Pictures of graduate students at a workshop

How can we create interactive narratives that foster a liberatory approach to current and potential sociotechnical systems? What are the potentialities of alternative storytelling formats – enacted beyond texts and screens – for scientific inquiry?

Next week I will be exploring these questions at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, hosted this year in Yokohama, Japan. I am a Brazilian qualitative researcher particularly interested in technology and gender, with a focus on creating worker- and creator-led collaborative paths against harassment and labor inequality mediated by digital platforms. Also, I explore intersections between scientific inquiry and collaborative media-making, documentary filmmaking, and speculative design.

At CHI, I will be participating in a workshop exploring narrative forms of knowledge in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I will present my ongoing work on research through speculative design and design fiction, and how anti-colonial and feminist media-making theories can inform HCI methods.

My abstract, titled “Embodying Stories for Resisting Technology: Anti-Colonial Approaches to Human-Computer Interaction,” offers stories and case studies that illustrate how “world-building” and embodied storytelling practices can serve as anti-colonial methods for resisting hegemonic and oppressive HCI practices. By “embodied” storytelling, I refer to interactive, lived, or participatory story-making practices. Echoing the work of Gonzatto and van Amstel [1] on the liberatory potential of using the body in HCI through bodystorming and theater techniques, she support creating storytelling experiences that allow for lived, dialogical exchanges “that, by transforming and co-producing computers and other things (their material reality), they can work towards the liberation from their oppressions” (p.4). 

I position these perspectives as anti-colonial because they challenge the coloniality of power [2], which privileges Western knowledge-making practices as superior and institutionalized, while devaluing bodily, oral traditions and “ephemeral” practices as less scientific. In conclusion, embodied storytelling can be part of processes that directly intervene in and transform current oppressive and hegemonic design choices in HCI, fostering a collaborative, dialogical process through which people can co-create and reimagine the relationships that shape these worlds.

I am excited to meet other researchers working with collaborative and participatory research methods, especially those drawing from intersectional and feminist perspectives, and interested in addressing harassment and inequalities mediated by technology.

 ✨ If you want to reach out and grab a matcha with me, ping me at bfr35 [at] cornell [dot] edu

References

  1. Rodrigo Freese Gonzatto and Frederick M. C. Van Amstel. 2017. Designing oppressive and libertarian interactions with the conscious body. Proceedings of the XVI Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 1–10. 
  2. Aníbal Quijano. 2007. Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. Cultural Studies 21, 2–3: 168–178.