Hi, I'm Catherine D'Ignazio.
And I'm Alexis Hope.
And we're to talk about our paper,
"The Personal Is Political, Hackathons As Feminist
Consciousness Raising."
And we just want to acknowledge our contributors who are not
here today, who include Rebecca Michelson, Josephine
Hoy, Jennifer Roberts, and Kate Krontiris.
We are part of the organizing team behind the Make the Breast
Pump Not Suck project, which is a series of hackathons
and an umbrella research project that
focuses on birth and breastfeeding in the United
States and on creating spaces for parents and others
to imagine more equitable futures.
We previously published Design Principles for our 2018
Hackathon at [INAUDIBLE] and this paper builds on that work.
Evaluative work on hackathons has primarily
assessed entrepreneurial outcomes.
That is how many startups came from this event,
and educational outcomes.
So what are participants learning?
In this paper, we contribute to evaluative work on hackathons
by investigating a long-term, personal and political impacts
that a hackathon-style event can have on participants,
through an interview study with participants and event
organizers.
From this empirical work, we described themes
that emerge at three scales--
the personal, growing towards the political,
and the political.
And also, our findings indicate that the hackathon functioned
as a space of feminist consciousness
raising, a historical practice that Catherine
will describe next.
So feminist consciousness raising
is different from just raising awareness.
It's a specific historic and contemporary practice
that we described in the paper, in which individuals share
and listen to personal experiences of oppression,
often having to do with stigmatized topics.
They connect those experiences to structural
and to political forces, and they
leverage that new understanding to build solidarity
across differences and towards political action.
Our methods included semi-structured interviews
with participants in our hackathon,
as well as a focus group conducted with ourselves,
the event organizing team, and semi-structured interviews
with organizers of other birth and postpartum innovation
events.
Our findings point towards the Make
the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon
as a site of feminist consciousness raising.
The first phase of a feminist consciousness raising approach
makes space for one's own personal lived experience.
This personal experience often motivated
participants to come to the event in the first place.
Participants were also able to listen to the personal stories
of others at the event, which often
highlight instances of gender and race-based oppression.
Our next set of findings highlight the second phase
of a feminist consciousness raising approach--
moving towards the political.
In this phase, participants begin
to connect their personal stories to structural patterns.
They're able to learn about similarities and differences
between their experiences and others'
experiences by listening to the stories and design
ideas of others.
Participants from dominant identities
also become more aware of their privilege.
And feminist consciousness raising as a practice
moves towards the political, by this,
making public of personal experience
and building solidarity around issues that were previously
neglected, stigmatized, or being too small
or to niche for political action.
And so we saw evidence of this in people describing
their feelings of confidence and solidarity with others,
and the fact that people formed long-lasting relationships.
And also, participants expressed their visions
for a more just future for parents and babies.
And they articulated how they fit
in to producing that future.
This leads to our discussion and takeaways for designers.
We identified hackathon quality that
may have fostered feminist consciousness raising, really
intentionally, sharing and valuing personal stories,
for example.
We also very intentionally structured equity.
And we provided avenues for structural literacy.
We reflect a bit in the discussion
for when it's appropriate to design
for feminist consciousness raising.
And then we also raised the open question
around trauma-informed hackathons.
So when we center personal stories that
come from lived experiences of oppression,
this is very likely to surface intense emotions.
Several participants describe those emotions as trauma.
And even during our own hackathon,
the organizing team was not entirely
prepared for how intense the stories that were shared
would be, or for the intense emotional reactions
from listeners.
So sharing trauma can be cathartic,
but it can also be triggering for survivors.
So in the paper, we raised the question
for future research, what would a trauma-informed approach
to feminist hackathons and other innovation events look like?
And we'll leave it there.
Thank you so much for your attention,
and we look forward to your questions and [INAUDIBLE]
dialogue with you.