechOtherwise platform’s Defund Big Tech report and reflect on their experiences attempting to implement the Canadian government’s feminist commitments<https://women-gender-equality.canada.ca/en/gender-based-analysis-plus.html>. Please join if you can and spread the word. Thank you! Vanessa Thomas – Defund Big Tech, Refund Community: Reflections and actions from a federal public servant March 31, 12pm-1pm ET Online event – please register here <https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/vanessa-thomas-reflections-on-defund-big-tec…> for Zoom link. The Defund Big Tech, Refund Community report offered a call to action for many industries, organizations, and individuals—including but not limited to “Governments and Policymakers<https://techotherwise.pubpub.org/pub/dakcci1r/release/3#2zuoz4a3xl>“. In this presentation, Dr. Vanessa Thomas (they/them, he/him, she/her) will draw on their experiences working in the federal public service—most recently as the lead researcher and manager for a feminist research team at Employment and Social Development Canada—to reflect on the Defind Big Tech proposals. Vanessa’s talk will address some of the challenges facing employees and teams who attempt to implement the government’s feminist commitments<https://women-gender-equality.canada.ca/en/gender-based-analysis-plus.html>; drawing from those challenges, Vanessa will speculate about the future(s) of #govtech, #civictech and government digital services if we were to attempt to defund big tech. The presentation will involve prompts to encourage an active and open discussion amongst participants. Vanessa Thomas, PhD, (they/them, he/him, she/her) is an anti-disciplinarian queer settler with training in computer science, design, management studies, feminist methodologies, and environmental studies, amongst many other fields. Vanessa currently works full-time for the Government of Canada, teaches part-time at Carleton University, and supervises graduate students part-time through HyperIsland. Vanessa’s research builds on the TechOtherwise<https://techotherwise.pubpub.org/> platform’s Defund Big Tech<https://techotherwise.pubpub.org/defund-big-tech> report to explore how governments and policymakers could take active steps in the directions outlined there. For the past seven months, Vanessa has been drawing on their expertise in speculative design, digital innovation, feminisms, and leadership to try to establish a feminist technology research team at Employment and Social Development Canada. Vanessa has been undertaking this work from multiple locations in what is currently known as Canada. https://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/defund-big-tech-refund-community-reflection… Prof Christoph Becker he/him Associate Professor, Faculty of Information Director, Digital Curation Institute University of Toronto www.christoph-becker.info<http://www.christoph-becker.info/> https://twitter.com/ChriBecker

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FW: January at the DCI: Meet the DCI Fellow, join a workshop
by Christoph Becker 05 Jan '22

05 Jan '22

Hello all, Please consider yourself invited to these events! Best wishes for 2022, Christoph Becker Subject: January at the DCI: Meet the DCI Fellow, join a workshop Dear colleagues, I want to invite you and your students to two events in January. Please share with those at UofT who you think may be interested. First, since CAUT censure is revoked, the 'main' DCI Fellowship is active. Our Fellow is Prof. David Wachsmuth, Canada Research Chair in Urban Governance at McGill University, where he is also an Associate Professor in the School of Urban Planning and an Associate Member in the Department of Geography. He directs the Urban Politics and Governance<https://upgo.lab.mcgill.ca/> research group and co-leads the Adapting Urban Environments for the Future theme of the McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative<https://www.mcgill.ca/mssi/>. Prof. Wachsmuth's ground-breaking work on the impact of digital platforms such as Airbnb on global metropolitan housing markets, and the politics of data and curation it involves, was previously featured in a DCI Lecture<https://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/prof-wachsmuth-data-and-the-lack-of-data-in…> in 2019. We will host a Zoom meet-the-Fellow on January 13 at noon. David will talk a bit about his recent research and the project and seminar series he plans to host as part of his Fellowship project over the coming months. He is looking forward to meeting colleagues at UofT and the Faculty. Come say hello and suggest it to students and colleagues who may interested - please spread the word! Please drop me a line for the Zoom link. Second, Associate Fellows<https://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/meet-the-associate-fellows-at-the-dci-2021-…> Loren Britton and Isabel Paehr (aka MELT<http://www.meltionary.com/>), arts-design researchers who work with games, tech and radical pedagogy, will host a workshop / role playing game session in which we playfully reconfigure what data may mean for trans* and disabled people. The main workshop is on February 24 (see Coalition Data Center: Assembling Data Points for Trans* and Autistic Justice<https://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/coalition-data-center-assembling-data-point…> for details and participation). On January 27 at noon, they will workshop-the-workshop in an informal Zoom session. Join us if this sounds interesting to you! Please drop me a line for the Zoom link. Best wishes for this winter term, Christoph Becker Prof Christoph Becker he/him Associate Professor, Faculty of Information Director, Digital Curation Institute University of Toronto www.christoph-becker.info<http://www.christoph-becker.info/> https://twitter.com/ChriBecker

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FW: Upcoming Events: December at the Digital Curation Institute
by Christoph Becker 19 Nov '21

19 Nov '21

Hello all, I am hosting two events that are very much about critical computing. The first talk speaks about the ideological shaping of online participation and addresses issues of participatory design. The second talk will discuss results of a partnership between feminist STS and requirements engineering, in which we collectively deconstructed memory texts of RE practitioners to explore the politics and values that shape RE work. Come and join! Best wishes, Christoph From: Christoph Becker Sent: November 19, 2021 7:19 PM Subject: Upcoming Events: December at the Digital Curation Institute Dear colleagues and students, I want to draw your attention to two upcoming events at the DCI. The first event is intended to be more informal and internal to UofT; the second is designed as a public talk. On Friday, December 3 at noon ET, Dr. Victoria Palacin will discuss how belief systems shape online participation, contrasting cases from the Global North and South. Victoria Palacin (@vpalacin<https://twitter.com/vpalacin>) is a researcher and technologist specialized in digital participation for sustainable development. Her current research focuses on understanding the unconscious ideologies that guide the design of digital democracy tools. She advances this work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Helsinki social computing group<https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/social-computing> at the University of Helsinki and as a DCI associate fellow at the University of Toronto. In recent years she has been an affiliate researcher at the UN Digital Government Division and at the MIT Center for Civic Media. Victoria received her doctorate with distinction from LUT University in Finland during 2020 for her work examining the way people participate in digital citizen science<https://lutpub.lut.fi/handle/10024/161916>. During this talk Victoria will introduce the ongoing projects she started during her fellowship. These include OtroCovid <https://otrocovid.co/> (A longitudinal study of 5 International "hackathons" and 6142 projects developed in a distributed manner in response to the pandemic) and Participatory Budgeting Configurations<https://github.com/elaragon/decidimpb>. She will also talk about her plans for the upcoming 2021 - 2022 as an associate fellow<https://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/meet-the-associate-fellows-at-the-dci-2021-…> of the DCI. Info and registration: https://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/victoria-palacin-reconfiguring-citizenship-… On Thursday, December 16 at noon ET, Dr. Doris Allhutter will discuss "why disciplinary boundaries make change hard", presenting a partnership between feminist Science and Technology Studies and Requirements Engineering. Doris Allhutter is a senior scientist at the Institute of Technology Assessment<https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/ita> at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research studies how social inequality and ideologies of difference co-emerge with information infrastructures and socio-technical systems. She works with critical computing communities from an STS perspective and is currently an Associate Fellow at the DCI. Requirements engineering (RE) is an interdisciplinary research field integrating social science approaches with software engineering. It is as well a transdisciplinary practice translating different industry domain's sociotechnical contexts into technical specifications. Reporting on an empirical study in critical RE, this talk discusses how the inter- and transdisciplinary nature of requirements work implicitly enacts a specific relation between epistemic, social and economic value/s. It argues that the obscured interplay between these values makes it structurally hard for critical researchers and practitioners to develop collective agency towards change. Info and registration: https://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/doris-allhutter-why-disciplinary-boundaries… Prof Christoph Becker he/him Associate Professor, Faculty of Information Director, Digital Curation Institute University of Toronto www.christoph-becker.info<http://www.christoph-becker.info/> https://twitter.com/ChriBecker

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DCI Talk: A Planet of Citizen Laboratories. Why the Pandemic has been an Opportunity to Build Infrastructures that Enable both Local and Global Commons
by Christoph Becker 20 Oct '21

20 Oct '21

Hi everyone, We're hosting an exciting talk this week, please spread the word and join! Christoph May 7th, 12 - 1 pm (EST) Speaker: Marcos García, MediaLab Prado Director 2014 - 2020 Online event: please register here<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dci-talk-a-planet-of-citizen-laboratories-tick…> for the zoom link. In this talk, Marcos García (Director of the Medialab Prado during 2014-2020) will talk about the distributed citizen laboratories project, a project that started in 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. We will hear about their approach and of outstanding projects developed by hundreds of volunteers in response to the pandemic. Marcos García works in the field of citizen laboratories. He worked at Medialab Prado. Between 2004 and 2006 he was responsible for the educational and mediation program of MediaLab Madrid together with Laura Fernández, where they promoted the Interactivos Project, a collaborative prototyping workshop format that served as the basis for the development of Medialab Prado and its citizen laboratories methodology. Between 2007 and 2014 he was responsible for the cultural program of Medialab Prado together with Laura Fernández, and between 2014 and 2021 its director. In 2020 Marcos designed, with the collaboration of Diego Gracia, the Distributed Citizen Laboratories project focused on citizen innovation in libraries and other cultural institutions, an initiative of the Ministry of Culture and Medialab Prado to promote the creation of citizen laboratories and cooperation between them, during the Covid-19 crisis. This initiative is part of the Library Laboratories, a program of the Ministry of Culture and Medialab Prado to promote libraries as places of collaboration, experimentation and creation of cultural projects and citizen innovation. About the Medialab Prado<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medialab-Prado> The media lab Prado was<https://www.eldiario.es/madrid/levy-desplaza-medialab-prado-emblema-innovac…> a cultural space for open experimentation. The Lab aimed at co-creating city commons through diverse initiatives, such as the Participa LAB (Collective Intelligence for Democracy), the DataLab (open data initiative), and the InciLab (Citizen Innovation Lab). The lab had become an emblem of cultural innovation for Europe and the World, with a number of international awards and recognitions. For instance, in 2016, their collaborative culture was awarded <https://www.eldiario.es/cultura/politicas_culturales/europa-premia-cultura-…> the Princess Margriet Award by the European Culture Foundation. Further, the lab guided the creation of dozens of citizen laboratories in the Americas.

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FW: Announcing event series on "Taming Big Tech", starting this Wednesday (tomorrow)
by Christoph Becker 18 May '21

18 May '21

Hello all, Andrew Clement has put together a very promising set of events on the basis of the TechOtherwise<https://techotherwise.pubpub.org/> report (Defund Big Tech) that I shared earlier this year. These are hosted at Ryerson CFE, no censure there :) I think these are interesting to many of us and our students. Please spread the word. Best, Christoph From: Andrew Clement <andrew.clement(a)utoronto.ca> Sent: May 18, 2021 7:01 PM Subject: Announcing event series on "Taming Big Tech", starting this Wednesday (tomorrow) Hi all, I'm pleased to announce an event series I’ve organized with Ryerson U's Centre for Free Expression<http://cfe.ryerson.ca/> (CFE) called Taming Big Tech: Exploring the Alternatives. As the title suggests, it’s based on our "Defund Big Tech, Refund Community: Anti-Trust is Not Enough, Another Tech is Possible”<https://doi.org/10.21428/93b2c832.e0100a3f> statement. We have 3 events scheduled so far: In Conversation with Cory Doctorow,<https://craphound.com/> SF author and digital rights activist How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism: Seize the Means of Computation<https://cfe.ryerson.ca/events/how-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-seize-mea…> (May 19, 4pm EDT) In Conversation with Meredith Whittaker,<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Whittaker> ex-Googler and Co-founder/Director of the AI Now Institute at NYU<https://ainowinstitute.org/> - "Take Control of Algorithms, Data, and Infrastructure”<https://cfe.ryerson.ca/events/take-control-algorithms-data-and-infrastructu…> (June 2, 4pm EDT) Panel on Defund Big Tech, Refund Community<https://cfe.ryerson.ca/events/defund-big-tech-refund-communities> with Lilly Irani UC San Diego; Pedro Reynolds-Cuellar, MIT Media Lab; and Dawn Walker, UofT (June 10, 4pm EDT) Could you pass this on to anyone you think may be interested. Thanks, Andrew

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DCI talk postponed
by Christoph Becker 07 May '21

07 May '21

Hello everyone, Please note that the DCI talk<http://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/2021/04/27/dci-talk-a-planet-of-citizen-labo…> scheduled for today is postponed due to the CAUT Censure of UofT. Thanks, Christoph Prof Christoph Becker he/him Associate Professor, Faculty of Information Director, Digital Curation Institute University of Toronto www.christoph-becker.info<http://www.christoph-becker.info/> https://twitter.com/ChriBecker

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Defund Big Tech, Refund Community
by Christoph Becker 08 Feb '21

08 Feb '21

Hello all, I want to share something that I've been working on with a group of people including Lucy Suchman, Andrew Clement and Doug Schuler for 7 months following a workshop <https://techotherwise.pubpub.org/pdc20> I organized at the Participatory Design conference last year. We released it on Friday, and I think it resonates with many of you. In Defund Big Tech, Refund Community: Another Tech is Possible<https://doi.org/10.21428/93b2c832.e0100a3f>, we argue that now is the time to radically redirect the future of tech. To think tech otherwise is to move away from binaries of tech or not (though we may sometimes need to make that judgement), in favour of how we could make tech differently, in the service of our collective and sustainable well being. The Tech Otherwise platform we built for this is designed to continue this conversation. We are now publicizing this, with some pieces coming out and maybe some media coverage (fingers crossed!) - please consider reading, commenting, and spreading the word. I am resending this with only this one main link and the DOI as it seems to have gotten into everyone's junk folder with the precise links :D https://techotherwise.pubpub.org/ Consider using #TechOtherwise if you tweet about it. Thank you, Christoph Prof Christoph Becker he/him Associate Professor, Faculty of Information Director, Digital Curation Institute University of Toronto www.christoph-becker.info<http://www.christoph-becker.info/> https://twitter.com/ChriBecker

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Defund Big Tech, Refund Community: Another Tech is Possible
by Christoph Becker 05 Feb '21

05 Feb '21

Hello all, I want to share something that I've been working on with a group of people including Lucy Suchman, Andrew Clement and Doug Schuler for 7 months following a workshop<https://techotherwise.pubpub.org/pdc20> I organized at the Participatory Design conference last year. We released it today, and I think it resonates with many of you. In Defund Big Tech, Refund Community: Another Tech is Possible<https://techotherwise.pubpub.org/pub/dakcci1r/release/1>, we argue that now is the time to radically redirect the future of tech. To think tech otherwise is to move away from binaries of tech or not (though we may sometimes need to make that judgement), in favour of how we could make tech differently, in the service of our collective and sustainable well being. The Tech Otherwise<https://techotherwise.pubpub.org/> platform we built for this is designed to continue this conversation. We are now publicizing this, with some pieces coming out and maybe some media coverage (fingers crossed!) - please consider reading, commenting, and spreading the word. https://twitter.com/hashtag/TechOtherwise Thank you, Christoph Prof Christoph Becker he/him Associate Professor, Faculty of Information Director, Digital Curation Institute University of Toronto www.christoph-becker.info<http://www.christoph-becker.info/> https://twitter.com/ChriBecker

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