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I’m really happy to have a short piece by me and Clara Crivellaro included in the publication “Self-Service”, a collection of contributions responding to . Kirsty Hendry and Ilona Sagar produced the publication which was exhibited alongside their film screening at the Glasgow International Festival.

In “Experiments in collective counting”, Clara and I write about the (ac)counting practices on an estate in South East London and our efforts to intervene in a resolutely singular logic of community and value.

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Anja Thieme, Cynthia L. Bennett, Cecily Morrison, Edward Cutrell and Alex Taylor (2018) “I can do everything but see!” – How People with Vision Impairments Negotiate their Abilities in Social Contexts. In Proceedings CHI ’18. ACM Press.

pdf (879 downloads)

Ari Schlesinger, Kenton O’Hara and Alex Taylor (2018) Lets Talk about Race: Identity, Chatbots, and AI. In Proceedings CHI ’18. ACM Press.

pdf (1282 downloads)

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A conversation with Alex and Daniela for the “What are you reading?” column in interactions magazine, Nov. 2017.
A.S.T.: Daniela and I wanted to try something a little different for this issue’s “What are you reading?”. We wanted to read something together that had a resonance between us, and that might give rise to a generative discussion. After a bit of deliberation, we settled on two books. The first is Anna Tsing’s “The Mushroom at the End of the World,” an extraordinary examination of one of the world’s most rarified mushrooms across capitalist supply chains and histories of multispecies cohabitation that explores the tensions between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival. The second book is Sarah Ahmed’s “Living a Feminist Life,” a feminist treatise that weaves together ideas from feminist of color scholarship with personal meditations on everyday feminist encounters.
Although quite different in scope, and although investigating topics conventionally outside HCI, both volumes explore feminist figurings of materialism that Daniela and I have been mulling on for quite some time. […]
Before getting into the readings, I feel it’s important to share that over the last eight years Daniela and I have grown together as scholars. Early on, we shared a keen interest in materialities as articulated by people like Tim Ingold and Bruno Latour. Over the years, this mutual interest has developed to centre far more on a feminist figuring of materialism and a particular concern for the entangled enactments of being and doing in the world, probably best exemplified in Donna Haraway’s figures of the cyborg, companion species and, most recently, the chthulucene. At the same time, Daniela has gone on to develop a mature reading of craft, hand-work and repair, and demonstrated the importance of these to HCI. And my own interests have threaded a variety of topics together, but been unified by a deep interest in the structural effects and affects of computation. Together, then, we hoped our convergences and divergences might make for something engaging, if unconventional for an interactions’ reader.
* * *
Having read these books what makes them valuable to be read together, and critically how do they come to be valuable together as feminist figurings of materiality?
D.K.R.: I’m in awe of these authors — the scope of their work, their ability to entwine a strong activist agenda with a crisp theoretical focus, and their skillful nurturing of a poetics of practice with powerful analytic potential. How to search for understanding while asserting difference? Thinking through mushrooms, I’ve learned, can help.
Before reading Tsing’s book, I never thought much about mushrooms as more than something delicious (or deadly!) to consume, and certainly not as an object for feminist world-making. But as with Ahmed’s focus on feminism, reading Tsing’s account of the matsutake mushroom is a deeply personal account of noticing —showing how the impulse to notice can take multiple forms. For Ahmed noticing is a political act, drawing forth and realizing exclusions and omissions. What is it that people learn not to notice? In learning and unlearning across difference Ahmed promises opportunities for listening, for noticing. Tsing works with a noticing of unpredictability, the dance of following tracks in the dark, of follow the mushrooms, of noticing what matters. Bodies, both living and dead, become tools for “show[ing] us how to look around rather than ahead.” (2015, 22) They enroll additional instruments for knowing; forms of political listening that, in Tsing’s words, “look for disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest” (ibid, 5).
Have these forms of noticing infected your work? What did you find?
A.S.T.: You capture a strong commonality between what have been for me two exhilarating and deeply moving texts. I felt the same way: noticing is thoroughly enlivened by both authors. I found their ideas turned and folded in together—involuted! (Hustak and Myers)—to offer up something more and at the same time pointing to a deeper, more critical attention to things.
I was delighted with Tsing’s insistence on following the stories, of choosing to turn away from the usual modes of scholarly accounting and, instead, stay with the noticed details of lines spun by mushrooms and people across time, and along global supply chains. Also, I was touched by Ahmed’s attention to revisiting her own profound encounters with violence, (un)happiness and self-discovery, and responding by daring to ‘get in the way’—like Wolf’s Mrs Dalloway, finding ways to stop and orient the body differently. Between them, such shifts in scale! But together they invite, as you say, a care for paying attention and asking, to use Ahmed’s words, “questions about how to live better” (2017, 12).
It’s with an emphasis on the latter that I want to respond to you, and that I mean to ask a follow on question. Certainly paying attention to the details has been central to my research in studying how lives entangle with technologies. This has always been the starting point for the ethnographic enterprise that channels my work. And yet, I’ve managed to bracket this kind of eye for detail from what I bring with it, what worlds I bring with such noticings. I agree with you, Ahmed and Tsing (along with other feminist writings) show how noticing has its politics, that by ‘merely’ noticing we are always already entangled in a cosmopolitics (Stengers) in which the personal and structural are strung together, and where injustices, inequities and violence are immanent. What Ahmed’s and Tsing’s noticings show for me, then, is a commitment to much more than the detailed accounts of the world. By paying attention to the troubled conditions we are implicated in, they are making the space to seek reparative methods and the possibilities for other more bearable worlds.
What I’m curious to hear is whether these ideas of what I am beginning to think of as ‘resistances and reparations’ resonate with you in reading the texts and, perhaps more importantly, if/how you see them coming through in the design research you do.
D.K.R.: I like thinking of these as reparative methods — and, in this sense, I see their methods as reflections of genealogy. The lineage of design we receive as HCI practitioners looks very different from the one I inherited as an undergraduate design student, which looks different from the one I now seek to recuperate in my recent work (exploring the practices of women who wove early forms of computing memory by hand). In this multiply produced trajectory, in seeking out varied pathways toward defining design, I see possibilities for reconfiguring what comprises design today. Design might not work toward progress or toward ruin but instead, after Tsing, it may help us think with “salvage rhythms.” It might help us notice the uneven, contingent, and collective work required for change. Ahmed writes of women’s studies departments:

“We have to shake the foundations”

“But when we shake the foundations, it is harder to stay up” (2017, 232). Does design call for the same willful commitment to keep going, “to keep coming up?” (ibid, 12).
Ahmed and Tsing don’t speak directly to design as a field or as a practice. But I wonder if you see in their critiques and potentials — from “decentering human hubris” to “diversity work” — an opening for elaborating a different kind of technology design? Tsing writes, “To listen politically is to detect the traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas” (2015, 254). As you do this listening, this reparation and resistance, what not-yet-articulated common agendas might you find?
A.S.T.: There’s so much to say in response to this, but in the interests of space (which we are running out of), let me limit my answer to one thing in particular, namely what I see to be our contemporaneous obsession with numbers, counting and simulacrums of the market place. To me, this unerring drift (that sometimes feels like a surge) towards measurement and the market rationalising of everything, has become such a big part of how we approach technology design. It operates as a rationalising force in so much work, to the point that we mask how—in the way Tsing shows so compellingly— labour and capital is strewn together through such a heterogeneity of flows, eddies, disturbances and even ruin. Indeed, the labours and products that many of us are involved in appear to be so bound up with this powerful logic, but there are still so few possibilities to question or resist it, to “shake the foundations” and “keep coming up”.
For me, Tsing and Ahmed show that we need, urgently, to find ways to act together, to make more possible with the possibilities you write of. Inspired by Ahmed’s language, in particular, I come away wanting to build an army in which each of us is not afraid of putting our bodies into it. All around us, there are ideologies, structures, methods, norms, practices, etc. that seek to smooth so much over and remove each of us from being counted, really counted, from being “alive with a world”. What we need are ways to keep pushing, resisting, and being sensational. We need to ensure our noticings are noticed.
D.K.R.: So maybe then, for HCI, this call to arms makes possible a renewed concern for the problem-solving heritage of the field. Across its methodological rubrics and case studies, HCI scholarship tends to frame design as a means of accomplishing ends, of seeking out too-easy resolutions rather than encouraging creative listening, in Tsing’s terms. These texts, by contrast, caution against such prefabrications and fatalisms. They show that what is at stake in making and inhabiting unpredictable encounters is our ability to recognize and become more accountable to those who lose out — to the things that lie outside our immediate view, to the bacteria that make the soil in which many designers mine, to the “users” haunted by our patriarchal legacies of innovation work. Tsing and Ahmed ask readers to struggle against — to take in and wrestle with our surrounding ecosystems. “We become a problem when we describe a problem,” writes Ahmed (2017, 87). For HCI, Tsing and Ahmed show that designers are not self-contained entities but designers-in-motion, continually working together across difference.

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Design Issues, Summer 2017, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 25–36

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SAVE THE DATE 11June 6pm Opening VIENNA BIENNALE 2015: IDEAS FOR CHANGE https://t.co/TWZntdYWBX pic.twitter.com/061HYLrT6D

— VIENNA BIENNALE (@VieBiennale) April 22, 2015

… the Biennale sets the developments in robotics and AI against the future of work and labour. I’ve used this as an invitation to consider two ‘modes’ of capability:

When it comes to judging the capacities of humans and nonhumans, we are drawn to two modes of existence. In one mode, we are compelled to see capability as residing within an actor, as an intrinsic quality of their being. A favourite determinant is the brain-weight to body-weight ratio; another is genetic predisposition. We have devised all manner of tests to isolate human and nonhuman capacities: IQ tests, rats mazes and Turing tests among them. Naturally, humans come out on top using most counts.
In the second mode, we observe actors excel in their achievements. We allow ourselves to be surprised and delighted by exhibitions of capacity that exceed our expectations (and that contravene the first mode in so many ways). To find evidence of this mode, one need only turn to that vast repository of record and observation, YouTube, and witness the viewing numbers for titles like “species [x] and species [y] playing together”, “species [x] and species [y] unlikely friends”, and so on. As these titles suggest, capability is often recognised here as accomplished with others—with other objects, other actors, other critters.
Speculating on human capacities—on what humans might be capable of and how they might work in the future—I find myself asking, as the animal studies scholar Vinciane Despret does, which of these modes is ‘more interesting’ and which ‘makes more interesting’. Which of these modes invites us to speculate on new fabulations of actors of all kinds, of actors becoming-with each other, of becoming other-than-humanly-capable, of becoming more capable?
I am taken by the mode that views capability as collectively achieved and that invites those conditions that enlarge capacities through on-going interminglings. The future of work, through this mode, will be dictated not by the limits of being human, but by how we might best attune ourselves with others, how we might become more capable together.

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Ingunn Moser & John Law (1999: 174)

What is it to be capable? How might we elbow away the conditions that limit ability, to become more capable?
In this short piece, I take seriously Rebekah’s invitation to account for “different ways of doing, acting, and living in the world”. The anthropological imperative to “take into account difference” and consider how objects “intersect with social worlds, imaginaries and emergent social practices” speaks to my ongoing efforts to engage, productively, with the long and troubled relationship between technology and dis/ability. Specifically, it resonates with work I’ve been undertaking that asks what, if anything, artificial intelligence (AI) might offer the blind and vision impaired.
What I want to do in the following is give some space to an idea of capability that I’ve found especially generative in rethinking this pairing of ability and technology, and in asking what AI could be good for. I find works like that of Shreeharsh Kelkar’s (published on the CASTAC blog) to be valuable here in critically examining what AI introduces to the technsocial assemblages of work, entertainment and leisure, and the boundaries enacted in/through such figurings. Like Shreeharsh, I hesitate to define, again, what counts as AI. Turning things around, my concern is for a capability that is achieved with others, and what the possibility of becoming capable together might mean for designing AI-with-dis/ability differently.
Thinking with dis/ability, I’ve found myself returning to a mixture of writings in disability studies, science and technology studies (STS), and feminist technoscience. I’ve drawn particular inspiration from Charles Goodwin and Ingunn Moser who have, in different ways, provided examples of the careful study of practice; both show a commitment to disrupting those sedimented “distributions of power and agency” which seem to come too easily when working with dis/ability (Moser 2005: 667). Also, offering a somewhat tangential perspective have been Donna Haraway’s writings and Vinciane Despret’s manifold accounts of animals. I’m conscious Haraway and Despret may seem peculiar reference points with their shared concerns for speculative/science fictions and stories with companion species, and I’m sensitive to what may appear to be the problematic connections I am drawing between such ‘fabulations’ and human dis/ability. However, my intention here is not to insist on direct parallels but to use the productive and uplifting works of Haraway and Despret to introduce a different point of view and, I hope, new questions around capability.
With this backdrop, the first thing to say is that the commonly referred to deficit model in disability studies presents an especially worrying version of capability. This version places the individual along a spectrum of ability, where what he or she can or cannot do defines them as more or less capable. Thus, blindness and vision impairment are indicative of an absence of ability. Worse still, if being human is defined somehow by a set of pre-defined abilities that constitute a ‘prototypical body’, then an absence of some sort or another conjures up the image of an actor who is less-than-human.
It’s this version of capability that Charles Goodwin troubles so convincingly in his careful analysis of the conversations between an aphasic man, Chil, and his family. Chil has only three words in his vocabulary, ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘and’. In a ‘formal linguistics’, Goodwin argues, Chil, with such a limited repertoire of words, “might seem an atypical, marginal figure for the study of human language, a defective actor who can be easily ignored without theoretical loss” (2004: 152). The “psychological and neurological structures necessary for linguistic competence are to be found” in the “mental life” of the speaker, and thus Chil is defined by a bodily absence, an individual deficit (2004: 153).
However, in actual talk, Chil shows himself to be a competent and adept conversationalist. Goodwin details how communicative features such as ‘nonsense’ syllable use, prosody, intonation and turn taking, and interactional, embodied resources like gaze and posture, are used by Chil to not just participate in ongoing conversational talk, but initiate and direct such talk himself.
The trouble with the deficit model of dis/ability then is it presents a version of capability that presumes a ‘normal’ human, and a deviation or absence of some ability, such as a limited lexicon, to be an indication of a “defective actor”. Yet this captures nothing of the mutual accomplishment of capability where such things as talk must be understood as an emerging phenomena, achieved in concert, with the involvement from others and a range of situational resources in-action. You might say, with the deficit model, capability is judged comparatively, always against some notional normative figure, always with an absence or lack of something that detracts from a ‘pure’ or ‘genuine’ presence in the world. No room is given for capability as it is achieved: how we—all of us—might just come to be capable in and through worlds strewn with ‘continuities and discontinuities’, and through ‘good and bad passages’ (Moser and Law 1999).
This takes me back to something a fieldwork informant, Jerry, told me. Comparing how people ‘take in information’ who have been blind from birth (as he has) with those who have recently lost their vision, Jerry thoughtfully comments:

We have a shared method I suppose of taking in information… It’s not… I don’t have to spend that time imagining the visual switch… They refer to the world that they live in as being like living in a fog, you know, nothing’s very clear. But I never had that feeling that my world is a fog. It’s the world.

I’m struck here by Jerry’s allusion to a world that is not forever placed in contrast to another. The ‘shared method’ is about coming to be capable, collectively, about living a life not dominated by a loss, a fog, but by being/becoming capable in/with the world. Another informant, Sarah, described something similar but in more concrete terms:

I was quite young when I learnt to take other cues. You know, people’s voice, what they sound like, how much they’re talking, are they suddenly really quiet [when] they’re normally really chatty, that they’re just not quite themselves. And quite often that’s an easy way. But! For example, the idea of catching someone’s eye across the room, that’s a foreign language to me. I just don’t even know what… I can in theory know what that means but in practice even if your head is facing towards me I don’t know who you’re talking to necessarily.

For Sarah, a visual cue—catching someone’s eye—is foreign, is other worldly; this could be used to highlight an absence in Sarah, the fog she lives in, a deficit in ability. But to me it feels more genuine to say she has become capable in/with a world that is other-than-visual. Dis/ability and what renders one more or less capable is afforded through a continual attunement in a world with others.
Jerry’s and Sarah’s reflections—that say so much to me about worlds that are other-than-sighted—bring to mind two related threads of work. One is a moving series of works from the artist Sophie Calle. In photos, videos and stories, Calle has people ponder on colour (“La Couleur Aveugle”) and beauty (“Les Aveugles”), and first and last sights (“Pour La Dernière et Pour La Première Fois”). Not all of those people Calle collaborates with are blind—some are seeing things for the first time (“Voir la mer”)—but in each case the audience is invited to rethink the relations between person, experience and sight, and imagine worlds that are more-than-sighted and actively brought into being.
A second related thread that reminds us of our active presence in the world is one which resonates with “the arts of feminist speculative fabulation” (Haraway 2016) and provides significantly different versions of capability to work with. In particular, it brings to mind Donna Haraway’s refigurings of human-machine entanglements and multi-species companionship, and also Vinciane Despret’s lively stories with animals. Haraway equips us with generative ways of imagining worlds actively brought into being, of composites of actors (of all kinds) defined not by “bounded utilitarian individualism” (Haraway 2016), but by becoming-with each other.

“Becoming-with, not becoming, is the name of the game; becoming-with is how partners are, in Vinciane Despret’s terms, rendered capable. Ontologically heterogeneous partners become who and what they are in relational material-semiotic worlding. Natures, cultures, subjects, and objects do not preexist their intertwined worldings.”

Like Haraway, I find this ‘becoming-with’ takes on tremendous value through Despret’s work. Despret’s sensitivity to ‘asking the right questions’ of conditions and actors of all kinds, and of their assemblages, open up the possibilities to so much more, to render us capable in so many more ways (Despret 2016). Just as Chil emerges as a competent speaker and his family “treats him as someone who has something to say,” (Goodwin et al. 2002) Despret is interested in the possibilities of “interagency” (Despret 2013), of what actors-together might be rendered capable of. Despret’s project—if it can be referred to like this—is thus an expansive one. It is to perpetually invite the prospect of new ‘devices’, new ‘practices’, new ‘conditions’, new ‘fabulations’, and to invite the chance, the risk, even, of becoming more capable together.
It’s just such a version of capability that I believe gives us so much more to work with. Dis/ability is not constrained by the imagined limits of what it is to be human, but rather made possible by the conditions actors (of all sorts) are active in.
So, what if we—those of us who think and live with dis/ability—found ourselves able to work with capability along these lines? How might we approach dis/ability, and imagine new figurings of technology and dis/ability? This is not the place to speculate on these imaginaries, but it does I hope show that a different onus is put on emerging technologies like AI. The versions of technosocial fabulations we might begin to tell here are not of the repair or replacement of vision (or other deficits in ability) but of enlarging what and how we become-capable-with, become more capable.

Despret, Vinciane. 2016. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? London: University of Minnesota Press.
Despret, Vinciane. 2013. From secret agents to interagency. History and Theory, 52(4), 29–44.
Goodwin, Charles. 2004. A Competent Speaker Who Can’t Speak: The Social Life of Aphasia. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14(2): 151–170.
Goodwin, Charles, Goodwin, Marjorie H., & Olsher, David. (2002). Producing Sense with Nonsense Syllables: Turn and Sequence in Conversations with a Man with Severe Aphasia. In Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox, & Sandra A. Thompson (Eds.), The Language of Turn and Sequence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. London: Duke University Press.
Moser, Ingunn. 2005. On becoming disabled and articulating alternatives. Cultural Studies 19(6): 667–700.
Moser, Ingunn and Law, John. 1999. Good passages, bad passages. The Sociological Review, 47(S1), 196–219.

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Cynthia Bennett and Alex Taylor

In this paper, we begin with Ingunn Moser’s and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s generative notions of care and use them to expand how we understand capability. Drawing on fieldwork with blind and vision impaired people, we turn our attention to a materially enacted, unfolding ‘sense-ability’. This is a sensing that puts (cap)ability and care together, that understands ‘seeing-in-the-world’ as a practical affair that is, at once, knowing, effecting and affecting with others (humans or otherwise). Thus, we show not only that care can contest an ‘instrumentalism’ in forms of knowing and doing—by ‘re-affecting objectified worlds’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011: 98)—but also give a greater clarity to how care can be, in practice, entangled in practice. This sense-ability seeks to be active, enlivening how we become capable; it is figured to be worked with, not finite and dictated by assumed bodily limits, but open to becoming-with and becoming-more. Borrowing from Vinciane Despret, this sense-ability is “to gain a body that does more things, that feels other events, and that is more and more able…” (2004: 120).

Despret, V. (2004). The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis. Body & Society, 10(2–3), 111–134.
Moser, I. (2011). Dementia and the Limits to Life. ST&HV, 36(5), 704–722.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011). Matters of Care in Technoscience. Social Studies of Science, 41(1), 85–106.

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Lindley, S.E., Thieme, A., Taylor, A.S. et al. (2017). Surfacing Small Worlds through Data-In-Place. Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

 
Abstract

We present findings from a five-week deployment of voting technologies in a city neighbourhood. Drawing on Marres’ (2012) work on material participation and Massey’s (2005) conceptualisation of space as dynamic, we designed the deployment such that the technologies (which were situated in residents’ homes, on the street, and available online) would work in concert, cutting across the neighbourhood to make visible, juxtapose and draw together the different ‘small worlds’ within it. We demonstrate how the material infrastructure of the voting devices set in motion particular processes and interpretations of participation, putting data in place in a way that had ramifications for the recognition of heterogeneity. We conclude that redistributing participation means not only opening up access, so that everyone can participate, or even providing a multitude of voting channels, so that people can participate in different ways. Rather, it means making visible multiplicity, challenging notions of similarity, and showing how difference may be productive.

See more on the CSCW site here. See an early draft here.

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As Sarah’s introduction to the paper outlined, our co-writings were an attempt to think with the emerging strategies of feminist counting, accounting and re-counting.
Below, I present my part to the co-authered piece. It’s long, so I put it here more for the record than any expectation it will be read. I must add that the ideas I present draw on work done by . Without her energy and always thoughtful investment in the field site, this reflection would not have been possible:

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