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 (@vpalacinhttps://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 grouphttps://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 sciencehttps://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 Configurationshttps://github.com/elaragon/decidimpb. She will also talk about her plans for the upcoming 2021 - 2022 as an associate fellowhttps://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/meet-the-associate-fellows-at-the-dci-2021-2022/ of the DCI. Info and registration: https://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/victoria-palacin-reconfiguring-citizenship-o...

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 Assessmenthttps://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.infohttp://www.christoph-becker.info/ https://twitter.com/ChriBecker