"Do you want to be part of an echo chamber or be part of a community where you can promote impactful social change?"
(Speech delivered at the Diversity and Inclusion Lunch @ CHI 2018 where I was awarded Diversity Champion Recognition Emerging Voice)
My message today is addressed to those who are transitioning from their PhDs to the job market or the junior folks who are adjusting to their new professional life.
I received my PhD from the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University (IU). For my dissertation, I did an almost year-long ethnography in the slums of Brazil where I was researching the experiences of people in marginalized communities with technology, in order to recommend and promote more inclusive technology designs and policies.
I was able to conduct and finish this research because I was in a very privileged position at Indiana University where I had all the support I needed — from human to financial resources.
After I finished my PhD, I joined the University of Kentucky (UK) as faculty in the School of Information Science. I didn’t have a good first year at all- along with all the struggles that first-year faculty have to face, I couldn’t find at UK the support I had at IU. I couldn’t find any of you there (pointing at the crowd attending the Diversity and Inclusion Lunch). I thought that Kentucky wasn’t a good fit, so I went back to the job market — but as you can imagine, the job market is not very kind to ethnographers.
So, I decided to give Kentucky another chance… or maybe give myself another chance. It was right at the beginning of my second year that I had a moment of realization: I needed to change my attitude, instead of having that attitude of a PhD student looking for support, I had to be the professor who provided support — and as cliché as this may sound, I decided to be the change that I wanted to see in my community.
So, I started several initiatives and research projects in order to bring support and social justice:
(1) Along with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Computer Science female students, we founded the ACM-W chapter at UK — the first one in the commonwealth of Kentucky. We also founded the Women in Technology (WiT) group to support female students who were outside ICT and Computer Science majors, such as students in Bioinformatics and Communications.
(2) With almost no budget, I started a series of talks in my department in order to bring scholars whose research promotes inclusion, diversity, and social justice. These talks have the intent to spark more debates and conversations about these issues on campus. This year, we brought three amazing scholars: Austin Toombs, assistant professor at Purdue, Brandi Frisby, associate professor at UK, and Virginia Eubanks, associate professor at University at Albany, who talked about her amazing new book “Automating Inequality.”
I also started three new research projects that touched on these issues but on different fronts:
(1) I have been doing fieldwork in Havana, Cuba since 2015 in order to understand the implications that the now-accessible Internet is having in the Cuban society — from freedom of press to access to information. Since 2016, I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with amazing scholars in this project, such as Michaelanne Dye, Neha Kumar, and Amy Bruckman — all from Georgia Tech.
(2) I partnered with Google in a project led by Nithya Sambasivan where we are researching gender and technology in various countries, to help us understand what the experience of women and non-binary folks with tech is and how designers can be more inclusive.
(3) And the most challenging one is the project I started in Appalachia. For those who are not familiar with the region, Appalachia is considered the poorest area in the USA. It lacks proper access to health care, education, and not surprisingly, access to information. This region was labeled as Trumpland during the 2016 presidential race and the people were hit hard with misinformation, which helped perpetuate the everlasting stereotypes that have hunted the community for a long time. Eastern Kentucky is part of such a region, and the state ranks 46th (out of 50 US states) in Internet access. My research project there is to promote affordable broadband access and information literacy programs as a way to tackle the issue of misinformation (fake news) and promote health information literacy. The Eastern Kentuckian and Appalachian communities feel completely forgotten by the government, Democratic and Republican leaderships; if we want to make a change, we can’t turn our backs on them and stick to the stereotypes — we need to build bridges and engage in acts of care in order to bring social change, because, otherwise, we will be inflating our comfortable bubbles and continue to be “surprised” by the elections outcomes.
And just when I started changing my attitude, to be the support, I actually found great support at UK in the Gender Women Studies, Social Theory, and Center for Equality and Social Justice groups, where I’ve become an affiliated faculty. The fantastic scholars in these groups have been challenging me intellectually and pushing me to directions that I had never thought about taking the risk.
So, going back to my PhD times — of course, when I was finishing it and getting on the job market for the first time, I wanted to go to places like New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, Berkeley… places that are usually associated with a progressive agenda, but I didn’t end up going to any of these cities. I’m sure this is the case for many of the folks here today, and if you haven’t ended up in such cities, don’t be disheartened. Ever since I decided to stay in Kentucky, I’ve been reflecting on the following question, which I’d like to invite you all to reflect on as well: Do I want to go to a place and be part of an echo chamber, or a place where I can engage with the community and promote impactful social change?
Thank you!
