Positionality statement

I’m a white, Polish, queer cis woman from a lower middle class family. I’m 29, educated to a double Masters level, and am hoping to start a PhD soon. I work in academia and have previous experience in the creative technology sector. I’m an atheist raised in a Catholic environment. I’m an immigrant to the UK, but am not subject to most limitations faced by immigrants due to my EU status. While pursuing higher education, I could count on the financial support of my parents, who are still together, are educated to a Masters and PhD level, and work(ed) in traditional professional occupations. When I was growing up, my parents had additional caring responsibilities due to disability in the family. English is my second language, but I speak it well enough to teach at university in the UK. I’m neurodivergent and have experience of disability. I consider myself European but not fully ‘Western’ due to cultural, social and economic differences between Eastern Europe and the West while I was growing up.

Proposed intervention

We propose create a collective database of creative computing practitioners from underrepresented backgrounds. The ‘database’ word here is a placeholder and refers to a collection of resources about these creatives which aims for easier access to inclusive diverse and representative examples of creative work for teaching materials within UAL CCI.

This is a project which I started in Autumn 2023 with an AL colleague Adam Cole but it has been put aside due to lack of time. I’m hoping to revive it for the PGCert, with feedback from the academic community at CCI. This report is my individual reflection on the process and an on how it could be redesigned in a more ethical and inclusive way.

Adam’s positionality: queer AL on the MSc Creative Computing course, tries to bring that perspective into the classroom and extra-curricular activities.

Adam and I are both light-skinned and Western(ish). The way I feel it, it places more responsibility on us to address the issue of diversity and representation in the curriculum. The idea is that we would build a technical framework in the form of a website / wiki to display knowledge collected voluntarily contributed by the academic community at CCI. When we’ve gathered some data, the project could be shared with a wider audience.

Before we initially invited the CCI staff to contribute to the form, we asked a few colleagues from backgrounds different to ours for their opinion. My manager at the time volunteered and helped us refine the wording of the form and the data we collect. I’m not sharing their positionality use to lack of explicit consent and easy identification.

After collecting the first few form entries, I wrote a Python script which automates data processing from an Excel sheet and formats it into an .md (Markdown) file, which can be displayed on UAL GitHub (Cole and Tańska, 2023).

We decided to publish the early prototype on UAL GitHub as an internal resource for teaching and learning purposes, as we were not sure how the information we collect and share about the creative practitioners relates to GDPR and Copyright.

Appendices

The work-in-progress “Creative Computing Canon”. To view, please log in with UAL details.

Form to contribute to the database. The contributions are manually reviewed in an Excel file, and the display page is updated by running a Python script. Please note: Question 5: “5.How does this person’s presence increase the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion of the Creative Computing curriculum?” was added later after collecting feedback, hence the answers are mostly empty.

Why the intervention is needed

• As Associate Lecturers, my colleagues and I either teach from someone else’s materials or are expected to prepare class materials from scratch on a very limited (paid) timeframe.
  
• Existing class materials are often not nearly good enough in terms of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, which is recognised by the lecturers and some managers. They also do not represent the plurality of voices in our field (Creative Computing), or the student cohorts we teach. I can confirm the same as a graduate of 2 Masters courses at UAL.
  
  
• Access to information about work by people from underrepresented backgrounds is limited due to structural discrimination, publication language, etc. As a consequence, searching for diverse references takes additional time. It requires a conscious effort and determination to do that.
  
  Example: I opened Google in incognito mode and searched for “creative coding artists”. The 2018 Medium article “Algorithmic Beauty: 10 Artists Pushing the Boundaries of Code” was the second search result. All featured artists and the article author have traditionally masculine, Western or European names (Bezic, 2018).
  
• UAL represented by line managers limited by budget set by higher-level management refuses to pay us for the extra work.

Why the intervention is a good fit

• The lack of diversity in the Creative Computing industry is a well-known problem.
  
• The need for this intervention came from mine and the project co-facilitator’s experiences as both students and lecturers at UAL CCI. The consulted colleagues agree with this and declared they would be likely to use these resources in their teaching practice.
  
• The project is relevant for both my teaching practice and the Inclusive Practices unit.
  
• The project has a significant potential impact on my and my colleagues’ work,, as well as the student experience within CCI.
  
• Apart from increasing the DEI of the teaching materials, the intervention can help ALs, who are often disadvantaged at work due to limited paid preparation time.

Peer feedback

As a part of this assignment, I talked to two colleagues and discussed the project with them. They both started teaching at university within the last year. Due to a limited timeframe, I decided to ask people I know well, in order to be able to ask them for their time on a short notice. They were both happy to contribute their insights and agreed for their data to be used in this report.

Person 1

Positionality (in own words):
Turkish woman, Associate Lecturer

General feedback:
P1 has found the project potentially very useful. She has previously struggled with finding representative examples of creative work for creative coding classes and has asked colleagues, including myself, to share resources. She agrees this project is needed, particularly for ALs, who are often expected to develop teaching materials without sufficient time.

Suggestions:

• Rephrase the DEI question in the form. Suggested allowing for more contributions and assessing whether this question needs adjusting based on people’s answers.
  
• Filtering based on thematic tags would increase usability. Requested more tags relating to specific class topics such as computational music.
  
• Asked for improved navigation through the database.
  
• Asked for ensuring more examples to make the database usable, as well as for including creative practitioners working with diverse media rather than focusing on coding for visual art.
  
• Pointed out the need for the examples to be representative of CCI students, and particularly to add Chinese artists to the database.

Person 2

Positionality (in own words):
Polish woman, Acting Senior Lecturer on the MSc Data Science and AI for creative industries course, experience as a software developer in the music industry, PhD student

General feedback:
The project is useful and has a very straightforward, focused output, which was complimented. She agrees with overrepresentation of white men in the Creative Computing industry, and also struggles with finding examples of work by more diverse authors for the teaching materials. She said she would use this database in her teaching practice if developed further.

Suggestions:

• Make the GitHub repository into a full website to ensure easier navigation.
  
• Ensure enough data at the beginning to avoid tokenisation of the few featured creatives.

Challenges and ethical considerations

1. I’m currently not able to develop the database into a fully usable resource on my own. I believe a workshop / work session to develop the database alongside colleagues / students could be helpful. Drawing from the Design Justice framework (Costanza-Chock, 2019) and Codesign methodology (Cizek & Uricchio, 2022), if we treat the codesigners / participants as experts in the field we’re investigating or designing for, they should be equally credited and profiting from the project. If we want to invite academic staff or students to participate, we should be able to provide them with some form of compensation. Provided funds are secured, full-time staff members are still not allowed to accept hourly contracts from UAL. This could be solved through for example offering shopping vouchers instead of employment contracts.
   
2. The value of the workshop will depend on the diversity of participants and the different perspectives that are represented. It is often the case that people from most underrepresented groups are tokenised, under too much pressure or expectations, and it’s unethical to expect additional work from them. They should be compensated for their work if they agree to participate; but they should have the option to say ‘no’ and it should be respected.
   
3. Introducing the values of representation, diversity and inclusion at a more systemic level, expressed through the whole teaching structure rather than just examples of creative work that teachers can use. D’Ignazio and Klein (2018) describe the often unintentionally discriminatory decision-making process as privilege hazard – lack of competence and experiential knowledge to imagine how the decisions taken may impact underrepresented groups. In some ways, I am the privilege hazard. The whole teaching system has the privilege hazard deeply embedded, is still quite authoritative and not diverse and inclusive enough, and the university staff is not representative of the student cohorts we teach. We need to work together to make things better, but we are not working equally unless everyone is equally credited and compensated, and more voices are included in the debate.
   
4. Do we need to rethink the DEI question in the form? How do we ensure DEI while avoiding tokenisation and reducing people to labels? How do we celebrate diversity while respecting the artists’ privacy and only use information that they freely and publicly share? Should we highlight labels of artists from underrepresented groups in teaching materials if the label is not obvious? This poses further questions like: is the presence of creatives from underrepresented backgrounds enough if we don’t acknowledge the label? How do we ensure plurality of voices without it? Do we want the teaching materials to just be diverse, equitable and inclusive, or also for them to be obvious about it?
   
   Guyan (2022) describes the impact of predefined labels which do not accurately reflect people’s experience may lead to further exclusion and lack of visibility. This concerns particularly minorities within minorities and identities which are plural (intersectional). I’m very much internally conflicted about using labels. At the same time, lack of highlighting particularly intersectional perspectives can have serious real life consequences. The intersectional approach is over 30 years old and has its source in Black feminist theory (Crenshaw, 1989). As Buolamwini’s seminal work on intersectional testing of face recognition models shows, these perspectives are still widely not considered in computing and can have serious consequences (2019).

Proposed improvements and further development

• Based on peer feedback, I’d like to explore if the initial document can be exported to a website or other public resource, depending on Copyright and GDPR rules, and respectful and ethical use of the artists’ freely and publicly shared information.
  
• I’d like to develop the technical side further, include more tags relating to the topics and media of work, filtering options using these tags, pages with more details, and clearer formatting.
  
• Further development should involve a more diverse group of collaborators.
  
• For the resource to be useful, we need a bigger number of examples for a start. This could be done for example during a collaborative workshop session with CCI staff and/or students.
  
• Set up a maintenance routine for reviewing new submissions and updating the document.
  
• Maybe instead of including specific labels, we could introduce a more affirmative approach through blog posts linking to the artists info focusing on group representation? Ideally, this would include guest contributions with proper crediting and compensation.
  
  For reference:
  Six Trans Programmers Who Shattered the Lavender Ceiling by the Coding Space (The Coding Space, 2023).
  Honoring Black Computational Histories (Martinez, 2023).

References

Bezic, V. (2018). Algorithmic Beauty: 10 Artists Pushing the Boundaries of Code. Available at: https://medium.com/feed-fatigue/algorithmic-beauty-10-artists-pushing-the-boundaries-of-code-2d55b58aedea (accessed: 19.01.2025).

Buolamwini, J. (2019). Gender shades. Available at: http://gendershades.org/ (accessed: 19.01.2025).

Cizek, K. and Uricchio, W. (2022). Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cole, A. and Tańska, M. (2023). Expanding the Creative Computing Canon at UAL CCI. Available at: https://git.arts.ac.uk/mtanska/cc_canon_parser (accessed: 19.01.2025).

Costanza-Chock, S. (2019). Design Justice. Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” In: University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1., pp. 139-167.

D’Ignazio, C. and Klein, L.F. (2020). “The Power Chapter”, in: Data Feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Guyan, K. (2022). “Queer Validation”, in: Queer Data. London: Bloomsbury.

Martinez, S. (2023). Honoring Black Computational Histories. Available at: https://sfpc.study/blog/black-computational-histories (accessed: 19.01.2025).

The Coding Space (2023). Six Trans Programmers Who Shattered the Lavender Ceiling by the Coding Space. Available at: https://www.thecodingspace.com/blog/2022-03-01-six-trans-programmers-who-shattered-the-lavender-ceiling/ (accessed: 19.01.2025).