[3] Double double, toil and trouble
Unclear how 3 weeks have gone by so quickly and we are now at the end of October. I feel like I’ve not had time to delve deeply into some areas that have peaked my interest and have been furiously making notes of things I need to go back and spend more time on.
Felt a bit anxious putting in my first assignment. Decided to push myself and move away from a standard academic paper into a different format – it was less formal prose and used more visual elements to communicate. This is quite far out of my comfort zone for academic work and brings in more of my commercial skills. While I’ve gone through all the marking criteria etc. it still feels like a ‘risk’, one I won’t be taking on my Toolbox essay just to help ease the nerves. I have to remind myself I’m here to learn new things but also all skills are valid skills and if I have the ability to communicate well in other formats, I should use it. I have always detested high-brow academic writing as it is and when looking back on some past pieces for my undergrad can see myself pushing the boundaries of formality anyway, so hopefully it’s fine.
Really enjoyed the couple of intensives I’ve had this month. It’s been really inspiring to hear how my classmates think and approach certain problems. The creativity in the postdigital module was incredible and being immersed in such different thought processes is exactly what I was looking for from this course.
I do find myself still feeling a bit exhausted from this overwhelming sense of injustice, especially building the Datafication module on top of toolbox. I have to remind myself that there are people working on solutions and part of solving the problem is awareness. I have had to take a day or two off and ‘reset’, especially from reading this War on Disabled People book as it is bleak af. It’s hard to remain objective and not just lean into my inner social-justice warrior. Not that there is anything wrong with wanting fairer and better systems, but it can sometimes cloud ones judgement and easily overlook other points of view.
- Postdigital 2-day intensive & assignment – really interesting 2-day intensive on Postdigital. Got to analyse banking, digital IDs and also hear ideas about what happens to your data once you die and how a data double might live on. Submitted first assignment – was a quick turnaround (about a week), but nice to have gone through the process at least.
- Datafication, accountability and democracy prep & 2-day intensive – loved this course – really aligned with some of my questions about ‘how to create a system now that works for unknown impacts in the future’. Also aligns with a lot of my general interests and work so had read / heard about a lot of the material covered, which meant I felt I had a chance to think about things deeply. Had to do a group project in advance and a presentation on the first day. Was great to meet some classmates and work together on something outside of an intensive, looking forward to working with them again. Also have a fun idea for the essay, which makes it easier to get started with.
- Interdisciplinary weeks 4,5 & 6 – really thought provoking content on data visualisation and data humanism in week 4. Week 6 also was great to think about underlying motivations and ‘what worlds I connect/want to’. Still struggling with the actual sessions on the odd weeks – not sure I’m getting a huge amount of value from them. I think if I came from a single-discipline world or didn’t have much commercial experience it would be more useful. Trusting the process but also finding the reading weeks more useful at this point.
- Toolbox assignment – wrote the bulk of the assignment but decided to put it on ice and read a book called ‘The War on Disabled People’ as well as investigate what I think is a new finding about how people using the digital form are much more likely to be rejected for PIP before an assessment. Still looking into this but only have one weekend left before assignment is due – have to consider what is something for the assignment and something potentially for other research.
Found what I think is a big red flag in the PIP data I’ve been looking at – they introduced a digital-as-default approach to the application form from September 2021 and since then the number of people failing the ‘form’ stage has increased significantly. In the datafication course someone mentioned a social justice organisation trying to petition the DWP to find out about algorithm use in a specific, slightly related area. I need to go back over the recording and find out who this was and delve into it. I have a hunch the digital-form approach has come with some sort of automated decision process that is being kept secret, but is also falsely rejecting claims. I need to do some more work on it but might be an interesting project topic, especially if there is someone already looking into similar issues I can team up with.
Otherwise I’ve had some really lovely chats with the lilac group. Thinking about what sort of research I want to do was a great suggestion, as was looking at other financial systems to see if there is any inspiration there. A bit of extra pondering has me thinking again about how would UBI work? With any system change, if you have dependant variables and one variable changes, the status of the other variables will also change. So any assumptions or calculations made on variable at change-0 is false when you move to change+1 unless this has been accounted for in the model. Therefore, I’m thinking about what the variables are when considering a radical financial system change, the dependancies between them and how one might account for change – sort of like a grand impact assessment not a cost-benefit analysis. Still pondering…
Your writing style and typography are very attractive. Thank you for sharing. Enjoy the rest of the weekend!
Thanks Jiayi! Hope you are well 🙂
This all sounds great, Rhi. I’m glad to see you’re synthesising your course work and thinking about how they build off one another and give multiple views on a set of issues. In the next few weeks, try to apply your main insights from the past intensives to your two project ideas. What are the main modes of thinking you’d bring in to each project?
Now is the time also to start thinking about research methods. How would you explore either project option?
At the moment, the PIP idea sounds much more concrete. You have ready access to the topic via the quantitative dataset you’ve been exploring and also via qualitative data through personal connections and people’s experiences interacting with the system. You also have a clear pivot point to examine – the change in system from analogue to digital application and how this will affect users’ experience and potentially generate new kinds of exclusions and inclusions. What is the discourse of the digital and how does it match up to real life experiences? You have a huge potential to contribute a truly meaningful analysis through these mixed methods.
Alternatively, your UBI topic is a really good one and might feel less loaded / less close to home. There’s the added benefit that we’ll be exploring UBI more deeply in S2W2 and bringing in an external practitioner/expert to discuss with us. Can you pin down your approach or research questions more specifically? It sounds like you’re interested in the evaluative questions of ‘how will we know we’re making a positive impact, and how would we keep track of the unintended consequences?’ So perhaps a method could be to examine several real-world UBI pilots and look specifically at their theories of change and impact assessment processes (and results, if any)? How do they compare (do they care about the same or different variables and theorise similar or different relations between them)? This would sound like discourse analysis of project documents, plus maybe interviews with staff, etc. Alternatively, or in addition, you could do a literature review of the broader cash-transfer literature to see what variables seem to be important in contextualised cases and if there are any patterns to the unintended consequences that arose. You could then apply these findings speculatively to an emergent UBI case.
But there are so many other ways you could approach both topics methodologically and conceptually. See if you can list a few more for each topic. While thinking through how you would conduct the research, see what sounds the most fun and rewarding to you!
Thanks Juli – this was really helpful. I’m going to do some brainstorming on questions / methods and data that I can access around both ideas. I’ll turn it into my next blog and from there I might do a pros/cons of each option 🙂