Hi, everyone.
My name is Bryan Dosono, and I'm excited to be
attending CSCW 2020 virtually.
Today, I'll be presenting a short summary
on a paper that's now available for download on the ACM Digital
Library.
This study is called Decolonizing Tactics
as Collective Resilience--
Identity Work of AAPI Communities on Reddit.
Whenever we do work on race, it's really important
to recognize how many of us are in stolen colonies land,
and this affects every aspect of what we do and how we live.
I'm personally recording this video
on Staten Island in New York City,
and I'm on the land that was originally populated
by the Munsee Lenape people.
During my coursework at Syracuse University
I first presented the study on campus
as one of my dissertation chapters
and I also want to take this time
to acknowledge with respect to Onondaga Nation, fire
keepers of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy,
the indigenous peoples on whose ancestral lands
Syracuse University now stands.
Identity work is a process through which people make sense
of or reconstruct their identities,
and we've been seeing empirical identity work
studies within our community.
These studies have looked at disadvantaged college students,
gender transitions, veteran reintegration.
I research emergent properties of collective identity
and the work involved in reframing
collective identities.
Here I use a case of Asian-Americans and Pacific
Islanders, or AAPIs, as a proxy for otherwise sinocentric,
CHI, and CSCW scholarship.
Reflexively understanding race and ethnicity
may bring certain affinities into perspective.
I personally identify as a Filipino American
and have previously engaged in advocacy work for my community.
I live and breathe within a colonized body
that grants me certain privileges
and denies me of others.
Scholarship on race and the internet
remains largely eurocentric in orientation.
For those who are unaware, colonization
is a process by which a central system of power
dominates the surrounding land and its components.
It involves enslavement, rape, genocide, and erasure
of indigenous peoples within Asian nations
by Western imperialist powers.
This is problematic, because the colonized
are conditioned to believe that they are different
and therefore inferior.
For this study, I scope the research questions
to understand how sociotechnical systems contour and contribute
to the marginalization of fringe communities.
And I also wanted to learn how AAPIs are using technology
to decolonize their collective identity.
Over a span of three months, I directly
solicited over 118 Redditors three direct message.
I employed maximum variation sampling
to understand the phenomena amongst different groups
of people in a variety of contexts.
I ultimately interviewed 21 moderators
from 13 different AAPI subreddits
and employed iterative coding and memoing techniques.
Redditors are reclaiming space to confront brigade invasion.
One of the common threats that had been reported
throughout these interviews was having the Redditors
experience a disruption of their identity work discourse online.
One of the ways in which they are navigating this and having
a tactic to go around this is that they're
providing each other with network solidarity in Reddit
meetups, which are offline gatherings of Redditors.
I'm going to, in the next couple of slides,
be presenting audio vignettes directly
from the words of my participants.
The peak during the election period,
there was a lot of non-Asian men who came in r/asianmasculinity
posing as Asians.
These were troll accounts.
They were alt-right funded troll accounts,
and they were trying to push the Asian American male narrative
more towards alt-right nature.
They were trying to push a little bit more
of the red pill philosophy, more of a conservative viewpoint.
We had this weird influx of random people we did not know
or who were never part of the community, trying to join.
We noticed the people were random--
or white people who fetishize Asian Americans-- would
try and join meetups Let's try and vet them
through another process first.
So they have to join this blog, chat with us
for a little while, and then basically the consensus
is depending on the members in that area.
In response to dismantling colonial structures that
persists online, these Redditors are also
actively developing collective resilience
and resisting algorithmic hegemony
from what they're seeing in their Reddit feed.
Identity work matters, because sociotechnical systems
are used amongst marginalized communities
to decolonize themselves from systemic hegemony.
I want to take this time to also acknowledge
my advisor Bryan Semaan, as well as the different funding
agencies, and my student collaborators,
and my peers for providing me with iterative feedback
on this work.
You can access this slide at bit.ly/cscw2020 and read
the full paper in the ACM Digital Library.
Thank you for listening, and I'm looking forward
to connecting at CSCW.