This week we had our first intensives, and the results were… intense. There was a certain amount of satisfaction in being able to read vast amounts of work and somehow magically remember enough of those readings to refer back to them in discussions. Probably even more so for the students in North America who were effectively pulling all-nighters to have these discussions. I came away from the experience more intimidated by the need to somehow tie the concepts we discussed in the intensive to a final project that I do not feel remotely prepared to seriously contemplate than I do about the concepts themselves, so I guess that’s some kind of progress?

As for that whole final project thing…

I like this Maya Lin quote borrowed from p. 91 of Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies because this is what I’m feeling now (especially the last sentence):

“I spent much time researching the site—not just the physical aspects of the site but the cultural context of it as well: who will use the site, the history of the place, the nature of the people who live there. I spent the first few months researching a multitude of facts, history, and materials, not knowing if anything I am studying will be of use to me in the artwork.” (Lin 2000)

So, after the intensive, I spent the rest of the week devoting myself to hunting for ideas for the final project. I went to the Partners Fair, which I heard had good pastries if you were there in person. Then I spent several glorious days wallowing in readings on data justice (as if reading is somehow going to dig me out of this hole). There have been some really interesting studies done. And presumably, more can be done! One just needs to come up with an idea that isn’t shallow or unethical or already done (Just need to shut off the part of the brain that then goes, “So why can’t I come up with something like one of these ideas?”).

Here are some of my favorite articles (and a book) that I stumbled across this week:

• “The Algorithmic Imprint” by Upol Ehsan, Ranjit Singh, Joseph Metcalf, and Mark O. Riedl – The authors looked at how “removing an algorithm does not necessarily undo or mitigate its consequences,” which is such an interesting concept! It turns out, if you have an algorithm behaving badly, it may not be enough to just remove it; it can have a broader, deeper impact on the people you deployed it on.
• “The Rise of the Data Poor: The COVID-19 Pandemic Seen from the Margins” by Stefania Milan and Emiliano Treré. They talk both about how centralized decision-making vs. data poverty creates invisibility among certain groups when it comes to policies and governance but also about the things some of these marginalized groups are doing to reclaim their visibility (also, it’s a nice, short article)
• “Understanding power positions in a new digital landscape: perceptions of Syrian refugees and data experts on relocation algorithm” by Anu Masso and Tayfun Kasapoglu. The idea behind this one is that some countries use algorithms to disperse refugees across different cities to mitigate some of the issues that come with taking in a lot of refugees. But what the algorithms are programmed to prioritize doesn’t necessarily lead to the best living results for the refugees.
• New Perspectives in Critical Data Studies edited by Andreas Hepp, Juliane Jarke, and Leif Kramp. The subtitle is “The Ambivalences of Data Power,” which seems to be where the editors’ passions lie; they write this: “Digital data and infrastructures may open up many potentials that can be emancipative; at the same time, however, this data power has many negative elements that should not go unnoticed.” It does cover some themes similar to last week and has a nuanced chapter about the history of China’s data industry (debunking the usual Western descriptions of it).
• “Dutch scandal serves as warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms” by Melissa Heikkilä. I actually hope more countries than just European ones take using algorithms in tax benefit decision-making seriously and don’t do this, but you know, Politico needy a grabby headline. Anyway, this is a cautionary horror story about what can happen if you a) decide that the point of a welfare system is to stamp out all the fraudsters, b) define fraudsters as people with more than one citizenship and poor people who have babies, and c) follow all that up by hiding the evidence so that people can’t figure out why they’re being flagged.

On a suggestion from one of my colleagues, I went cruising around the UN’s job site looking for the kinds of things they hire people to collect data on. Found some really tempting internships in Bangkok that way, especially this one, because it looks to involve literature reviews on sustainable development and international migration, and I believe I have skills that would be beneficial. But no sparks for ideas for final projects.

So here’s where that leaves me with ideas for final projects:

Topic idea 1: International (as opposed to domestic) migrants in southwest China

How does or doesn’t the highly digitized environment in China impact migrants from neighboring countries in China’s Yunnan province?

(apologies, this one gets long, but I felt the background was necessary)

According to the 2020 census, there were over 370,000 foreigners living in China’s southwestern Yunnan province (on the border of Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam), an incredible increase over the 36,000 foreigners recorded there ten years before. Because of China’s stringent immigration regulations, foreigners are typically associated with FDI (traders starting up foreign-invested companies so they can do business directly with Chinese companies; large manufacturing companies wanting to invest in China but also wanting to bring in trained people from other countries to oversee those projects; teachers brought in to educate the families of the resident foreigners whose children are barred from public Chinese schools or to help train locals in language and culture to make getting jobs with foreign-invested companies easier), but that doesn’t appear to be the case with most of this population in Yunnan, where foreign-investment has not kept apace of the dramatic influx of people (and trade numbers that I’ve seen are tiny compared to the coast). Last year, I did speak to some people who study refugees in Asia, and when I asked if this increase might be refugees from Myanmar (which shares a border with Yunnan and which has been going through a tumultuous period), they pointed to some policies China made in the years between 2010 and 2020 that relaxed immigration requirements for people crossing into Yunnan by land.

It’s hard to find information on Yunnan’s immigrant population, though, and what information is out there tends to emphasize diseases and drugs. Of the few studies that I’ve found in either Chinese or English on this group, most have been in relation to China’s HIV/AIDS epidemic or to COVID-19 outbreaks (Ruili, a town on the border of Yunnan and Myanmar, has been one of the hardest hit areas in China under the dynamic zero-COVID lockdown policies that sporadically bring cities and provinces to a halt). China’s National Immigration Administration regularly releases reports on drugs, firearms, and other contraband seized along this border. sex-trafficking and cross-border marriage brokering are other things that frequently get tied to this area.

Add to that mix, China’s increasing reliance on digital platforms. WeChat and Alipay are the blood that keeps China’s retail economy humming along at this point. To use either effectively, you need a minimum of a foreign credit card but preferably a Chinese bank account, something that can be difficult to acquire as a non-Chinese person (how difficult varies based on your visa and the country that issues your passport with those from internationally sanctioned countries often finding it almost impossible to set up a bank account). Even if the area along this border is friendlier to cash transactions than more urbanized parts of China, now with COVID-19, there is the matter of the health code (needed to travel on public transportation, to move between cities, to register for PCR test, to visit hospitals, etc.), for which foreigners typically need a verified account on Alipay in order to use. My recent attempt to register on the Yunnan health code was successful, but there is a form that needs to be filled out and which appears to only be available in Chinese or in English. Additionally, the Yunnan health code suffers from a common health code problem in that it doesn’t allow foreigners to register dependents who lack their own phones/accounts (such as children or the elderly).

Given how much migrant life in eastern China is now devoted to trading tips and hacks for dealing with difficulty accessing digitized things (most platforms require registration with Chinese state IDs, which are only available to Chinese citizens; some platforms also allow for registration with passports or Hong Kong or Taiwanese IDs, but this is by no means universal), I think it would be interesting to explore what life is like out in the far southwest.

Problems: Ideally, I would want to partner up with an organization serving and collecting some form of data on this group/communities, but I’ve been having trouble locating one. In fact, information, in general, is hard to collect on this. Going there to try to cement on-the-ground connections could also be difficult under zero-COVID policies because the border areas frequently get locked down by COVID cases coming over the border (although this could get easier quickly if the COVID policy eases). Also, it seems likely, it would be beneficial to have language skills in something like Burmese, which I don’t have (though finding a translator might be doable).

Topic idea 2: How women lose income share

Last week, I spent a lot of time obsessing over the women’s labor income statistics on the World Income Database when I saw that China’s women are actually showing a decreasing share of labor income over time. The accompanying paper on this compared the change to countries of the former eastern bloc, so other countries that had transitioned to a market economy from something else. This week I revisited the data but decided to look at the graphs for all the countries that were showing women’s share of labor income decreasing. The collection of countries was even more interesting than the paper described:

Turkmenistan, Ethiopia, Czech Republic, Moldova, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Lithuania, Slovenia, Chad, Kyrgyzstan, Hungary, Poland, Timor-Leste, Slovakia, Ukraine, Guinea, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Azerbaijan, Albania, Togo, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Myanmar, China, Yemen, Malawi, Liberia, Bhutan, Somalia, Central African Republic, Burundi, Niger

Isn’t that such an interesting and colorful collection of countries? If you look at the graphs over time, some are on a consistent downward trend, some go up and then down, and sometimes the transition to a downward graph is sudden and dramatic, like in the cases of Niger and Bhutan, sometimes it’s a little dip like for Ethiopia. I bet there are a lot of interesting things going on behind these graphs and numbers.

While there would likely be challenges in collecting data, and this is quite a few countries to collect data on, I’m optimistic, because WID, the World Bank, and the ILO, etc., have all collected some form of data on this. So unlike my impressions on data/information collection on international immigrants in China, this feels like something where the data should be reasonably obtainable. And there are also experts and organizations I can ask questions.

Topic 3 – The bandaids we place over domestic violence

Last year, I met a woman in the US who was convinced that her husband, who she was in the process of divorcing, had discovered her address. He wasn’t supposed to know her address because she and her kids were enrolled in an Address Confidentiality Program. ACPs were created to protect victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, and other crimes by giving them a way to hide their physical location while still having access to an address to receive mail. The way these typically work is that once you’re enrolled in one, you have your mail sent to the address of a government agency, and then they forward it to you. It’s basically a bandaid for a much bigger problem—that abusers are rarely arrested or punished or ordered into treatment, leaving victims in danger of more abuse. State governments have found it’s easier and faster to just hide the victims.

However, in our datafied, digitized worlds, it’s really hard to keep those hidden addresses hidden. Many people in these programs have mentioned their addresses turn up on public databases or data leaks or even getting leaked by courts or government departments. Each time an address gets out, they have to move. It’s an additional burden placed on victims of domestic violence in a long line of burdens placed on victims. There are also some problems with who keeps tabs on these programs and how. State governments funnel victims into these programs, telling them this is the way they will be safe (and they sell these programs to the public as an easy and inexpensive fix). The same governments are the only ones that know who is in the program and keep records on any possible breaches.

After this woman I knew was murdered by the man she hired to protect her from her husband while waiting for the ACP to get back to her on if she should move, I went to her ACP and asked them about how worried she had been that her husband had discovered where she lived. To which they responded that there was no breach of her address. Maybe this is true, and the government was able to check it out and verify it somehow but hadn’t given her that information. But the day she died, she was certainly operating under the impression that her husband likely knew where she was.

This case haunts me for several reasons, although I’m not even sure if it’s possible to get accurate data on these programs. The US courts place the burden of proof on victims of domestic violence to show that they were indeed victims, and if they can’t do this to the satisfaction of a judge, there is little to protect them. ACPs are popular because they’re cheap and somewhat effective—so long as the victim’s address stays hidden, they are a lot safer than they would be without the ACP. But it’s very much a flawed system, so it would be interesting to see what else is out there. Could this be a use case where computers could improve the odds of staying safe?

Topic 4 – Who’s got the power, and what does that mean for the planet?

Does the diversity of politicians in power impact the kind of climate/eco-friendly legislation/policies a government adopts at a national level?

I was walking the dogs on one of those pleasantly fresh-but-sunny fall days directly after a surprisingly late, surprisingly hot heat wave, pondering whether the government stuff going on in Beijing will actually matter within the scope of my life, and eventually, I got distracted by this thought: does the age of the people making the policies impact how seriously policies treat the growing climate crisis? Not really sure how I got there—it might have been inspired by this poll about how Americans across the political divide overwhelmingly think their politicians are too old or Darcie’s blog post that mentions how her teenage daughter is worried about climate change—but pretty soon I’d expanded the thought to whether or not concentration or diversity of some demographic or another —age, race, gender, class background, education or birth overseas—might impact the kinds of climate policies put out.

The idea would be to look at the makeup of the politicians that comprise governing bodies that pass legislation (so congresses, parliaments, that kind of thing) in different countries and then look at the kinds of climate policies they produce and see if there’s any correlation. The hardest part would be creating the scoring system for the climate policies, I think. What I find appealing about this is all the information should be public. Politicians are public figures, so tend to maintain public biographies, and when policies are passed, those tend to be announced publicly. I don’t know if I’m erring on too simple on this one, though, or copping out by not working on something weightier.

What my final project might look like:

While part of me is tempted to try a more traditional, dissertation-style paper just to prove that I can, when I picture this project, I most often envision it as something more “new media.” Think along the lines of a website with an interactive element (I’ve built websites in the past, but I’d be interested in a more technically complex format than what I’ve built before). I’ve been heavily inspired by Newsgames to explore additional methods that have a bit more of a give-and-take with the reader/user than a traditional big block o’ text.

The Project Topic One – Week 3 / Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0