Week 7 Reflections: A mish mash of intensive activity
Joining up the dots
It’s been a tough gig managing overlapping intensive periods, with multiple assignments, group work and readings. However, what I have enjoyed about the overwhelming and simultaneous influx of information, is that I have started to notice similarities between the courses I am taking, and have begun thinking about how these may feature in my final project.
Below are some brief reflections:
- Neuro-politics of decision-making (intensive and post-intensive). I found this course very different to what I know. It was interesting to explore how neural process measures can be optimised to understand how our brains make decisions in different contexts. I’m thinking of using the funnel-down approach (of looking at big data via social media, followed by techniques such as eye tracking) to test hypotheses related to perception problems of epistemology. This will be particularly useful when looking into things that we think we know but don’t actually know. It may also help with exploring more abstract questions such as how different people imagine that positive change happens. I hope to explore this further in my experimental work-up plan for the course. Another takeaway from this course was to keep things as simple as possible. Especially in the case of my research project, where I’m interested in exploring so many different things, this reminder was a hard pill to swallow
- Datafication, accountability and democracy (intensive and post-intensive) approached issues of datafication from multiple different angles. The course was super interesting and left me with so many questions about why society works in the way that it does, and the mechanisms that are deliberately manufactured to reduce accountability, allowing for the persistence and exacerbation of many inequalities. Viljeon wrote a paper that critiques current and proposed data governance methods, with a particular focus on their focus on individual impacts as opposed to population impacts created by horizontal relational effects of data sharing. Outside of general governance, I wonder what individuals perceive the impact of sharing their data to be on others, if at all. Towards the end of the session there was a comment about how public perception makes its way into policies which I also found very interesting
- Insights through data (weeks 5 and 6). The programming isn’t easy and oftentimes, I have an urge to revert back to an excel file or stata (which I used during my Bachelor’s degree for modelling). That being said, the group project for this course has encouraged me to learn more about Python and experiment freely. Yesterday, I was thinking about whether it would be useful to take a mixed methods approach for my final project, and perhaps use Python as a way of processing and presenting the quantitative elements. I’m not entirely convinced at this point- but at least it’s come to mind
- Migration and forced displacement (pre-intensive). The pre-intensive readings for this course have got me thinking about agency again… if we truly want to empower and support the society’s most vulnerable, how do we afford these groups with the capacity, confidence and skillset they need to thrive? Flipping the coin, what does this look like for “the helpers” and what tools do they need to make effective change from where they are?
A final note/food for thought
If you had to name something that describes the way that your brain works, what would it be? I think mine is water…I’ll explain more next week 🙂
Sounds like it was a very heavy week of learning for you Maryam – glad to hear all of these things are helping you with your project scope. Neuropolitics gave me a lot to think about as well. By the end of day 2 I felt much better about my grasp on the content but it was tough getting there. It’s such an interesting field.
Hmmmm, the way my brain works – a merry-go-round. I am always thinking about everything, then when it stops for a minute I can really see the details, and it’s off to the races again.
I love that- do you tend to look for spaces to pause or do you just embrace them as they come?
Hi Maryam, I’ve also noticed the connections between my courses and often find I have to think to recall which course a particular concept was being discussed. This is a sign of interdisciplinary learning, right?! I appreciate hearing how you’re already applying each course to your concept of a final project — and I’m glad to be reminded there is a datafication course, as I can peek at that (already curated) reading list for a group project in another course. We are looking at the concept of de-datafication and using the predictive policing and incarceration as our topic – let me know if you have a particularly strong article you think we should review. Finally, my brain functions like a firework with several thoughts exploding in different directions in the same moment. My thoughts are narrated by my own voice (in my head) which I only in recent years came to understand that not everyone does this. So it’s a messy, loud jumble of thoughts to constantly wrangle.
It’s great to hear that you’re also starting to see everything come together, Janel. De-datification in the context of predictive policing sounds like a great topic. It may be worth looking into some of the literature on Design Justice (e.g., the book by Sasha Constanza-Chock) and on Data Justice (there’s quite a bit on surveillance technologies within this). The Ada Lovelace Institute has also looked into the role and use of biometric technologies- they’ve done quite a lot of work that contributes to the debate on their use in incarceration scenarios so definitely worth looking at.
What an interesting point about the diversity of thought… I’ve never quite considered how my thoughts are narrated so I’ll be taking this one away. I think you forgot colourful with the firework description- in our group work especially I’ve enjoyed how ‘colourful’ your contributions and thoughts have been so thank you
Notion (the software): highly structured in its own unstructured way! (In answer to your food for thought…:)
What a busy time you’ve had! I was really glad to see your list of potential angles you posted in a comment to a previous week. At this point in time, several weeks later, do any of them grab you the most as they intersect with the agency question? In reading your posts, I keep being reminded of Darren McGarvey, aka Loki, and his first book Poverty Safari (https://darrenmcgarvey.com/). I return to him whenever I need a reminder that the liberal lefty focus on structural inequalities also has the effect of misrecognising the agency that people have and need to change their circumstances. (His spoken word work is sharp and fantastic too.)
It might help you to think about what scale you want your project to inhabit. Are we talking on the level of comparative political philosophy and ideologies about broad societal systems, or individual narratives of their own sense of agency, or something in the middle like organisational theories of change/impact? Each of these would imply a different set of methods, too, with political philosophy being a more theoretical, library-based study; individual narratives implying qualitative methods like interviews or ethnography, and organisational impact statements leading to something like discourse analysis and staff interviews. Have a think about what scale of focus would be most useful for your other projects, and which methods would be most feasible and fun.
“Highly structured in its own unstructured way” – I love this, and it’s something I definitely resonate with. Although mine is probably the opposite way round- in my head everything is unstructured but I try to structure things so that I can do something with these seemingly unrelated data points 🙂 Thanks for sharing!
I’ll have a proper look into the Poverty Safari book and also will think about projects scales/methodologies. If all goes to plan, I’ll provide a reflection on this in my next blog post Thank you for this guidance- it’s really helpful!
It’s great to see that the idea for your business and your project as well as the courses all starting to intersect. The question of ‘what does this look like for “the helpers”’ is so fundamental to not ending up in the situation that we have now where charity almost more of a way of imparting or proving your values rather than genuinely helping others. Did you read the ‘Chronic Poverty’ book from the reading list on Toolbox? What struck me from here was that in a lot of scenarios just giving money to poor people was the best solution because nearly all of their problems could be solved with more money and individuals were able to make decisions about how to prioritise better than anyone else. I know that you aren’t necessarily looking at poverty, rather looking to empower people to understand how they can help, but there might be some element of ‘individuals know what they need best’ and ‘asking them’ is probably a good start 🙂 I guess it’s thinking then about how to connect people so they can listen and then help rather than prescribing how they should help…
how does my brain work? hmm…like a really anxious squirrel trying to store enough food for the winter – constantly burrowing and stashing things in the hopes they will be useful / I can get back to them later!