Source: De Agostini Picture Library / Getty

Kipnis, who was accused of sexual misconduct because she wrote about sexual harassment, was not initially allowed to know who her accusers were either, nor would anyone explain the rules governing her case. Nor, for that matter, were the rules clear to the people applying them, because, as she wrote in Unwanted Advances, “there’s no established or nationally uniform set of procedures.” On top of all that, Kipnis was supposed to keep the whole thing confidential: “I’d been plunged into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it,’’ she wrote. This chimes with the story of another academic, who told me that his university “never even talked to me before it decided to actually punish me. They read the reports from the investigators, but they never brought me in a room, they never called me on the phone, so that I could say anything about my side of the story. And they openly told me that I was being punished based on allegations. Just because they didn’t find evidence of it, they told me, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

Last year Joshua Katz, a popular Princeton classics professor, wrote an article critical of a letter published by a group of Princeton faculty on race. In response The Daily Princetonian, a student newspaper, spent seven months investigating his past relationships with students, eventually convincing university officials to relitigate incidents from years earlier that had already been adjudicated—a classic breach of James Madison’s belief that no one should be punished for the same thing twice. The Daily Princetonian investigation looks more like an attempt to ostracize a professor guilty of wrong-think than an attempt to bring resolution to a case of alleged misbehavior.

Not that everyone really wants an apology. One former journalist told me that his ex-colleagues “don’t want to endorse the process of mistake/apology/understanding/forgiveness—they don’t want to forgive.” Instead, he said, they want “to punish and purify.” But the knowledge that whatever you say will never be enough is debilitating. “If you make an apology and you know in advance that your apology will not be accepted—that it is going to be considered a move in a psychological or cultural or political game—then the integrity of your introspection is being mocked and you feel permanently marooned in a world of unforgivingness,” one person told me. “And that is a truly unethical world.”

But dig into the story of anyone who has been a genuine victim of modern mob justice and you will often find not an obvious argument between “woke” and “anti-woke” perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways, even leaving aside whatever political or intellectual issue might be at stake.

After that, she must wear a scarlet A—for adulterer—pinned to her dress for the rest of her life. On the outskirts of Boston, she lives in exile. No one will socialize with her—not even those who have quietly committed similar sins, among them the father of her child, the saintly village preacher.

I created a social justice metaphor library to help explain concepts like why you can't just create a "level playing field" without acknowledging the economic impacts of history (see, even saying it like that is complicated).

there’s a group of us who are figuring out what this Centre for Climate Justice is going to be and what its scope is going to be.

Just as normalizing the use of pronouns has been an important step for supporting gender justice, we argue that normalizing access talk is an important step for advancing disability justice in STEM fields. Moreover, we argue that all individuals have access needs, regardless of whether they are disabled or nondisabled.

Campbell’s lived experience as a native Black Bostonian showed her firsthand how uneven and oppressive the school-to-prison pipeline can be. Her late twin brother, Andre, was a victim of the systems she works to rebuild.

But -- see, but that's what makes the case a -- just a little bit -- in -- in -- in my last hypothetical about earthquake safety, any problem there with giving the money to a church and spending extra money for the cross in the window? It's all -- it's for public safety.

The incontestable principle of inclusion drove the changes, which smuggled in more threatening features that have come to characterize identity politics and social justice: monolithic group thought, hostility to open debate, and a taste for moral coercion.

Unlikethehuman-laborcurationprocessesoftheearlyInternetthatledtothecreationofonlinedirectoriessuchasLycosandYahoo!,inthecurrentInternetenvironment,informationaccesshasbeenlefttothecomplexalgorithmsofmachinestomakeselectionsandprioritizeresultsforusers.

Angelo: There could have been more people that heard my story, there could have been... Somebody should have said this is not right. Somebody should've said the police report is not right. I promise anybody could read the police report and it makes no sense, it makes no sense whatsoever. And I just feel like somebody could have said, "Well, hold on, this makes no sense at all. You know, let's ask him what happened." But it was never, "Okay, what happened?" It was always, "Okay, you did this." So that's where I saw the bad side of the United States legal system where I literally had no voice—and mainly being in Texas. I mean, in Texas literally, I was the bad guy because a little baby got hurt.Angelo: And so it was very hard, it was very hard. Even in jail there were people that would fight their cases and just because a woman said something—you didn't even have to actually do it—just because a woman said, "You know what, he did something," it was, "You're going to jail," just because of an outcry. So having this case of a little baby being in Texas, and just hearing all these stories, I was like, "There's no way that I'm going to get past this." And literally the very first offer was 30 years. 30 years, super aggressive, they put in that out of those 30 years, I had to do minimum 25 years. And it was just so scary for me because that was not me, I wasn't what they had on paper. I was not that person, I was different, I was completely—Isabel: Opposite of the criminals that you were surrounded by?Angelo: Exactly. And just hearing all these stories of people going through things in jail of all these things, I told myself, "Why are you here then? You're not supposed to be here. Why am I still here after six months? Why am I still here after a year? Why am I still here after me finally signing for some time?" I was like, "Okay, it's all going to be over. You're going to go home, you're going to see your mom." And then out of nowhere you get this paper that says order of deportation and you're like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what's supposed to be happening. No." And so it was like literally the world ended, and everything was taken just so fast. The only things that I have left is pictures just because of the situation that happened, I am not on good terms with the mother of my kids. And all I'm left with is pictures and just memories and that's the hardest. Not being able to just have some type of context, some type of pictures, or recent pictures and updates, something, something, something, it's very hard.

Isabel: Despite your own experience with the US justice system, you have like a larger faith that it is still like less corrupt than Mexico. Is that kind of what you're saying?Angelo: Well, it's very difficult because in the United States, when I would think about corruptions or anything like that, I think about families getting separated, all this stuff that's going on now with the news, with the President. Those are the bad things that I see up at the United States, about just this one guy has a problem with -- had an argument with one Mexican one day and it ruined his image for the rest of his life, and now a whole country has to has to suffer because of that. And I feel like the corruption here in Mexico is more inside of Mexico, more of being corrupt here and not having to do anything with any other countries or anything like that. But I do feel like there could've been more done.

Une première intervention dans l’action de groupe

. L’arrêt concerne l’accueil et la prise en charge des mineurs non accompagnés en France.

La réforme de la justice pénaledes mineurs

que le service public de la justice ne garantit pas partout le respect des droits et de l’intérêt supérieur des enfants parties à des procédures d’assistance éducative.

une Commune victime de propos diffamatoires ou injurieux peut déclencher elle-même les poursuites, mais doit au préalable délibérer en Conseil municipal et de manière ad hoc sur l’introduction des poursuites, conformément aux dispositions de l’article 48 1° de la loi du 29 juillet 1881.

Rajiv reminded us that: “Openness can be leveraged for justice, but it can also do harm. Closed practices can also do harm, but there are times when closed is the empowered choice. Choice is key. We must serve justice, rather than merely being open.”

Recommandation 2: conforter la mise en œuvre plus systématique des droits de l’enfant et du principe de primauté de son intérêt dans les procédures judiciaires

Article 31. Dans toutes les décisions qui concernent les enfants, qu'elles soient le fait des institutions publiques ou privées de protection sociale, des tribunaux, des autorités administratives ou des organes législatifs, l'intérêt supérieur de l'enfant doit être une considération primordiale. 2. Les Etats parties s'engagent à assurer à l'enfant la protection et les soins nécessaires à son bien-être, compte tenu des droits et des devoirs de ses parents, de ses tuteurs ou des autres personnes légalement responsables de lui, et ils prennent à cette fin toutes les mesures législatives et administratives appropriées. 3. Les Etats parties veillent à ce que le fonctionnement des institutions, services et établissements qui ont la charge des enfants et assurent leur protection soit conforme aux normes fixées par les autorités compétentes, particulièrement dans le domaine de la sécurité et de la santé et en ce qui concerne le nombre et la compétence de leur personnel ainsi que l'existence d'un contrôle approprié.

Article 4Les Etats parties s'engagent à prendre toutes les mesures législatives, administratives et autres qui sont nécessaires pour mettre en oeuvre les droits reconnus dans la présente Convention. Dans le cas des droits économiques, sociaux et culturels, ils prennent ces mesures dans toutes les limites des ressources dont ils disposent et, s'il y a lieu, dans le cadre de la coopération internationale.

Recommandation 4 Le Défenseur des droits recommande au garde des Sceaux et au ministre de l’Intérieur de rappeler aux autorités dont ils exercent la tutelle de prendre les mesures nécessaires afin de s’assurer que, dans toute procédure qui le concerne, l’enfant soit systématiquement et préalablement informé de son droit d’être accompagné par une personne adulte de son choix.

Recommandation 3 Le Défenseur des droits recommande au garde des Sceaux de faire respecter le droit de l’enfant à être auditionné en justice, en réformant l’article 388-1 du code civil. Il recommande également de réformer l’article 338-4 du code de procédure civile par voie réglementaire, pour que l’audition de l’enfant qui demande lui-même à être entendu dans le cadre d’une procédure le concernant soit de droit, sans qu’il ne soit plus fait référence à sa capacité de discernement. Il recommande enfin de compléter l’article 338-1 du code de procédure civile pour prévoir que le mineur de 10 ans et plus soit personnellement informé par le greffe de son droit d’être entendu.

Les personnes morales (sociétés et associations) peuvent aussi porter plainte pour défendre leurs intérêts ou les objectifs qu'elles poursuivent.

Preliminary results from the first year are tantalizing for anyone interested in solutions to address rising inequality in the United States, especially as they manifest along racial and gender lines. Within the first year, the study’s participants obtained jobs at twice the rate of the control group. At the beginning of the study, 28 percent of the participants had full-time employment, and after the first year, that number rose to 40 percent.

Poverty and affluence make a mockery of our system of justice.

What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims explicitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world.

those who don’t usually end up in jail

By focusing on the condition of the looking glass, Joyce suggests the artist does not start his work with a clean slate. Rather there is considerable baggage he or she must overcome. This baggage might include colonial conditions or biased assumptions. Form and context influence content.

Privilege

Journée mondiale de la justice sociale | (A/RES/62/10)

Diagnostiquer　: le sentiment de justice scolaire. Sous impulsion CPE et avec aval du chef d’établissement. Projet piloté par le CESC (s’inscrit dans son plan de prévention impulsé par CPE selon C3 «　impulser le volet éducatif du PE　»). Un questionnaire pourrait être établi en collaboration avec une instance d’élèves (CVC ou CVL) pour les élèves, avec le CESC pour les parents et avec le conseil pédagogique pour les professeurs afin de repérer les besoins et de mettre en œuvre ensuite des actions concertées. Ce genre d’initiative favorise les échanges et la concertation. Il s’agit d’une démarche volontaire en instaurant le respect et la confidentialité des débats. Réflexion par pole, instauration d’un outil diagnostic par pole, restitution collective, réflexion sur les objectifs et la mise en œuvre puis restitution finale ouverte.

Plainte classée sans suite en invoquant le motif n°61 Le motif n°61 de classement sans suite porte sur les « procédures alternatives mises en œuvre par d’autres autorités ». Ce motif signifie que le juge a estimé que la sanction du conseil de discipline était suffisante. En cas de désaccord, rien n’empêche de faire appel de cette décision de classement sans suite, soit en écrivant directement au procureur général pour contester, soit par le biais d’une citation directe, soit en déposant plainte avec constitution de partie civile auprès du doyen des juges d’instruction.

will consider for employment, qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of the Fair Chance Ordinance

“Let’s say a trial is listed and I have to cross examine a witness,” he said. “Now, what is the guarantee that the witness would be willing to go all the way to the court in such a time?” If witnesses do not appear, then the matter would merely be adjourned.

You have no choice. You can shop at a store that pays its workers better, sure, but the real atrocities have taken place long before your desired products have reached the shelf, and the stickers have nothing to do with it. “And here grocery has one last trick,” Lorr writes: “it allows us to hate our shrimp and eat it too. The image of the bad polluting aquaculture farmer or vulnerable exploited migrant gets imprinted in our first-world brain, while the fungibility of commodity goods—that maze of brokers and agents—gives the entire system the plausible deniability it craves.”

Trucking is now an industry thriving on its workers’ vulnerability

boycotting a single product is pointless. “Look at what happens when abused children get pushed out of labor markets. They typically don’t suddenly find better jobs. They get pushed further underground,” he says. “What you in the West have to realize is the entire narrative is backwards. In trafficking, the media focuses on why and where poor people get into difficult situations. But maybe we should be looking at why they are poor to begin with?” The answer is, of course, the “hunger behind our hunger.”

Is there any truly ethical way to buy groceries in America?In short: no. Americans now spend only 10 percent of their budgets on food, Lorr notes, while in 1900 it was 40 percent. Our food is the cheapest in the world because we import so much of it from places where things like labor and antibiotics are cheap. Not only that, we hunger for cheapness in our own shopping habits, forever seeking the great promotional deal.

the entire supply chain putting food in our supermarkets has been whittled down to the sharpest edge of profitability by suit-wearing Midwesterners who pride themselves on exemplifying the American capitalist spirit. It’s more surprising that anybody put the Thai shrimp industry story on a newspaper front page, Lorr thinks, than it is that we’re eating the fruits of indentured labor.

This kind of casting is true, Lorr explains, of nearly all supermarket employees, who would be automated away in a heartbeat if the data didn’t show that the average American consumer prefers a human touch.

Shrimp are perhaps the paradigmatic grocery store item. They used to be expensive, and now they’re not. They are born animals, and when they die they become meat, then cargo, then merchandise represented by a bar code—a product with a notably high profit yield on the grocery floor because it’s a dirt-cheap factory-farmed import.

Clark based his book selection framework on a social justice curriculum, and it consists of four components: identity, respect, justice, and action, which build on each other. “When we were evaluating books, we would try to find books that fell into one of those four categories,” he said, noting that the majority of considered titles landed in the identity group “because we want young people to develop a sense of who they are and to see themselves.” According to Clark, “if young people have a strong sense of who they are, then respect enters in, meaning that they respect other people and they respect different perspectives and points of view. And when you have identity and respect, children are better able to identify instances of injustice, thereby wanting to see justice.” And lastly, “action,” the fourth element of the framework, Clark said, “gives young people suggestions or examples of things that they can do to take action when they see injustice.”

This episode represents a pattern in the letters, wherein it is white students who are “woker” than their Black classmates, neatly demonstrating the degree to which this new religion is more about virtue signaling than social justice.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot, about how we can’t cover sports right now, or ever, as an individual and separate thing because sports are the gift we get for making our society as just and fair as possible. Right now, we’re seeing that multiplied a hundred times, because you have athletes who are feeling the urgency and have the power to come out and say what they believe politically. ESPN was saying just a few years ago that they wouldn’t cover politics at all. Now there’s no choice there. It’s been made really clear by the athletes, the people who play the sports, that they don’t want that distinction there themselves. So, who are we to decide that it must be imposed?

Food should be a vehicle for social justice, but oftentimes when we have panel conversations and conferences, nothing comes out of it because there aren't any implementation resources. People have this enlightened conversation, but then they leave. How do we actively combat that?

il n’est pas rare que les parents aient tendance à privilégier désormais la judiciarisation

Recommandation 14Le Défenseur des droits recommande que les décisions judiciaires, particulièrement en matière d’affaires familiales, d’assistance éducative et en matière pénale, soient expliquées à l’enfant, dans leur contenu et leur motivation, au besoin par l’intermédiaire d’un avocat, d’un travailleur social ou encore d’une association habilitée

Les délais fixés par la loi ne sont pas toujours respectés, comme pour la notification des décisions judiciaires, ce qui conduit à retarder leur exécution ou à priver pendant des mois les parties de leur droit de faire appel. Les délais d’exécution des décisions judiciaires résultent quant à eux souvent d’une offre de prise en charge insuffisante en établissement social ou médico-social.

dix mois pour une première audience en assistance éducative.

A Theory of Justice

Though the presence of conflict in socially just design may seem like an impediment, it is actually a healthy sign that a project is tackling topics worthy of debate. This is especially true for marginalized people, who have “interests in asking questions [about power, oppression, and inequality], and dominant groups have interests in not hearing them” [3].

They call this retribution. Hateful name!

If she is, as you believe, innocent, rely on the justice of our judges

And then I bent over her, and whispered “Awake, fairest, thy lover is near—he who would give his life but to obtain one look of affection from thine eyes: my beloved, awake!” “The sleeper stirred; a thrill of terror ran through me. Should she indeed awake, and see me, and curse me, and denounce the murderer? Thus would she assuredly act, if her darkened eyes opened, and she beheld me. The thought was madness; it stirred the fiend within me—not I, but she shall suffer: the murder I have committed because I am for ever robbed of all that she could give me, she shall atone. The crime had its source in her: be hers the punishment!

Social justice education does not merely examine difference or diversity but pays careful attention to the systems of power and privilege that give rise to social inequality, and encourages students to critically examine oppression on institutional, cultural, and individual levels in search of opportunities for social action in the service of social change.

include student empowerment, the equitable distribution of resources and social responsibility, and her processes to include democracy, a student-centered focus, dialogue, and an analysis of power.

So far, according to the Times and other outlets, this technique is being used by the FBI and police departments in Arizona, North Carolina, California, Florida, Minnesota, Maine, and Washington, although there may be other agencies using it across the country.

In a new article, the New York Times details a little-known technique increasingly used by law enforcement to figure out everyone who might have been within certain geographic areas during specific time periods in the past. The technique relies on detailed location data collected by Google from most Android devices as well as iPhones and iPads that have Google Maps and other apps installed. This data resides in a Google-maintained database called “Sensorvault,” and because Google stores this data indefinitely, Sensorvault “includes detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide and dating back nearly a decade.”

“In contrast to Dr. Wood’s claims, bias found in one system is cause for concern in the other, particularly in use cases that could severely impact people’s lives, such as law enforcement applications,” they wrote.

“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. Though the startup in question, Vainu, sees the partnership as a kind of prison reform that teaches valuable skills, other experts say it plays into the exploitative economics of prisoners being required to work for very low wages.

This aspect has led some to claim practitioner research shares many qualities of social movements (e.g., Campano, 2009; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).

For literacy educators, consciousness of inequality is only the starting point for resistance, a basis for asking more immediatequestions: What happenswhen literacy classrooms are sites of activism? How do teachers work within and against the systems they are a part of to disrupt or challenge ideologies of social reproduction through the literacy curriculum? How does this involve more capacious understandings of the literate practices students bring to schools? What are the challenges teacher activists face when they strive to work within and against an educational system that is structured around normal curve ideologies? How might we re-envision the variance of student potentials, in a way that is not organized around a hierarchy of academic ability or essentialized notions of intelligence?

Experts say any filters introduced will likely be error-prone and ineffective. They also note that given the cost of deploying such filters, the law may have the opposite effect to politicians’ intent — solidifying the dominance of US tech giants over online spaces.

This article is a new law that was appended to Penal Code in 2011, and in Japan, it is generally known as the "Offense of Creating Virus".  Although the law calls it virus, the wider definition of this law was set with an  intension to crack down on developing and distributing malware.

The way he rebuilt it is a bit complicated but important: Look closely and you will see that there are four phrases in Isaiah 61:1. Jesus reads the first, second, and the fourth, but skips the third, “to heal the broken-hearted.” He leaves that out. Then he pastes in a phrase from Isaiah 58:d, “Let the oppressed go free.” The added phrase fits his theme theologically, but wasn’t in his original reading. He then deletes the end of the next verse, “the day of vengeance of our God” (61:2b). Why all of the cutting and pasting? No one knows for certain, but presumably he deleted “Heal the broken hearted” to avoid over spiritualization of his reading.[1] He added “let the oppressed go free” because it comes from another compatible Jubilee passage, and is thematically linked by the word, “release” (aphesis, “liberate,” “set free”) which is found in both.[2] And he probably deleted the last phrase about the day of God’s vengeance in order to de-emphasize the negative aspects of the reading. The result is that he strengthens the justice portions and weakens the vengeance portions. So, even if one argues that he didn’t pick the text himself, he certainly made it his own.

Train someone in it and, according co Quintilian's way of thinking, you have trained that person to be virtuous. "Virtuosity is some evidence of virtue." To chink of this at/through toggle switch as "virtuous," as implicitly moral, is to com-prehend the deeply felt "reasoning" behind Quintilian's evasive answer to his own question and to glimpse, perhaps, the beginnings of a legitimate explanation of, and justification for, what the humanities do--or at least can do.

Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice

Today, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at the Comparative and International Education Society’s Annual Conference with representatives of two open education projects that depend on Creative Commons licenses to do their work. One is the OER publisher Siyavula, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Among other things, they publish textbooks for use in primary and secondary school in math and science. After high school students in the country protested about the conditions of their education – singling out textbook prices as a barrier to their learning – the South African government relied on the Creative Commons license used by Siyavula to print and distribute 10 million Siyavula textbooks to school children, some of whom had never had their own textbook before. The other are the related teacher education projects, TESSA, and TESS-India, which use the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license on teacher training materials. Created first in English, the projects and their teachers rely on the reuse rights granted by the Creative Commons license to translate and localize these training materials to make them authentic for teachers in the linguistically and culturally diverse settings of sub-Saharan Africa and India. (Both projects are linked to and supported by the Open University in the UK, http://www.open.ac.uk/, which uses Creative Commons-licensed materials as well.) If one wakes up hoping to feel that one’s work in the world is useful, then an experience like this makes it a good day.

Universal education is now widely viewed as one of the basic requirements for a modern society and it serves as a chief catalyst for socio-economic and personal development.

While Silvia and Irene are in a very different place from Lacey, in that they are able to work and attend college, respectively, at this point in their lives, they and their children are still at risk

“The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions… What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change and fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope that society has. This is the only way societies change.” — James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” 1963

On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.

But addressing problematic internal culture of design teams is not enough. As an industry we must also confront the real-world socio-political outcomes of our practice. If we accept a code of conduct as necessary, we must also accept a code of outcomes as necessary. We must create ethical frameworks to evaluate our work at all stages, especially once it is alive in the world. Our lack of ongoing critical evaluation of our profession means that design continues to reinforce a harmful status quo, creating exploitable systems at the expense of societies.

Design is inherently political, but it is not inherently good. With few exceptions, the motivations of a design project are constrained by the encompassing platform or system first, and the experiences and values of its designers second. The result is designers working in a user hostile world, where even seemingly harmless platforms or features are exploited for state or interpersonal surveillance and violence.As people living in societies, we cannot be separated from our political contexts. However, design practitioners research and implement systems based on a process of abstracting their audience through user stories. A user story is “a very high-level definition of a requirement, containing just enough information so that the developers can produce a reasonable estimate of the effort to implement it23.” In most cases, user are grouped through shared financial or biographical data, by their chosen devices, or by their technical or cognitive abilities.When designing for the digital world, user stories ultimately determine what is or is not an acceptable area of human variation. The practice empowers designers and engineers to communicate via a common problem-focused language. But practicing design that views users through a politically-naive lens leaves practitioners blind to the potential weaponisation of their design. User-storied design abstracts an individual user from a person of lived experience to a collection of designer-defined generalisations. In this approach, their political and interpersonal experiences are also generalised or discarded, creating a shaky foundation that allows for assumptions to form from the biases of the design team. This is at odds with the personal lived experience of each user, and the complex interpersonal interactions that occur within a designed digital platform.When a design transitions from theoretical to tangible, individual user problems and motivations become part of a larger interpersonal and highly political human network, affecting communities in ways that we do not yet fully understand. In Infrastructural Games and Societal Play, Eleanor Saitta writes of the rolling anticipated and unanticipated consequences of systems design: “All intentionally-created systems have a set of things the designers consider part of the scope of what the system manages, but any nontrivial system has a broader set of impacts. Often, emergence takes the form of externalities — changes that impact people or domains beyond the designed scope of the system^24.” These are no doubt challenges in an empathetically designed system, but in the context of design homogeny, these problems cascade.In a talk entitled From User Focus to Participation Design, Andie Nordgren advocates for how participatory design is a step to developing empathy for users:“If we can’t get beyond ourselves and our [platforms] – even if we are thinking about the users – it’s hard to transfer our focus to where we actually need to be when designing for participation which is with the people in relation to each other25.”Through inclusion, participatory design extends a design team’s focus beyond the hypothetical or ideal user, considering the interactions between users and other stakeholders over user stories. When implemented with the aim of engaging a diverse range of users during a project, participatory design becomes more political by forcing teams to address weaponised design opportunities during all stages of the process.

Weaponised design – a process that allows for harm of users within the defined bounds of a designed system – is faciliated by designers who are oblivious to the politics of digital infrastructure or consider their design practice output to be apolitical.

Und hier werden Eltern die Kinder weggenommen und sie bekommen gar nichts? Nicht einmal einen Zettel?«

I read those miraculous words with an emphasis which did them justice, and then I looked him severely in the face. “NOW, sir, do you believe in ROBINSON CRUSOE?” I asked, with a solemnity, suitable to the occasion.

they can develop a action plan to communicate change

The way we approach digital learning is to try to think of using technology as a tool to enhance both the art and social justice.

Finally, the ‘smart’ machine's presentation of itself asthe always obliging, 'labor-saving device' erases any evidence of the labor involved in itsoperation "from bank personnel to software programmers to the third-world workers whoso often make the chips" (75).

Chasin poses the question (which I return to below) of how a change in our view ofobjects from passiveand outside the social could help to undo the subject/object binaryand all of its attendant orderings, including for example male/female, or mental/manua

One consequence of thisposition is a more radical understanding of the sense in whichmateriality is discursive (i.e., material phenomena are inseparable from theapparatuses of bodily production: matteremerges out of and includes as part of itsbeing the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries), just as discursive practices arealways already material (i.e., they are ongoing material (re)configurings of theworld) (2003: 822).Brought back into the world oftechnology design, this intimate co-constitution ofconfigured materialities with configuring agencies clearly implies a very differentunderstanding of the ‘human-machine interface’.

The trope of configuration animates another study of surgical practices by MargunAanestad (2003), who focuses on the labors (carried out predominately by women)involved in aligning a complex sociotechnical environment for the conduct of so-called‘minimally invasive’ or ‘keyhole’ surgery. The latterrequires, among other things,displacing the direct gaze of the surgeon and attendant practitioners from the interior ofthe patient’s body– formerly achieved only through a correspondingly large incision– to aview mediated through camera and video monitors. Aanestad’s analysis follows thecourse of shifting interdependencies in the assemblage, as changes to existingarrangements necessitate further changes through what she names thein situwork of“design in configuration” (2). She emphasizes that, incontrast to views of technologydesign as the province of (predominately male) ‘inventors’ located in research anddevelopment labs, the ongoing work of design takes place in the worksite, and isaccomplished by actors rarely recognized as designers.. Moreover, her analysis makesclear again how in such a setting the capacity for action is relational, dynamic andcollective rather than inherent in specific network elements, and how the extension of thenetwork in turn intensifies network dependencies.

The feminist orientations of these studies add crucial sensibilities to thereconceptions of agency under development in STS more broadly. First, feministresearchdisplaces traditional preoccupations with abstracted and decontextualized formsofknowledge in favor of particular, specifically situated practices of knowing in action.Second, feminism directs attention always to the labors (particularly those previouslyignored) that are an essential and ongoing aspect ofsociotechnical assemblages and thecapacities for action that they enable. And finally, feminist research orients us not only torelations and symmetries among persons and things, but also to the politics of difference.The boundaries that constitute things as separate and different are treated not as pre-given, but as enacted, and practices of boundary-making and the enactment of differenceare inevitably political.