Last week, I participated in the Exclusion and Inequality two day intensive. This post is a reflection on the journey (both educational, and physically from Orkney to Edinburgh and back) and the key points I’ll take forward from it.

The lead up to the intensive was quite a stressful one. In my undergraduate degree we did not read many academic papers or encounter much academic language; I therefore found approaching the readings quite a challenging idea. In addition to this, there were strong gale force winds forecast for the night of my boat from Orkney to Aberdeen and train strikes scheduled between Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Nevertheless, after a bit of a rough crossing; some hitchhiking (done safely); a few last bits of text-to-speech listening to papers; and some 18 hours later I finally arrived in Edinburgh ready to join the intensive.

The intensive itself

Almost as soon as we arrived, we dove into discussing our topics with our teams. I’m very grateful for my team (Kate Sparks, Genevieve Zhan, and Xingchen Chen) who quickly gave me some basic explanations on the terms I wasn’t familiar with. What I learned quite soon was that I actually had a better understanding of the themes and concepts I’d encountered than I had initially expected¹.

Upon reflection, the format of the two-day intensive was an effective way to get me thinking about the variety and complexity of global inequalities and the breadth of means for tackling them. I particularly enjoyed the group talks where we discussed the ways different disciplines can and are tackling some of the inequalities we discussed.

Some themes and concepts that I’ll carry forward

The content of the presentations and discussions has given me a good starting point for further research, and broadened the concepts that I’d already semi-formed for my final project. Below are some of the key concepts and ideas that have stuck in my mind and how they might relate to my final project:

Topic: Resource Flows

I allocated myself to the Resource Flows group as I hoped to build a better understanding of the global economic system: who benefits and who is being exploited by it. Our group readings and discussion helped me to consider how this topic works on many different scales, from personal experiences to the exploitation of, and extraction from whole countries (as is described in Hickel’s 2017 book: The Divide). I was particularly interested to learn about the concepts of Racial Capital (the capital you accumulate simply due to your race); and Capital Flight. One concept I’m still getting my head around is the complex idea of Economic Globalisation, I’d like to learn more about this but will probably only explore it if it relates to my project.

Methods: Ethnographic Research

In my undergraduate degree, I learned about, and carried out research using, ethnographic methods that allow us to design for participants with an in-depth understanding of what they really need. I was happy to encounter this kind of thinking again in Karim’s 2008 article: Demystifying Micro-Credit: The Grameen Bank, NGOs, and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh. It really helped me to conisder the lived experiences embodied in many of these inequalities: these concepts are all so multi faceted that they have economic, political and social implications that it’s impossible to be aware of without in-depth, culturally aware research.

Premise: “All Data is Biased”

I’d like to echo Rhiannon Hanger’s blog post reflecting on the intensive by picking up on a recurring question we discussed as a class and in our groups during the intensive: is all data inherently biased. I now believe that the answer is almost definitely “yes” (thanks, Eric Liu for a particularly interesting conversation about this). One method I am using to help get my head around this concept is by referencing the philosophical theory of Object Orientated Ontology, which I first encountered in Timothy Morton’s 2018 book “Being Ecological”. This theory suggests that we can never fully experience an object, be cause we can’t see it from every point of view.

“With your thought, you can’t encapsulate everything that an apple is, because you forgot to taste it. But biting into an apple won’t capture everything an apple is either, because you forgot to tunnel into it like a worm.” (Morton, 2018, p21)

When we capture data, we reduce a complex thing down into subjective data we call facts. However, how can we ever think that we’ve actually captured all there is to know about that object when what we’ve captured is so dependent on: what we’re looking for, what means we have to capture information and what perspective we’re looking from (whether it’s our race, nationality, or even our species).

More on this in my next post, but I hope to build on some of the themes being researched about by Mozilla Foundation. The one good think about such a long travel time between Orkney and Edinburgh is the opportunity to reflect. The photograph above was taken on the top deck of the MV Hjaltland that does the seven hour crossing from Aberdeen to Orkney (and then onwards to Shetland). I spent the crossing listening to previous iterations of Mozilla’s 2022 podcase ‘IRL: Online Life is Real Life’ with a new framing: looking at the sustained inequalities behind the application of many of these technologies.

Thanks to JB and Juli, and the full class for the experience! Now to dive into my projet…

¹ I left feeling that, perhaps I should be grateful for my non-academic background as this could help me to always communicate using accessible language, no matter how deep I get into the academic world. I hope I can keep this with me as I go through the course.)

Week 3: Reflection on Exclusion and Inequality Two Day Intensive, Leanne Fischler / Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0