In this talk, I'll present the design
and delivery of a community panel tasked
with reviewing research proposals
on digital innovation for social
justice. I'll focus on our methodology.
Key insights and takeaways from the work.
Recently a growing body of work in
HCI sets out to explicitly explore,
challenge and respond to social
justice issues in digital technologies
and contribute to the structuring
of constructive social relations
towards more equitable,
caring and fairer digital societies
alongside critical work on social justice
oriented agendas centering the voices of
marginalized people in design endeavors.
The work in this paper sets out to
experiment with the possibilities
to democratize processors of
Commission and HCI research that
aims to support social justice.
We've done this by setting up and
working with the Community panel
made up of beneficiaries and service
providers have a range of charities,
including those that work with refugees,
domestic abuse support,
and other various forms
of marginalized groups,
and causes who have developed criteria to
assess research proposals and apply this.
through a reviewing process.
The study took place in the context
of Not Equal a UK based network
project and it's Open Commissioning
program that supported collaborations
to develop research projects,
tackling social justice in and
through emerging technologies.
The open commissioning process included
the following stages developing a
call for proposals which included
the development of social impact
criteria by an initial community
panel issuing the call for proposals.
A review process where proposals
were reviewed.
Buy a second community panel alongside
an expert panel and finally fund
allocation to successful projects.
Our approach to the design
of the community.
Panel was grounded in the principles
driving participatory action
research and more specifically,
the critical pedagogies of Paulo Freire
for his pedagogy is articulated and four
interconnected principles of practice,
dialogue, critical consciousness,
and context.
In line with this approach or
process of creating the Community
panel included contextualization.
Fostering opportunities for panel
members to relate their lived experience
with technologies to broader issues
of social justice and technology,
fostering multiplicity and plurality
in the creation of dialogical spaces,
we wanted to expose people to different
world views and experiences and in this way,
foster process of negotiation
that challenged pre-existing and
fixed worldviews and finally,
creating the conditions for
dialogue and cooperation.
We wanted to foster a peer support
atmosphere between participants
for honest and open dialogue.
Characterized by mutual respect.
In cooperation towards a common
goal in the paper,
we present 4 themes from a thematic
analysis of data from both
phases of the Community panel.
They are becoming a reviewer which focuses
on the way our participants negotiated
and legitimized their role as reviewers.
Searching for honesty and trust,
where we explore panelists,
expectations for proposals,
how they valued participation in research,
and questioned equity in research
partnerships between academic
bodies and partner organisations.
Tensions and carelessness,
in digital innovation and research.
Here we investigate tensions
in social justice,
academic research and the perceived
contradictions within academic cultures by
our participants and finally
reconceiving impact and entangling
who and how of justice we report on
how panel members identified inherent
contradictions in proposals that
sought digital innovation as a viable
response to complex social issues.
Based on our insights,
we make the following suggestions for HCI
researchers interested in social justice.
A commitment to Co producing research
that positions communities is capable
participants in digital innovation,
including the redistribution of
power and responsibilities that
come with such participation.
Processed like our Community panel could
be developed and adopted as a way to
involve people with direct experience
of the issues proposal set out to
tackle and bring knowledge of its
complex realities at the wall model.
Did offer a distributed approach to elicit
and critical reviews of research proposals.
Future work could involve extending
our process further to develop and
expand are distributed approach to
engage wider communities of interest
with research proposals at various
stages before they get funded,
and finally engage in our panel with
the way HCI and digital innovation may
support social justice enabled us.
To develop different ways to build
accountability in our own research endeavors.
It also appears to have enabled our
panel to develop more tools to hold to
account researchers and those development
technologies through the questioning
critiquing of research proposals.
Thank you so much for listening
and thank you to all our core
collaborators and participants.