Individual and collective recognition
I was recognized this week as an ACM Distinguished Member, a high honor in computing. Thank you to my nominators and the Distinguished Member committee for taking the time to highlight my work and the incredible community of people that came before me. As much as I appreciate it, however, I do struggle with recognition, personally and intellectually. This piece is a reflection on that struggle and a call for more collective forms of acclaim.
In 7th grade, we were asked to write some poetry about civil rights. At the time, my teacher had taught us extensively about the Civil Rights movement, and particularly the Montgomery bus boycotts in 1955. I remember deciding write about the 20 years of activism that ultimately led to Rosa Parks’ role in the boycotts, and the eventual Browder vs. Gayle case that ruled bus segregation unconstitutional under the 14th amendment. Her story had inspired me to think about the personal risks that activists are forced to take to pursue justice, but also how those risks are shared with a community, and how those community efforts are often reduced, simplified, and erased.
I remember leaning over a foot stool with a piece of paper and a pencil while watching Animaniacs and writing and rewriting a somber few stanzas that tried to stitch together the series of moments in that history that led to Parks’ arrest. I wanted to use imagery to implicitly show how reductively Park’s role was often told, rightfully elevating her heroism, while also erasing the countless others working tirelessly for the Montgomery Improvement Association, the NAACP, the many activists prior who had resisted bus segregation, and the long history that led up to that moment. (Yes, I was a nerd at 13 too). I remember it being a bit flowery and sentimental, but I liked how I’d woven together the rightful rage at segregation, the organization of a community, and the way that community buffered the isolation of a cell.
My teacher liked it. She pulled me aside one day in class and asked if I’d be okay being nominated to publish it in a poetry journal for young writers. I was embarrassed; I didn’t like being noticed, or having my work recognized. I didn’t feel like I deserved it, and I didn’t want people to see me, because I felt like I was a fraud. But I also always gave high deference to authority, and so I said yes, and shrunk in my seat. It was eventually published and the journal eventually gave it an award. It was my worst nightmare.
But it got worse. I was at my middle school jazz band concert some time later, giving my first alto sax solo at the end of Stray Cut Strut, and I was already mortified for missing a few notes. And then, in the intermission, my English teacher came up to the mic and announced to the audience that I had won the literary award. I turned red and tried to hide. She then asked me to come up on stage and read the poem to the audience of 200 parents and students, all of whom were staring straight at me. I froze, then vigorously shook my head, and so she read it instead, and the audience applauded. It should have felt like an honor, but it was the most mortifying day of my childhood.
I tell this story not to feign modesty, but to reinforce just how important it has been in my life to not be seen. This continued in high school, when I quit band because my teacher wanted me to be first chair for alto sax, and I didn’t want to be noticed. I excluded accomplishments and awards on my college applications because I didn’t want to stand out. I never talked in class all throughout college because I didn’t want people to hear my thoughts and questions. This continued even to the end of my doctoral studies, after an successful run of publications and awards, where my colleagues kept having to remind me to put myself out there and sing my phrases if I wanted any chance as a job as a professor.
Sometimes I think the only reason that I am where I am today is because other people decided to take the time to recognize and celebrate me, even though, or perhaps because, I would not recognize myself. It only became clear after I finally accepted my gender identity back in 2018 why I had such a hard time being recognized: I didn’t want people to see me because if they saw the real me, they might reject me. And so I hid.
Five years later, I’m less afraid of being seen. But I’m still not very good at accepting praise. That might seem strange, given how much space I take up on this blog talking about myself, and my dreams and ideas, but the reality is that everything about writing here has always felt like a forced exercise in learning to value myself. Its like I’m constantly needing to pretend that I’m a confident, successful, unashamed person so that I can eventually be one, eternally faking it until I make it.
The irony, of course, is that I have made it. Many times over. The most recent evidence of this came this past week, when I was recognized as an ACM Distinguished Member, after a member of the community nominated me. My first thought was, “Lies.” But I caught myself, and tried to remind myself, that indeed, I was distinguished. I have accomplished a lot, I have contributed a lot, and while there are countless people who helped me get here, I was a central part of these accomplishments. I have to tell myself that being seen in this way is just my community acknowledging that I matter, and I have to reluctantly agree. I do matter.
And yet, after growing to accept validation personally in the past five years, I find myself still struggling with recognition. But it is not an emotional struggle, but an intellectual one that concerns the same ideas I wrote about in that Rosa Parks poem 30 years ago. For example, why do we have such a need to recognize individuals in academia, but so much disinterest in recognizing the communities that make individual contributions possible ? Why, when we recognize individuals, do we not historicize recognition, helping reveal how individuals and their accomplishments are in conversation with time, place, and broader social forces, and its their interaction that lead to the outcomes we recognize? Why, when we recognize achievements, are they so frequently framed in ways that elevate individuals above others? We absolutely should recognize individuals — we all are, after all, individuals — but we are also not separate from each other. We shape each other together, and create meaning together, and make progress together. Even the most incredible people in history are at least partly a byproduct of their times, culture, and communities.
So while I accept this recognition as deserved, and the ACM website only lists my name, I must contextualize it with the broader community contexts that shaped me and my ideas. My mother, for example, has always been a key figure in my life, teaching me how to bring order to my actions and plans, inspiring me to teach, and modeling a fierce independence as a single mother and parent. The eclectic community of scholars that have long attended the VL/HCC conference, and the Psychology of Programming Interest Group, and the murky corners of HCI that never let go of a fascination with programming languages as user interfaces gave me place and purpose and theories and ideas and hope that the things that fascinated me were still worth investigating. There are thousands of authors of research papers, spanning HCI, software engineering, programming languages, education, cognitive learning sciences, psychology, sociology, economics, design, and more that shaped the intricate web of my expertise, and my contributions to that web, no matter how big, are dwarfed by the history of knowledge in which they are situated. The leaders of history that created the communities, resources, and conditions that enabled me to even have the privilege of being distinguished — the founders of HCI communities, the inspiring mentorship of the late David Notkin, Jan Cuny and her leadership in broadening participation at NSF, computing visionaries throughout history—absolutely deserve most of the credit. And perhaps most importantly, the dozens of doctoral students I work with shape my own ideas every day, through their perspectives, creativity, and care. Marking me for distinction is elevating thousands of people for the community they created, the teaching they did, and the ideas that emerged from it.
I’ve come to think of recognition, then, as like the tip of an iceberg. When someone is recognized, it is a sign of a much larger mass of ideas, history, movement, all of which were necessary for one of us to bob up out of the water, temporarily, to suggest the greatness below. The boats that pass by these unseen glacial forms can’t be blamed for looking first to the jagged edges that peek out, as they’re the first sign of something massive. But they can be blamed for not stopping, pausing, and looking down into the depths to see just how deep the lattice goes.
Maybe, then, instead of recognizing individuals alone, we might try the harder task of documenting history. How are ideas shaped and by whom? We made the funding possible? Who created the communities? Who took the time for a hallway conversation that led to a great idea? How did the broader culture at the time create the substrate for our creativity? Recognition, perhaps, shouldn’t be about annually soliciting nominations for who rank above others, but maybe a once a decade moment to look back, to see who came before us, to understand how we got to the present day, and to use that knowledge to reconsider where we’re going. None of that means erasing the individuals we admire or the movements and ideas they inspire. But it does mean telling their full story, which is always a story of community.
If you’d like to learn more about the many Black women other than Rosa Parks who organized the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1955, NPR’s Code Switch has a great episode from last year with inspiring interviews. It’s a great example of what recognizing a community can look like.
