[Linganth] Ling anthro research on language variation and ethnicity in tech?

[Rachel Flamenbaum]

Nate,
You've hit on a major lacuna in ling anth and its allied fields--there is a
ton of work out there on digital learning and computer mediated
communication, but it tends to be sited in informal (ie non-institutional)
white middle class post-industrial contexts, and few are oriented from a
language ideologies or language-as-social-action perspective.

I'm about a week away from filing my dissertation on socialization into
digital literacies (and their related ideologies) across class in Ghana,
which speaks to many of these issues. I have some work in the publication
pipeline, but the only thing currently out is a small piece as part of a AA
vital topics forum on Anthro in and of MOOCs
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aman.12143/abstract> edited by
Graham Jones--all of the authors are troubling a priori assumptions of
monolithic user experience in some way.

If you haven't come across their work already, you might also look at what
Mark Warschauer and Morgan Ames have done (separately and together) on the
design of the XO laptop and the One Laptop Per Child program's claims re:
"the world's poor," as well as Lisa Poggiali's work in the burgeoning tech
sphere in Nairobi and Lily Irani's work on HCI and entrepreneurial
citizenship as tied up with tech in India. I'm sure I'm forgetting
important additions to this list, but I plead dissertation brain!

Outside of academia, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center (housed in the Sesame
Workshop) has some really useful publications
<http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/publications/> on media use in
lower-income and ethnically-diverse families, geared towards shifting
policy and design.

Would love to continue the conversation more with you and others interested
in this work!

Back to the dissertating grindstone,
Rachel

Rachel Flamenbaum, M.A.
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Anthropology, UCLA



On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 7:57 AM, Nathaniel Dumas <nadumas at ucsc.edu> wrote:

> Good morning colleagues!
>
> I hope all is well. I'm emailing to ask if anyone knows of any work that
> is specific to the tech industry on language ideologies and their
> intersections with race/ethnicity? I ask because I am about to start
> working with a non-profit aimed at increasing African American
> participation in tech, particularly to train critical user experience
> researchers. Yet much of the work that is out there on speech events like
> the 'user interview' and 'diary studies' do not take ethnicity and language
> ideologies into account. Moreover, a majority of the work excludes and
> omits much of the work done by critical native anthropologists who have
> raised critiques of traditional anthropological methods that the tech
> industry often uses in UX research without doing any critical appraises of
> it that really challenge status quo ideologies.
>
> Also, most of the work, except in the context of international user
> experience research, assumes a cultural homogeneity within work in the US,
> and has consequences for how persons of color who come from different
> backgrounds may be evaluated as 'effective' and 'non-effective'
> interviewers as tech begins to push for more people of color to be a part
> of their teams without a critical understanding of all this entails. Of
> course, I could point my colleagues to Charles Briggs' work, but tech
> people, I've found, like to read things a bit more closely aligned to their
> industry and it's a long hard battle since user experience research has had
> a particular bent towards psychology/cognitive science.
>
> That said, does anyone know of any linguistic anthropology work on this,
> or graduate students currently working on this? I'd also like to use these
> materials to start reshaping the diversity and inclusion training as well
> at levels higher up, so if anyone has any best practices for that, that too
> would be great.
>
> Cheers,
> Nate
>
> --
> Nathaniel Dumas
> Research Associate, Department of Anthropology
> University of Santa Cruz
> nadumas at ucsc.edu
>
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>
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