Intervention plan

Identified problem:

• 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.

Proposed intervention:

• Create a database of computational arts and design practitioners from underrepresented backgrounds. This is a project which I started in Autumn 2023 with a fellow AL 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.
  
• As we are both light-skinned and Western(ish) and 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.

Key references for the intervention:

Costanza-Chock, S. (2019). Design Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Martinez, M. (2023). Honoring Black Computational Histories. Available at: https://sfpc.study/blog/black-computational-histories (accessed: 19.01.2025).

University of the Arts London (2021). UAL Anti-Racism Action Plan. https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0032/296537/UAL-Anti-racism-action-plan-summary-2021.pdf (Accessed: 19.01.2025)

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).

Post comments

reply to Anna Schlimm’s post on race:

Your post really resonated with me and I can see we posed similar questions regarding particularly the systemic maintenance of white privilege at university (Bradbury, 2020)

“This [Bradbury’s framework for Critical Race Theory policy analysis] might help reveal and challenge inequality by redirecting focus from proving that white privilege exists, to examining how it is being structurally upheld”

You cite Asif Sadiq’s ‘active anti-racism’ (20 as a proposed answer to structural racism in HE, and propose asking difficult questions in the classroom referring to bell hooks’s experiential knowledge sharing and “Teaching to transgress”. According to Sadiq, the answer to abstract or persona-based EDI training is bringing in real people and individual stories instead of promoting stereotypes. I can see how merging this approach works well with bell hooks’s mutual teaching and learning in the classroom (1994).

I wish this was something we did more of in classes. I often teach subjects related to data and programming. While teaching technical subjects, I find it quite difficult to find space for sharing experiential knowledge while helping the students achieve the LOs referring to technical knowledge. Instead, I try to search for and highlight examples with an intersectional approach, such as Dr Joy Buolamwini’s project “Gender Shades” revealing intersectional discrimination in testing Machine Learning models (2019). I try to apply Critical Race Theory and Intersectional Feminist theory to teaching about data and programming, and the Design Justice Framework to the wider technology design context, as well as discuss other risks of AI relating to privacy, profiling and discrimination (example: the AI model for classifying people as ‘straight’ or ‘gay’, Wang and Kosinski, 2017). We then try to apply these theories to analyse biases and power relationships in technological contexts traditionally dominated by white cis men, as I try to encourage students to exercise critical thinking alongside gaining technical skills.

References

Bradbury, A. (2020). “A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: The case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England”. In: Race, Ethnicity and Education, 23 (2), pp.241-260. 

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

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge.

Sadiq, A. (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw (accessed: 03.05.2025).

Wang, Y. and Kosinski, M. (2017). “Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images”. In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2018, Vol. 114, No. 2, pp. 246 –257 Available at: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/hv28a_v1 (accessed: 03.05.2025).

Reply to Lamprini Tzanaki’s post on disability:

I strongly agree with your thoughts and sentiments in this post around the social model of disability and respect for disabled people’s autonomy. Referring to the interview with Ade Adepitan (2020), you point out the societal, systemic and structural discrimination of disabled people, which makes it more difficult for them to achieve their full potential.

Later in the post, you refer to your own experience of intervening during a workshop, when your colleague made an assumption about a deaf student and decided for them about their mode of class participation, leading to exclusion form a group exercise. You comment on the situation:

“Creating a safe space and a community is really important in education. Listening to the student needs is a key element to create a space that is inclusive and accessible and sees and understands intersectionality.”

‘Nothing about us without us’ is a slogan used by the disability rights community since the 1980s (Costanza-Chock, 2019), which was adapted by many other communities. Good intentions often aren’t enough and true equity and freedom can only be achieved while everyone’s respectful of other people’s autonomy and if there’s mutual trust that everyone knows best what they need. This should not be a reason for exclusion, but rather for a promoting plurality of voices, and celebrating diversity as a community. In the fields I work in, design and technology, this has produced community-oriented design approaches such as co-design (Cizek and Uricchio, 2022), which treat the co-designers as experts in their needs, demanding respect, acknowledgement and credits for their contribution. In a pedagogical context, I can see a parallel to bell hooks’s “Teaching to transgress” and in-class exchange of experiential knowledge (1994). Perhaps that is the way the way to introduce co-design to classroom environments not just in terms of knowledge sharing, but also creating inclusive environments?

References

Adepitan, A. (2020). Ade Adepitan gives amazing explanation of systemic racism. Interviewed by Webborn, N. for ParalympicsGB. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAsxndpgagU (accessed: 19.01.2025).

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

Costanza-Chock, S. (2019). ‘Design Practices: “Nothing about Us without Us”‘. In: Design Justice. Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge.