Hacking Diversity Dunbar-Hester, Christina
2019, 2019-12-10, Volume:
19
eBook
A firsthand look at efforts to improve diversity in software and hackerspace communities
Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms ...of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates the activists engaged in free and open-source software to understand why, despite their efforts, they fail to achieve the diversity that their ideals support.
Christina Dunbar-Hester shows that within this well-meaning volunteer world, beyond the sway of human resource departments and equal opportunity legislation, members of underrepresented groups face unique challenges. She brings together more than five years of firsthand research: attending software conferences and training events, working on message boards and listservs, and frequenting North American hackerspaces. She explores who participates in voluntaristic technology cultures, to what ends, and with what consequences. Digging deep into the fundamental assumptions underpinning STEM-oriented societies, Dunbar-Hester demonstrates that while the preferred solutions of tech enthusiasts—their “hacks” of projects and cultures—can ameliorate some of the “bugs” within their own communities, these methods come up short for issues of unequal social and economic power. Distributing “diversity” in technical production is not equal to generating justice.
Hacking Diversity reframes questions of diversity advocacy to consider what interventions might appropriately broaden inclusion and participation in the hacking world and beyond.
A firsthand look at efforts to improve diversity in software and hackerspace communities
Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms ...of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia.Hacking Diversity investigates the activists engaged in free and open-source software to understand why, despite their efforts, they fail to achieve the diversity that their ideals support.
Christina Dunbar-Hester shows that within this well-meaning volunteer world, beyond the sway of human resource departments and equal opportunity legislation, members of underrepresented groups face unique challenges. She brings together more than five years of firsthand research: attending software conferences and training events, working on message boards and listservs, and frequenting North American hackerspaces. She explores who participates in voluntaristic technology cultures, to what ends, and with what consequences. Digging deep into the fundamental assumptions underpinning STEM-oriented societies, Dunbar-Hester demonstrates that while the preferred solutions of tech enthusiasts-their "hacks" of projects and cultures-can ameliorate some of the "bugs" within their own communities, these methods come up short for issues of unequal social and economic power. Distributing "diversity" in technical production is not equal to generating justice.
Hacking Diversity reframes questions of diversity advocacy to consider what interventions might appropriately broaden inclusion and participation in the hacking world and beyond.
The United States ushered in a new era of small-scale broadcasting in 2000 when it began issuing low-power FM (LPFM) licenses for noncommercial radio stations around the country. Over the next ...decade, several hundred of these newly created low-wattage stations took to the airwaves. InLow Power to the People, Christina Dunbar-Hester describes the practices of an activist organization focused on LPFM during this era. Despite its origins as a pirate broadcasting collective, the group eventually shifted toward building and expanding regulatory access to new, licensed stations. These radio activists consciously cast radio as an alternative to digital utopianism, promoting an understanding of electronic media that emphasizes the local community rather than a global audience of Internet users.Dunbar-Hester focuses on how these radio activists impute emancipatory politics to the "old" medium of radio technology by promoting the idea that "microradio" broadcasting holds the potential to empower ordinary people at the local community level. The group's methods combine political advocacy with a rare commitment to hands-on technical work with radio hardware, although the activists' hands-on, inclusive ethos was hampered by persistent issues of race, class, and gender. Dunbar-Hester's study of activism around an "old" medium offers broader lessons about how political beliefs are expressed through engagement with specific technologies. It also offers insight into contemporary issues in media policy that is particularly timely as the FCC issues a new round of LPFM licenses.
This paper presents an account of technopolitics in Mastodon, noncommercial, decentralized social media. Mastodon’s significance has further risen in light of Twitter/X’s recent decimation of its ...public sphere functions; a noncommercial and ideally public alternative to commercial social media is (even more) urgently needed. The autoethnographic narrative presented here, hinging on a dispute initiated and sustained by an intemperate donkeykeeper in Europe, is idiosyncratic, to say the least. But it reveals meaningful aspects of the network’s features, which point to both the promise of such an architecture and to how it falls short in hailing other users and facilitating transparent communication, two important and related functions in democratic communication online. If we appraise Mastodon in view of civic commitments, this peculiar episode contains lessons for thinking about distribution, conviviality, and their intersections in social media. I show how Mastodon has been designed for “lossy distribution” and argue that this has implications for optimizing democratic functions of noncommercial social media.
This paper examines imaginaries of work and labor in “open technology” projects (especially open source software and hackerspaces), based on ethnographic research in North America. It zeroes in on ...“diversity initiatives” within open technology projects. These initiatives are important because they expose many of the assumptions and tensions that surround participatory cultures. On the one hand, these projects and spaces are organized around voluntarism; in theory, everyone who wishes to participate is welcome to do so. On the other hand, diversity initiatives form in order to address the “problem” of imbalance in the ranks of participants. Technology is a unique domain for the discharge of political energies. In collective imagination, it has been vested with the power to initiate change (even as this belief obscures the role of social and economic relations). Multiple ideas circulate about the relationships between diversity in open technology projects and paid labor. This paper argues that in part due to the legacy of technical hobbies as training grounds for technical employment for much of the twentieth century, as documented by historians of radio (Douglas, 1987; Haring, 2006), voluntaristic technology projects are vexed sites for imagining political emancipation. To a large degree, diversity initiatives in open technology projects are consistent with corporate values of diversity as a marketplace value. At the same time, collectivity formations around technology that incorporate feminist, antiracist, or social justice framings may begin to generate connections between diversity advocacy in tech fields and social justice movements or policy changes in order to effect deep social change.
At the turn of the millennium, scholars and pundits reflected on how communication systems could shape events and societies, often while basking in the perceived glow of the then-novel Internet. ...Others pled for reasoned engagement with the interplay between communication infrastructures
and the social life of knowledge, a much-needed corrective in a moment of rampant breathless digital utopianism. This article explores the interplay between communication infrastructures and the social life of knowledge through specific sociotechnical arrangements, low-power FM (LPFM) radio
and large-scale commercial Internet-based 'platforms', both of which exist in our historical present. In particular, I use the formation of LPFM, which occurred at the same time that commercial Internet traffic picked up steam, in order to 'excavate the future': I return
to a not-so-distant past to consider what might yet be. The article's central claim is that the case of LPFM is even more relevant now than at its inception, in a context where behemoth commercial Internet 'platforms' have come to dominate electronic communication.
This article addresses the discourse of “localism” used in the formulation of low‐power FM radio service in the United States. It builds on S. L. Star and J. Griesemer's (1989) concept of “boundary ...object” to theorize localism as a “discursive boundary object.” Drawing on interviews with advocates and regulators, participant observation with low‐power radio activists, and documentary research in relevant policy discussions, the article argues that “localism” moved across discourse communities and effaced differences for groups who otherwise might not have agreed. “Localism” was also polemically deployed at the level of national policy. Its unique potency may be seen in the seeming inability of even actors who opposed the introduction of low‐power FM radio service to oppose localism outright.
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Are the “media reform,” ”media democracy,” and “media justice” movements complementary or in conflict? A bit of both, asserts the author, building on her earlier ethnographic study in the field. ...While each is a form of social activism with progressive political goals, they have different theoretical foundations and different frames for their respective agendas as “scholars,” “activists,” and “advocates.” The article offers a critical consideration of their distinctive interventions, and concludes that while framing media as a “problem to be solved” enabled a wide base to form, at the same time this outlook was so diffuse that it generated tensions among the actors.
The last couple of years have seen an uptick of different technological forms presented as mediators of human/nonhuman interaction, and these developments have been accompanied by an increase in ...scholarly interest. Here, we engage with the human urge to enter into communicative exchanges that implicate “other” entities, but we also wonder what is at stake, analytically and ethically, in these mediated communicative acts. Following an approach informed by work in the environmental humanities as well as science and technology studies and media studies, we explore three sites of (ostensible) encounters between humans and nonhuman others—plants and animals—and argue that while certain technological mediations can facilitate human “noticing” by rendering nonhuman others sense-able, it does not follow that such interventions open up a space where participants can meaningfully respond to each other.
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Scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences are grappling with how best to study virtual environments, use computational tools in their research, and engage audiences ...with their results. Classic work in science and technology studies (STS) has played a central role in how these fields analyze digital technologies, but many of its key examples do not speak to today's computational realities. This groundbreaking collection brings together a world-class group of contributors to refresh the canon for contemporary digital scholarship.
In twenty-five pioneering and incisive essays, this unique digital field guide offers innovative new approaches to digital scholarship, the design of digital tools and objects, and the deployment of critically grounded technologies for analysis and discovery. Contributors cover a broad range of topics, including software development, hackathons, digitized objects, diversity in the tech sector, and distributed scientific collaborations. They discuss methodological considerations of social networks and data analysis, design projects that can translate STS concepts into durable scientific work, and much more.
Featuring a concise introduction by Janet Vertesi and David Ribes and accompanied by an interactive microsite, this book provides new perspectives on digital scholarship that will shape the agenda for tomorrow's generation of STS researchers and practitioners.
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