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- Convenor:
-
Firaz Peer
(University of Kentucky)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel is being organized to explore the often neglected or under-reported forms of work, politics, power, privilege, values, voice, relationships, resistance that manifest when infrastructuring care for marginalized communities.
Long Abstract:
Information and communication technologies (ICT’s) are being integrated into care infrastructures, with the hope that they might help reduce costs, improve efficiency, and provide more timely services at scale. But such integrations come at a cost and are shaping how marginalized communities, like trans and non-binary people (Wilcox et al., 2023), refugees (Bell, 2018), older adults (Klakegg et al., 2017), women (Bagalkot et al., 2022; Mustafa et al., 2020), children (Karusala et al., 2023), racial, ethnic, and religious minorities (Mustafa et al., 2021; Sultana et al., 2019) navigate the healthcare infrastructures to gain access to care services. Further, these ICT’s have brought additional scrutiny and impacted the kinds of work that healthcare workers do (Ismail et al., 2022; Ismail & Kumar, 2019; S P et al., 2022). Scholars have argued that the enactment of care is always political as it is associated with asymmetrical power relations between those who care and those who are being cared for within care infrastructures (Boone et al., 2023; Martin et al., 2015), and are calling for us to be reflexive and pay attention to the “often-neglected voices, objects, and interests, while staying accountable to the politics, power, and privilege involved in such work” (Light & Akama, 2014). It is in this spirit of being reflexive that this panel is being organized, to explore the often neglected or under-reported forms of work, politics, power, privilege, values, voice, relationships, resistance that manifest when infrastructuring care at the margins.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Nicolás Schöngut-Grollmus (Universidad de O'Higgins) Carla Fardella (Universidad Andrés Bello)
Short abstract:
Friendship is crucial in social and cultural contexts, yet under-studied. It's vital for marginalized groups like women scientists and rare disease patients to provide care infrastructure that allows belonging, professional identity, and community support.
Long abstract:
Friendship appears in cultural productions from multiple eras, linked to elements such as affection, tenderness, power, alliances, or morality. Although friendship is easily recognizable in most social spaces, it is also a phenomenon that is weakly conceptualized and studied. For Romero (2015), it is the affective and informal nature of the bond that makes friendship difficult to study.
Different studies have shown the socio-political relevance of friendship in socially marginalized groups, e.g. in studies about mental health and older people, the relevance of friendship bonds in generating a sense of belonging and visibility in such groups is evident. However, the lack of theoretical and empirical studies of the concept complicates the analysis of friendship as a social phenomenon.
In this line, this communication reports the results of two studies that address friendship relationships in two marginalized groups: women scientists and patients with rare diseases. Through a study of narratives, the different conceptions of friendship constructed by the participants were analyzed, and how those conceptions can articulate new infrastructures and networks that have a positive effect on these groups. The results show that for women scientists, friendship is indispensable for generating relevance and building a positive professional self-image. For groups of patients with rare diseases, friendship relationships support complex health processes, strengthen connections with their community, and circulate vital information for decision-making. The analyses of both groups show that friendship bonds allow resistance to the situation of social disadvantage.
Rianka Singh (York University)
Short abstract:
This talk proposes a new feminist media theory that positions the platform as a media object that elevates and amplifies some voices over others while rendering more careful marginal resistance tactics illegible.
Long abstract:
In this paper, I argue that platform-mediated protest organizes social space in such a way that is at odds with intersectional feminism. I argue that the logic of platforms as media objects that elevate and amplify is not attuned to the safety and survival of people who resist on the margins because it too often assumes a uniform relationship to space. My contention in this paper is that in order to account for the feminist politics of those who are Black, brown, Indigenous, queer and disabled, we must consider resistance that does not rely on platforms in the first place. Instead, I turn my attention toward how feminist activists find ways to perform radical acts of care for each other in the digital age. This paper will contend that digital platforms facilitate increased visibility, while paying attention to marginal strategies by revealing how the quiet resistance of those who do not take so readily to platforms is also mediated by the digital. I argue that careful resistance is a response to an age of amplification mediated by digital platforms—an age in which being represented, heard, and rendered visible is lauded as a democratic good in everyday political culture and as a defence for free speech in civil society, and so is the dominant approach to understanding both offline and online feminist activism.
Isabella Corieri (Syracuse University School of Information Studies)
Short abstract:
When infrastructures breakdown in the field of migration, ad-hoc and creative action is often taken by humanitarian grassroots movements centered on social justice. These infrastructural responses can be seen as information equity practices across care-focused organizational contexts.
Long abstract:
In the digital age, where access to ICTs plays a central role in various aspects of life, addressing information equity is essential for fostering inclusive societies. As pointed out by Norris and Pogge (2019), information equity involves ensuring that individuals from different socio-economic backgrounds have equal opportunities to access, contribute to, and benefit from ICTs. Taking into account the migration experience, a time when individuals interact with various new systems and tools in often unfamiliar settings, one may see various ways in which information equity may (or may not) be embodied and it is crucial to understand these occurrences from an infrastructural perspective. Infrastructures within migration encompass the physical, social, and institutional frameworks that facilitate or impede the movement of people across borders. Physical infrastructures, such as transportation networks and border control systems, shape the material conditions and pathways of migration (Madianou & Miller, 2013). Social infrastructures, including migrant support networks, community organizations, and transnational social ties, play a crucial role in providing resources, information, and emotional support for migrants during their journeys and settlement processes (Faist, 2009). Unfortunately, with so many moving pieces, infrastructures can often break. Research has shown that grassroots movements are often implemented to enact care through creative solutions. By way of a literature review, this conceptual paper discusses how these grassroots movements can be seen as forms of creative infrastructural action (Jack, Chen & Jackson, 2017) in order to create resourceful pathways for offering care and social support within the migration experience.
Roda Siad (McGill University)
Short abstract:
The paper explores how refugees in Uganda experience vulnerability assessment tools and offers insights into the broader implications of automated aid prioritization.
Long abstract:
In light of unprecedented global displacement and funding cuts, UN agencies have begun moving away from blanket assistance to prioritized and targeted approaches to aid. The World Food Programme (WFP) and its partners jointly undertook an individual profiling exercise across Uganda’s 13 refugee settlements between 2021 and 2023. It involved the use of several vulnerability assessment tools, including an index-based ranking to identify and provide targeted assistance to the most in need refugees. This led to the automatic categorizing of refugees into three groups (most vulnerable, moderately vulnerable, and least vulnerable) and the removal of the least vulnerable from food assistance.
While the literature on vulnerability in the migration context has increased over the years (Brown et al., 2017; Peroni & Timmer, 2013; Sandvik, 2021; Purkey, 2022), the effects of the automation of vulnerability assessments tools on refugees in camps and settlements remain unexplored. Based on field research in the Nakivale and Oruchinga settlements, my paper asks how data-driven vulnerability assessment tools are (re)shaping refugee protection and governance. This research integrates perspectives from science and technology studies (STS), critical data studies and refugee studies, areas of study that have not had much overlap. Using STS concepts such as co-production, my paper explores how refugees in Uganda experience vulnerability assessment tools and offers insights into the broader implications of automated aid prioritization.