Our praxis principles: pluralism and solidarity

There are ideals, and then there is what’s possible. For us at CGHR, practicing praxis research has been revelatory in terms of the transformations that occur in the design process between ideals and their application. These transformations result from reflexivity and creativity as well as negotiation and resignation; priorities must be assigned, trade-offs must be made, and new ideas bubble up in the face of constraints.

We almost never can do quite what we set out to do. Pragmatism should thus be both a feature of praxis and a focus of critique, and pragmatism runs like a thread through our provocations. But what does pragmatism mean?

For us, as praxis researchers, pragmatism sees the value of research in what good it can do in the world, and thus pragmatism requires sets of values against which to evaluate the ‘goodness’ of practice.

In our Provocations, we are guided by two core values, which surface and complexify through our own work, through listening to our collaborators and through a deep engagement with the literature: pluralism and solidarity. As outlined below, we have an evolving understanding of these concepts and are fully open to their renegotiation, to their varied understandings and to the emergence of new priority values. What we note as a constant, however, is that these values in all their dimensions tend to stand in stark contrast to those animating big tech and much of mainstream technology design.

Pluralism

Pluralism is one of the key values that transverses our Provocations.

One of the main challenges faced by civil society organisations working with digital technologies is making space for diverse — and sometimes conflicting — voices to flourish on the speakers’ own terms. Pluralism recognises and celebrates diversity, insisting that, beyond a liberal emphasis on the individual’s freedom to be different, society as a whole thrives when the plurality of difference among us is brought together.

This understanding of pluralism is important, but so too is challenging it. The freedom of expression, for example, can also be about the freedom to be silent, to refuse to participate in voice projects — which, as Gangadharan points out, is also a political act. Strategic silence has many motivations. These include discriminatory technologies, the communicative capitalism model that commodifies our voices, and the irony that pluralism can destroy pluralism when our previous words are used against us — a problem many activists in hostile regimes have encountered. Sometimes the silence of some makes space for the pluralism of others, so we need to — empirically and politically — include silence in the spectrum of pluralism.

We often think about pluralism as a means to an end, the middle part of an information politics formula in which naming and shaming leads to social change. Powers that be, however, increasingly seem impervious to this formula; there is no guarantee that the formula will work.

Rather than focusing on what pluralism can do, then, we refocus the lens to think about what pluralism can be — namely, pluralism as communicative practices. We are interested in what these communicative practices can provide individuals and communities, such as the solidarity and care that can flourish in dialogue.

Our understanding of pluralism also extends beyond more narrow understandings, prevalent in contemporary thinking, that see it as the exchange of different ‘worldviews’. What if differences are so considerable that the actors involved cannot even be assumed to inhabit the same world? For example, not all individuals and groups live in a modern world where nature and land are considered the passive background of history. While for some a mountain constitutes a source of mineral extraction, others can conceive of it as an active agent in the life of the community.

Because of this, our approach to pluralism speaks to the notion of the pluriverse in which the horizon is the creation and sustainment of multiple worlds. As the Zapatistas from Chiapas, Mexico, would say, the aim is to construct ‘a world in which multiple worlds fit’. This sensitivity allows us to pay attention to aspects such as how mainstream digital technologies impose a particular world (one that is often modern, capitalist, patriarchal and racist) and how the design of digital infrastructure can and should pay attention to the way local communities interact with the environment.

Solidarity

Solidarity is a core grassroots value, not only of communities but also of collaborative projects.

Practices of building solidarity include making communicative spaces for the exchange of ideas and emotions, of values and goals, and of trust and credibility towards a shared commitment to each other. Solidarity is care at the community level, and neither tends to be efficient nor easily scalable. Designing with solidarity means supporting these communicative spaces, but it also impels particular relationships of care with our collaborators, as well as with those we critique and with our wider communities.

In terms of our collaborators and those we critique, solidarity is about stepping back from our own agendas and being as open as possible to understanding the aims and values of others with whom we interact. It’s about making room for something completely different to emerge from the dialogue between us as praxis researchers and those we are working with — and even against. As we live in a pluriverse and are committed to pluralism, this solidarity can never valorise consensus. Our solidarity is agonistic; we appreciate the foundational importance to democratic life of ‘agonistic confrontation’ and our Provocations emphasise ‘adversarial respect’.

In terms of our wider communities, our solidarity is also about doing critique with care, which connects with transforming ideals into praxis. In other words, it’s about avoiding the orthodox ‘mic drop’ of critical scholarship and saying instead, ‘This situation might not be good, but here are some things we can do about it’.

Solidarity, then, is about critiquing earnestly, but moving from the dejection of critique towards agential hope by reimagining from new vantage points and planning pathways out of critique. This is what each of our Provocations intends to do.