Innovation from the Margins: Users, Producers and Technology Choice
Project 4: Because Technology Discriminates (2014-ongoing)
Engineers designing technologies and systems produce problems when they do not account for existing biases in society. Designers have a mandate to make technologies efficiently, economically, and ethically. This textbook is written for both students and practicing designers, engineers, researchers, or artists who want to create more ethical designs; it aims to help readers understand how race is implicated in technology design. Learning from historical and contemporary case studies of engineering and architecture projects will help readers see clearly the power of design decisions to either perpetuate or contest racism. Chapter exercises will change engineers’ mental models to see the bias inherent to existing technological design. By incorporating the knowledge and insights of community-based experts into design projects, readers will begin to practice anti-racist leadership and counter-expertise.
Funded by: Michigan State University Lyman Briggs College & Department of Sociology; Independently Supported |
Project 3: Gender, Environment and ICT4D (2015-2022)
Project 3 involves analyzing the gender role of women in the design, production and use of information and communications technologies for international development. In the first part of this project, I have examined the likelihood of a proposed collaboration between scientists and rural women in the Indian Ocean region to increase women's access/recognition/participation in development, where the women are involved in participatory sensing using mobile phones. In the second part of this project, I am examining civil society organizations' potential ability to encourage sustainable technology production and consumption choices among other non-profit and for-profit organizations. These influential civil society organizations are interested in decreasing the accumulation of electronic waste (e-waste) which negatively (and primarily) causes environmental health harms to women and children in the global south.
Funded by: Council of Women World Leaders Environmental Studies Fellowship; Michigan State University Lyman Briggs College & Department of Sociology |
Project 2: Blind Users and Everyday Technologies (Paused)
My second project involves participatory action research with photographers trained in sensory photography. Together these participants (persons with blindness and low vision) and I articulated and tried to answer a research question about technology as an obstacle or an aid. This project is being conducted in the U.S. It uses the photovoice methodology.
Funded by: National Science Foundation DDIG 1153308 |
|
Project 1: Circulating Sciences From Below (2009-2018)
I completed my first book which describes community ophthalmology NGOs in South Asia and East Africa. These professionals are re-inventing surgical sciences and ophthalmic technologies, and creating new hospital management techniques in order to fight avoidable blindness worldwide. I am using Innovation Studies theory (socio-technical regimes and multi-level perspective) as well as critical theory from Feminist Technology Studies, and Political Sociology of Science & Technology to explain: (1) how appropriate technology choices are made collectively; and (2) the processes by which these innovations circulate throughout the world – to the benefit of both low-income patients and global modern science.
Funded by: National Science Foundation DDIG 1153308; CAORC Multi-country Fellowship; Smithsonian Lemelson Center Travel Fund; Rensselaer HASS Fellowship |