ECT Brownbag: Sepehr Vakil

BIPOC Youth as Philosophers of Technology

When: Thu, November 5th, 11am – 12pm EST
Zoom Link: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/91044407438

A wave of new scholarship and investigative reporting has documented the use of advanced technologies by law enforcement in the ongoing surveillance of and attempts to criminalize Black and Brown communities in the US. At the same time, recent calls for prison abolition and defunding of police highlight deeply seated tensions between law enforcement agencies and communities of color. Yet, the role of technology in police surveillance as well as in community resistance to such surveillance is seldom studied and requires a new paradigm for understanding and studying technology learning. In contrast to dominant approaches (e.g., #CSforAll) organized around economic, militaristic, or “STEM pipeline” logics, there is an urgent need for onto-epistemological perspectives of technology learning that substantively address the cultural, ethical, and political dimensions and implications of tech in society. Such approaches invite new ways of thinking, as well as innovative pedagogical and research methodologies to expand and deepen such thinking. In this paper, we explore a form of technology learning that imagines and prepares youth to become philosophers of technology, a conceptual pivot away from the limiting frames of ‘youth as consumers’ or even as ‘youth as producers’ of technology. Distinct from existing views on technology learning (e.g. learning how to code) and epistemologies about the role of technology in society (e.g. to increase productivity), a philosophical approach could focus on preparing youth to decode tech’s relationship with power (Vakil & Higgs, 2019) and/or to question whether or not a technology should be used or developed in the first place. But what does learning about the ethics and politics of technology look and feel like, especially for racially minoritized youth? What are these youth’s “signs of learning” relative to the intersections of ethics, power, and tech? In this talk, I take up these questions in the context of the Young People’s Race Power and Tech Project (YPRPT), a university-community partnership in the Chicago area where youth research and produce documentaries exploring the impact of technology on their local communities. I share emerging analysis centered around a focal artifact, Melting Ice, and the sense-making of the two high school students who developed this artifact.

Melting Ice is a student-produced film that examines both how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) use advanced technologies to surveil and track immigrants and how immigrant communities have created technologies of resistance for themselves. Drawing upon analyses of the film itself, community-member reactions to the film, and think-aloud interviews conducted with the two youth filmmakers, I analyze how the youth filmmakers felt, experienced, and understood an alternative view of technology learning and how they were both positioned as and agential in taking up roles as philosophers of technology. This study has implications for how we conceptualize technology learning, engage in research around youth sense-making and development of innovative artifacts of learning, and develop pedagogies that scaffold technology learning that honors youth’s multi-faceted identities as learners.