Infrastructural Speculations for Pluriversality in Sociotechnical Participatory Design Research
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Shabnam, Shirley
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Critical scholarship in HCI and CSCW have illustrated concerns of participatory research propagating harms by reinforcing systemic racism and colonial othering. Critiques have highlighted the technosolutionist tendencies of Partcipatory Design (PD), especially when design with marginalized communities, to produce products or technological interventions by flattening the diverse perspectives of heterogeneous communities without considering the complex infrastructural entanglements of deployed technologies. Decolonial participatory researchers have, hence, called for alternatives to democratizing decision making while sociotechnical scholars urge for an infrastructural lens within PD and community-enaged practices. To offer a participatory research practice addressing both calls, this project frames a predominantly-white institution of higher education as a complex sociotechnical system marginalizing students of color through infrastructural harm. I collaborate with 17 students of color through two PD workshops to identify their current frustrations with the system, and speculate lifeworlds they desire. This paper presents three constructed, contradictory lifeworlds in the form of a pluriverse –a world of many worlds– to critically examine the role of design researchers and lifeworlds when designing interventions and implications for sustainable participatory research.
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Undergraduate Research Option Thesis