Youth as philosophers of technology

ABSTRACT

We explore the idea of youth as philosophers of technology within a university-community partnership in the Chicago area. Youth as philosophers of technology decenters computing practices such as design, making, coding, and tinkering to instead foreground learning how to decode and unmake tech’s relationship with power through artistic, moral and humanistic inquiry. Our analysis explores the ethical, relational sense-making of two high school students who created a film that examines how technology is used to surveil immigrants an to resist such surveillance. This study has implications for conceptualizing technology learning and ethical youth sensemaking .

Acknowledgments

We express our gratitude to the youth at Family Matters for their insight, creativity, and dedication. We also thank our community partners Lucy Parsons Labs, Endangered Peace, and Family Matters, and in particular Sanjin Ibrahimovic, Chris Spence, and Raphael Nash; and members of the TREE lab in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University where many of the ideas in this manuscript were discussed, debated, and refined. We thank our community partners, Lucy Parsons Lab and Family Matters, for their collaboration and YPRPT students for sharing their brilliance, interest, and amazing work with us. We acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation Grant No. CAREER-1855494 and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education and Wisconsin Alumni Research Fund at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, SV, upon reasonable request.

Notes

1. Following 9/11, anti-immigrant and racialized tensions were fueled and government militarization increased, including the creation of Homeland Security and the shift of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. A “unique combination of civil and criminal authorities’’ (Homeland Security, 2021), the creation of ICE has led to increased rates of deportation and the criminalization of immigrants’ lives and activities. Since 2017, ICE has enforced the controversial decision to separate families and detain children, even babies. This has been met with active resistance, including protests against “kids in cages.” It is unclear how many children remain separated from their families without a reunification date. The number is speculated to be in the hundreds.

2. Consider the work of theoretical computer scientist Philip Rogaway who examines the politics of research in the specialized field of cryptography (Rogaway, 2015) or that of Timnit Gebru, a prominent Artificial Intelligence researcher recently fired from Google due to her advocacy on issues of racial bias in machine learning (Hao, 2020).

3. Endangered Peace Productions is a team of film and video producers founded by filmmaker Raphael Nash.

4. All student and school names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 1855494;Directorate for Education and Human Resources [CAREER-1855494];Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education and Wisconsin Alumni Research Fund,University of Wisconsin—Madison [NA].