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It is currently held, not without certain uneasiness, that 90% of human DNA is ‘junk.’ The renowned Cambridge molecular biologist, Sydney Brenner, makes a helpful distinction between ‘junk’ and ‘garbage.’ Garbage is something used up and worthless which you throw away; junk is something you store for some unspecified future use. (Rabinow, 1992, 7-8)
In the bioscience lab near Tokyo where I did my ethnographic study, the researchers taught me how to do PCR experiments. This was before Covid when almost everyone came to know what PCR was, or at least, what kind of instrumental information it could be good for.[1] The lab was working with mouse models, although I never got to see them in their cages. But the researcher I was shadowing showed me how to put the mouse tail clippings she collected into small tubes. She hated cutting tails, by the way, and preferred to take ear punches when she could. She told me that she didn’t like the way the mice wiggled under her hand, as if they just knew. But at this point anyway, the mice are alive in the animal room and she is only putting small, but vital, pieces of them into a tube to dissolve them down (mice becoming means), to get to the foundation of what she really wants.
I’ve still got the protocol that I typed up from the notes I made with her in the lab. Step 1 was: “Add 75 ul of NaOH to each ear punch tube (changing tips as I go).” The changing pipette tips part was really important to avoid haphazardly spreading around DNA, I learned. I also had to make sure the clippings were at the bottom of the tube and submerged. She said I could flick the tubes with my finger to get the “material” to fall down to the bottom and she showed me how to do it. I also, she cautioned, always had to be very careful of bubbles, but more flicking could help there and by making sure I didn’t put the pipette too far down into the solution. Then we would spin the tubes in the vortex (which I always typed as VORTEX for some reason), add some other reagents, and put it all in the “PCR machine,” but that is not at all its technical name.[2] Then we would usually go with all the others to the cafeteria for lunch.
In writing this now, I couldn’t remember what “NaOH” stood for so I had to ask the internet. And as I looked back over this protocol, and these practices I was just barely learning to embody before the pandemic sent us all home, I realize that they must have settled back in my mind somewhere, just as the material-ness of the lab which anchored them for me has receded like a shrinking lake in a drought summer. But what I do hold on to is what the researcher taught me about the importance of repetition and focus, for a kind of purity of practice, and the diligence to make materials—whether of mice or of sodium hydroxide—do what they ought to do.
Because what captivated me about these initial PCR steps was what appeared to me to be the profound transformation they wrought (of course, I am not the first person to say so)—from fleshy ear punch to silt DNA multiplied in a clear plastic tube, with just a little bit of chemicals and some repetitive cycles of heat—but even more, how this transmutation had the potential to fail in one way, or for one reason, or another. How difficult it could actually be to get the materials, and even the researchers themselves, to do what they ought. Once, I used some unknown solution instead of water because it was on a shelf in an unmarked bottle close to where the water, which I later supposed had gone missing, was usually kept. Once, I didn’t remember to change pipette tips. Or the sense in my hands of precisely what to do next and properly would simply begin to unravel. When we had to throw the tubes in the trash, the researcher comforted me by telling me about a time when her mind wandered for just an instant while pipetting and she lost track of which tube she had last filled with reagent. A minor momentary mistake that grows, and can even burst, into a huge error in the downstream. She taught me that sometimes, if I lifted the tubes to the light to examine their volume of liquid, I might be able to get back on track.[3] Other times the PCR machine might not cycle its heat properly. One machine was already considered to be of questionable working order but the lab didn’t have the funding to replace it. We didn’t know about its full potential for failure until we got all the way through to the very last stage of the process and discovered we had to go back to the beginning with new clippings.
The researcher and I classified these particular (wait, was that water?) experiments-in-the-making as failures because they missed the mark of their intentions. Their purposefulness, decided in advance by the goal of genotyping these mice, was also appended to other purposes, specifically to cultivate a living gene population that the researchers needed for other more central concerns. Trashing the experiments that deviated from this intentionality, although it could be costly, was a seemingly simple decision. After the PCR melt and the second half of the experiment, the electrophoresis machine either “read” back the base pair numbers we were looking for, or those numbers were just wrong and we’d made an obvious mistake. Or worse, everything collapsed into inconclusiveness and we needed to repeat the experiment anyway.[4] In this case, deviation from expectation, and therefore from usefulness, was what pushed experiments to a kind of failure, beyond which point they could not, in this context at least, be so easily reclaimed.
But what does something like “junk” have to do with mice ear punches, chemical transmutation, and mundane laboratory failures? Garbage experiments are routine in scientific practice after all. But as any scientist might tell you, failure can be its own kind of productive; in the least, as a way to learn the value of steady hands, and how to recognize water by smell, or its necessity as a control in genotyping—to become a “capable doer,” as one scientist told me. But beyond these mundane errors, some scientists argue that failures of a particular kind can break open old ways of thinking and doing, although what that failure is, and can be, is variously classified:
Science fails. This is especially true when tackling new problems. Science is not infallible. Research activity is a desire to go outside of existing worldviews, to destroy known concepts, and to create new concepts in uncharted territories. (Iwata, 2020)
I wish “failure” were the trick to seeing and moving beyond the limits of current knowledge. Is that what Kuhn said? I think that paradigm change requires making a reproducible observation that does not fit within the existing model, then going back to the whiteboard. But I don’t think these observations are very well classified as a failure. If failure = unexpected result of a successful experiment/measurement, then I can agree. (Personal communication with laboratory supervisor, 2020)
Failure has more potential than we might often recognize, where an instinct to trash can instead push to new beginnings. Just as Rabinow described Brenner’s description (1992), failure is like junk, those materials or states that are in-the-waiting—waiting to be actualized, reordered, and reclaimed as meaningful, valid and valuable, even if we don’t yet know how or why. Junk is, in this way, more than matter “out of place,” although it may land there interstitially. If “[d]irt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (Mary Douglas, 1966, 36), then junk is garbage and failure and decay, and even breakdown, on the precipice of being made anew. After all, without intentionality or purposefulness and other values, there can be no garbage, or failed and failing experiments and paradigms, in the first place.
Consider an example that seems categorically different from scientific experiments: inventory management in role-playing videogames. In Diablo 4 (2023), any item picked up from downed enemies or collected in the environment can be marked as “junk” and then salvaged by visiting an in-game merchant. These bits of amour and other gear reappear in your inventory afterwards as junk’s constitute materials, useful again for crafting and building up new things—strips of leather and other scraps as well as blueprints for better stuff. In Fallout 4 (2015), the “Junk Jet” gun lets you repurpose your inventory instead as ammo, anything from wrenches to teddy bears, which can be shot back out into the world and at random adversaries, where you might later be able to pick them up again, if you want. Managing encumbrance in Skyrim (2011), on the other hand, is a task of drudgery and tedium. Almost every item in the game world is moveable, each with its own weight calculation, and can be picked up and stored even accidentally, until your character is weighed down to the point of being unmovable. But the game is designed to make you feel that there is always the possibility that some magical potion, random apple, or 12 candlesticks, might just come in handy for a future encounter, a book that you might really read later, leading to a hesitancy to trash anything. In turn, every item brims with, as yet undiscovered, use-value. As Caitlin DeSlivey argues: “Objects generate social effects not just in their preservation and persistence, but in their destruction and disposal” (2006, 324). And certainly this is true when, over-encumbered deep inside a dungeon, I agonize over which items to drop, in order to move again, in order to continue to collect more—or laugh as I spray the world with cigarettes and telephones.
A decaying dog, reanimated by something that is not supposed to be there. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
For me then, junk is a way to look for when and where particular boundaries of the useful or valuable—and even the clean and functioning—are “breached” (Helmreich 2015, 187), and then reordered. Although Helmreich is speaking to scientific experimental practices and their organizing ideologies, his insight is useful for junk’s attention to those very breaches: “moments when abstractions and formalisms break, forcing reimaginations of the phenomena they would apprehend” (185). Of course, junk DNA itself has experienced this very kind of breaching—more recent scientific research demonstrating its non-coding role is actually not without usefulness (c.f. Goodier 2016)—(re)animating it for future use. And although DeSilvey is describing vibrant multispecies-animated decay within abandoned homesteads, like Helmreich, she points to junk’s transformative potential. We just have to dig through rotted wood and insect-eaten paper, or virtual backpacks and books, to find it.
Junk merges failure, trash, and decay with the processual and everyday negotiation of culturally meaningful and policed categories: garbage, scraps and waste, but also “breakdown, dissolution, and change” (Jackson 2014, 225). Although Steven J. Jackson describes the ways these last three are fundamental features of modern media and technology, an anthropology of junk collects and extends these processes into broader techniques and social practices. Junk can help us see connections criss-crossing symbolic and material breakage and disintegration. It helps us see in/visibility of the dirty and diseased, not as a property of any material or technological object alone, but as also always in coordination and collaboration with the ways they are imagined and invested—and more, always enmeshed in variously articulated forms of power.
If infrastructures like computer networks, for example, become (more) visible when broken (Star 1999), it is not their brokenness or decay in an absolute sense that reveals them, but the way their state change defies our everyday and embodied expectations—the way they push against normativity. We may be just as surprised to find things in good working order.
Metal becoming wood in “animation of other processes” (DeSilvey 2006, 324). (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Bit rot after all, has just as much to do with the made-intentionally-inoperable systems that force the decay, or really uselessness, of data (Hayes 1998), as it does with any actual mold on CD-ROMS and other corruptions of age and wear. In fact, digital information or technological and material infrastructures don’t become broken, just as they don’t become fully ever fixed either. Breaks and breaches are hardly so linear. Instead, these are “relative, continually shifting states” (Larkin 2008: 236). This view may be in contrast to Pink et al.’s suggestion to attend “to the mundane work that precedes data breakages or follows them” (2018, 3), but not to their entreaty to follow those everyday practices of maintenance and repair, and even intentional failure and forced rot. This is not simply because data and other material practices like PCR experiments may fail under given conditions or focused intentions, perhaps as a result of a momentary distraction or a faulty machine—or in the case of programming, because debugging is actually 90% of the work, as one bioinformatician told me. Indeed, software testing in practice goes beyond merely verifying functionality or fixing bugs and broken bits of code, but helps to define and make “lively” (Lupton 2016) what that software is, and can do, and can be made to do in the first place (Carlson et al. 2023). Along the way, as a generative process, testing, tinkering, and fixing have social effects (DeSilvey 2006) which are external to, but always in extension of, broken/working materials themselves (Marres and Stark 2020).
More importantly, perhaps, broken things can be used, as Brian Larkin argued in relation to Nigerian media and infrastructures, as a “conduit” to mount critiques of the social order (2008, 239)—to call attention to inconsistency and inequality, and to demand or remodulate for change. To see this resistance at work demands a collating of junk practices. As Juris Milestone wrote in his description of a 2014 American Anthropology Association panel, “What will an anthropology of maintenance and repair look like?”:
Fixing things can be both innovation and a response to the ravages of globalization—either through reuse as a counter-narrative to disposability, or resistance to the fetish of the new, or as a search for connection to a material mechanical world that is increasingly automated and remote.
Junk’s transformative potential asks us to see removal and erasure, or in Douglas’ terms “rejection,” as always coupled to these reciprocal practices: rebirth, repair, repurpose, renewal. In this way, junk shows us the way decay, even technological corruption, is less a “death” than a “continued animation of other processes” (2006, 324).
But if junk describes a socio-cultural ordering system concerned with practices of moving materials—even ideas and people—into and out of categories of value and purposefulness, it must also contend with the vital agency of other material and microscopic worlds, which just as easily unravel out or spool up regardless of human presence, intention, and desire. Laboratory mice in fact are particularly disobedient, they hardly ever behave as they are supposed to—just as cell cultures in a lab are finicky and fail to grow to expectations, and junk ammo from the Junk Jet has a 10% chance of becoming suspended in mid-air, becoming irretrievable.[6] If we repurpose sites or moments of breakdown to resist configurations of power, then materials themselves are also always resisting what they ought to do or become.[7] This is the draw of the things in which we are enmeshed, where we are always extending, observing, destroying and deleting. If junk is the possibility, under particular cultural expectations and desires, for things to be pushed or cycled across such thresholds, and also, of making and unmaking these, it also must contend with the things themselves—with what we see in a corroded mirror, looking, or not, back at us.
A woman in a corroded mirror, disappearing and extending. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Although junk may be over-bursting in its use here as a metaphor, I argue it can still usefully be used to stitch growing anthropological attention to material decay, breakage, and deviation together with tinkering, maintenance, and repair—across locations, states, practices and materialities. Granted, “manifesto” is also a too decisive word to attach to this short piece. Too sure of itself. But this post is also an attempt to challenge the understanding of what it means to be (academically) polished and complete. I use manifesto here mostly tongue-in-cheek, while still holding to the idea that any argument has to begin in small seeds, and start growing from somewhere.
My thinking about junk began years ago with Brian Larkin’s attention to breakdown (2008). More recently, I found DeSilvey (2006) by way of Pink et al. (2018); and Jackson (2014) from Sachs (2020); and Hayes (1998) from Seaver (2023). This lineage is important because I am not inventing, but building. These ideas are also bits and tears of conversations with Libuše Hannah Vepřek, Sarah Thanner and Emil Rieger, and very long ago, Juris Milestone. But everything gets filtered first through Jonathan Corliss.
This research has been supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 20K01188.
[1] PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. It is an experimental method for duplicating selected genetic material in order to make it easier to detect in secondary experiments.
[2] Thermal cycler, for anyone interested. Also, just to note, but for the purposes of this retelling, I gloss over the most detailed part in writing so simply: “add some other reagents” and later, “after the PCR ‘melt’ and the second half of the experiment.”
[3] I wrote in my protocol notes, as an (anthropological) aside to myself: “K. stressed that the amount of liquid in this case doesn’t have to be super accurate, but that this is rare in science experiments. When I tried it for the first time, I almost knocked over all the new tips and also the NaOH solution which can cause burns! Yikes~)”
[4] Inconclusiveness includes an unclear or unaccounted for band in the electrophoresis gel, which is seen in the machine’s output as an image file.
[5] The images in this post are part of the artistic work of Sarah Thanner, a multimedia artist and anthropologist who playfully and experimentally engages with trashing and untrashing in her work.
[6] Fallout Wiki, Junk Jet (Fallout 4), https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Junk_Jet_(Fallout_4)
[7] Here, I also gloss over (new) materiality studies, Actor Network Theory, etc. which have linages too long to get to properly in this small piece.
Carlson, Rebecca, Gupper, Tamara, Klein, Anja, Ojala, Mace, Thanner, Sarah and Libuše Hannah Vepřek. 2023. “Testing to Circulate: Addressing the Epistemic Gaps of Software Testing.” STS-hub.de 2023: Circulations, Aachen Germany, March 2023.
DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2006. “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things.” Journal of Material Culture 11: 318-338.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
Goodier, John L. “Restricting Retrotransposons: A Review.” Mobile DNA 7, 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13100-016-0070-z
Hayes, Brain. 1998. “Bit Rot.” American Scientist 86(5): 410–415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1511/1998.5.410.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2015. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Iwata, Kentaro. 2020. “Infectious Diseases Do Not Exist.”「感染症は実在しない」あとがき. Retrived May 9, 2020, https://georgebest1969.typepad.jp/blog/2020/03/感染症は実在しないあとがき.html.
Jackson, Steven. J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski, & K. A. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pp. 221-239.
Lupton, D. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Marres, N, Stark, D. 2020 “Put to the Test: For a New Sociology of Testing.” British Journal of Sociology 71: 423–443. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12746.
Milestone, Juris. 2014. “What Will an Anthropology of Maintenance and Repair Look Like?” American Anthropological Association Meeting.
Pink, Sarah, Ruckenstein, Minna, Willim, Robert and Melisa Duque. 2018. “Broken Data: Conceptualising Data in an Emerging World.” Big Data & Society January–June: 1–13. https:// doi:10.1177/2053951717753228.
Rabinow, Paul. 1992. “Studies in the Anthropology of Reason.” Anthropology Today 8(5): 7-8.
Sachs, S. E. 2020. “The Algorithm at Work? Explanation and Repair in the Enactment of Similarity in Art Data.” Information, Communication & Society 23(11): 1689-1705. https://doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1612933.
Seaver, Nick. 2022. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–391. https://doi:10.1177/ 00027649921955326.
A new report from the United States Census Bureau presents data on death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The data shows that in 2019 before the onset of the pandemic, 351,097 African Americans died. In 2020, when the pandemic took hold, 456,491 African Americans died. This was an increase of 29.7 percent.
In contrast, the number of deaths for the population as a whole increased by 18.5 percent from 2019 to 2020. The number of death for White Americans increased by 16.4 percent. The number of death among Hispanic Americans rose by a whopping 44 percent. During the pandemic’s first year, every race group other than the White population experienced single-year percentage increases higher than the 18.5 percent increase in deaths for the total population.
In 2021, when vaccines became widely available, the number of Black deaths remained very similar to 2020 but the number of deaths among White Americans rose 2.7 percent. In 2022, the number of deaths for Blacks and Whites declined.
Many studies have shown that Black schoolchildren are far more likely than their White peers to be disciplined at school. But a new study published by the American Educational Research Association, finds that 5 percent of teachers most likely to refer students to the principal’s office for disciplinary action do so at such an outsized rate that they effectively double the racial gaps in such referrals.
The study was conducted by Jing Liu and Wenjing Gao of the University of Maryland, College Park and Emily K. Penner at the University of California, Irvine.
Office discipline referrals (ODRs) are typically the first formal step in the discipline process and precede the potential use of further formal consequences, including suspension. Researchers found that the top 5 percent of referring teachers issued an average of over 48 ODRs per year—roughly one ODR every four school days. That is several times greater than the rates of their average-referring colleagues, who issued less than one ODR for every two months of school. This 5 percent of teachers accounted for 34.8 percent of all ODRs. The ratio of the Black-White gap in ODRs was about 1.6-to-1 when considering all referrers but jumped to 3.4-to-1 when including top referrers.
The results suggest that teachers who are White, early career, and who serve middle schools are most likely to engage in extensive referring. As teachers accumulate more years of teaching experience, especially after three years, their likelihood of being a referrer or top referrer quickly drops.
“Given that top referrers tend to be teachers early in their careers, targeting professional development supports of classroom management skills for this group of teachers might also be a viable approach to reducing their referring frequency,” said Jing Liu the lead author of the study. “Our analysis highlights that structural supports at certain school levels are warranted.”
The full study, “Troublemakers? The Role of Frequent Teacher Referrers in Expanding Racial Disciplinary Disproportionalities,” was published on the website of the journal Educational Researcher. It may be accessed here.
A new study led by Maura L. Scott, the Dr. Persis E. and Dr. Charles E. Rockwood Eminent Scholar in Marketing in the College of Business at Florida State University, finds that Black entrepreneurs are still severely discriminated against by banks, even when they are more qualified than their White peers.
The study found that potential Black borrowers received lower-quality service than their White peers when applying for financing. This included being offered fewer loan options. The study also found that Black borrowers were treated less warmly by bank personnel than White customers.
The researchers found that when Black customers signal higher socioeconomic status, or a Black customer’s company (for which they seek the loan) has a more complex and sophisticated legal structure they are more likely to receive funding than Blacks who are sole proprietors. The results show that a more sophisticated business structure increases the employee’s trust toward Black customers, which reduces the perceived default likelihood and increases the likelihood to offer a loan. However, this difference is not the case for White applicants.
Professor Scott is the joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and a Ph.D. from Arizona State University.
The full study, “Revealing and Mitigating Racial Bias and Discrimination in Financial Services,” was published on the website of the Journal of Marketing Research. It may be accessed here.
The video below this text is interactive.[1] To view, click play and follow the instructions you see on the screen. As you watch, look for areas that you can click with a mouse (or tap with your finger, if on a mobile device)[2] or see what appears when you mouse over different areas of the image at different times. What do you see?[3]
[1] This multimodal content, due to technological limitations, may not be accessible to all. If the multimodal experience is not accessible to you, please visit the text based version for visual and audio descriptions and full-text transcription or listen to the audio narration:
Audio Narration by Kara White
[2] On mobile devices, we suggest viewing the page in landscape mode and selecting “Distraction Free Reading” in the top-right corner.
[3] This is an interactive video. This video is designed to get the viewer or reader to “search” the image for interactive buttons. To navigate by keyboard, you can use the tab key to switch between objects. Press enter to click on each object. The text is revealed by interacting with objects that appear at various times during the video. As each object appears, the video will pause, and you will be instructed to click or press enter for the text to appear. When you’re ready to continue, click the play button object or press enter.
Ballestero, Andrea, and Brit Ross Winthereik, eds. 2021. Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2018. Anthropology: Why It Matters. Medford: Polity Press.
Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. International Library of Sociology. London ; New York: Routledge.
Will artificial intelligence fatally undermine the integrity of scholarly publishing? A formal debate from the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.
The post SSP Conference Debate: AI and the Integrity of Scholarly Publishing appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Increasingly, scholars across the life and social sciences recognize the necessity of multi-method, interdisciplinary research for its ability to adequately understand the world’s complex problems.[1] However, the process of designing and executing these projects can be challenging. Interdisciplinary endeavors often risk privileging one discipline/methodological paradigm with others incorporated in a more consultative manner (i.e. quantitative versus qualitative), or, they run in-parallel without integrating epistemologies and methodologies (Lewis 2021). Examples of symmetric and integrative projects which unsettle disciplinary boundaries to afford new kinds of knowledge remain few and far between.
In the following piece, we (ZB and CB), as members and ethnographers of interdisciplinary teams, reflect on several “Mexican Exposures” (MEXPOS) projects which bring together researchers in anthropology, epidemiology, biostatistics, engineering, and health economics to make better knowledge and “better numbers” about health and inequality in Mexico (Roberts 2021). MEXPOS projects collaborate with long-standing epidemiological birth-cohort studies (ELEMENT and PROGRESS) which are based within Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health (INSP). Through performing and observing the laborious process of integrating the often-disparate methodologies, epistemologies, and analytical aims that each expert brings to the team, we have identified that some team members act as mediators, performing a critical role in making these interdisciplinary collaborations work. Our contribution to understanding how interdisciplinary knowledge is made (Lin et al. 2007) is a focus on the interpersonal aspects of knowledge production through exploring how these teams make better data by destabilizing disciplinary boundaries. By doing so, we hope to elucidate the challenges and opportunities of this kind of collaboration by exploring what is made possible when doing this work together.
ZB has a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and has spent a year managing MEXPOS projects as she prepares to begin a joint MD-PhD Anthropology training program; as an undergraduate, she also spent three semesters working in the MEXPOS ethnographic coding lab. CB has a background in physiotherapy and medical anthropology, and works with MEXPOS as part of her doctoral research and the Biosocial Birth Cohort Network, which included shadowing the MEXPOS team for ten days in April 2023 and meeting field workers in Mexico City. We developed this essay from our shared experience and observations of interdisciplinary knowledge practices within MEXPOS team meetings.
MEXPOS projects perform bioethnographic work. Bioethnography is a research method which combines methodologies from the social and biological sciences to understand environment-body interactions as relational and situated processes (Roberts and Sanz 2018). The premise of bioethnographic teams is to generate new knowledge by transcending disciplinary boundaries to tackle the complexity of the topics of study. Bioethnographic methods differ from other examples of collaboration between the life and social sciences that break down because of the lack of a shared intent or question (Lewis 2021) and encourages critical implosions between “nature/culture” (Roberts 2021). This methodology calls for the unsettling of traditional epistemological boundaries between the disciplines involved to critically engage with the questions and objects of research at hand in new and innovative ways.
This interdisciplinary research model hopes to create knowledge that truly apprehends pressing problems and questions. In practice, however, we have found that this process can feel awkward, clunky, and falter as members navigate the integration and destabilization it requires, working through the tensions of epistemic purity and interdisciplinary compromise while creating new modes and subject positions towards these blended methods. In our experience, the element which often relieves these tensions and moves teams toward achieving their collaborative aims has been the presence of mediators and the labor they perform.
Mediators are key for facilitating conversations between disciplines that bring underlying “taken-for-granted” assumptions to the surface, enabling these teams to progress past disciplinary limits. Most MEXPOS teams consist of a core of senior academics that are anchored within respective disciplines and act as knowledge-keepers alongside a variety of research assistants and management staff. Within MEXPOS, we have found that mediation is typically performed by the project manager and several graduate research assistants, including ZB. These are junior scholars with varying degrees of training in ethnographic methods as well as survey methodology, epidemiology, biology/life sciences, statistics, and other quantitative analyses. Through their training and background, mediators are well positioned to steer, generate, and develop bioethnographic questions while fostering a group dynamic that advances the team’s goals. The two examples we present here demonstrate mediation-in-action which allowed these teams to move forward amid, and possibly because of, disciplinary friction (Tsing 2011), which was harnessed by the mediators and transformed into something generative.
In the Spring of 2023, a team within MEXPOS worked on a collaborative paper based on the insights of the Household Chemical Assessment Project, a pilot study of two working-class households in Mexico City. This project, involving anthropologists, epidemiologists, exposure scientists, and metabolomics researchers, documented household and personal care products along with their use/meaning and generated a master list of chemical ingredients and insights about household exposure. During these meetings, the team debated how to situate this project and its outputs within an existing paradigm of exposure research, “the exposome” (Wild 2005). The team was stuck; the epidemiologists were aiming for epistemological clarity and a fixed structure to proceed, while the anthropologists were looping back and questioning the paradigm itself by posing alternative questions. The mediator registered that the two camps were talking past one another due to differences in their underlying notions of what “exposure” entailed on an ontological level, and pulled together readings that spanned both sets of disciplines to be discussed as a group at the next meeting. This effectively moved the team forward by 1) developing a new starting point with a shared knowledge base and vocabulary, and 2) opening a window into each discipline’s mode of inquiry in a way which allowed for more nuanced discussion about their respective stakes and assumptions. In this way, mediators can act as disciplinary polyglots thanks to their ability to understand the languages of the different disciplines, recognize and iron out misunderstandings, and summarize the conversations held by senior academics from different camps. This practice of mediation enabled the team to theorize beyond disciplinary limits and pioneer a new orientation towards exposure inquiry and intervention that enmeshes social and life scientists within a framework of shared understanding.
The second example involves another MEXPOS team, comprised of anthropologists, health economists, biostatisticians, and epidemiologists, that leveraged insights from a previous project (NESTSMX) about household water infrastructure. The team created a module of survey questions for the Mexican National Health and Nutrition Survey (ENSANUT) in order to investigate the impact of an intermittent water supply on health, gender, and household finances. One meeting about question revisions for the following year’s survey got stalled when differences in disciplinary aims and timelines surfaced. The anthropologists, who predominated, wanted to ameliorate their own apprehensions around survey methodology by tinkering with existing questions and discussing potential new ones to keep fidelity to the complex ethnographic insights. The biostaticians seemed frustrated by this, as they pointed out the looming due date and advocated for straightforward and generalizable questions to produce data that could be meaningfully compared to the previous year. The mediators suggested narrowing the discussion only to the ethnographic data that could be directly operationalized into the specific module questions that the biostaticians agreed would be worth modifying because they describe experience instead of measuring prevalence. As such, the mediators helped to reconcile qualitative richness and quantitative concreteness in translating ethnographic insights into questions that produce 0s and 1s, modulating between the sometimes-disparate aims and scales of ethnographic and statistical research processes that make integrating them so difficult.
Sketches from CB’s notebook while observing interdisciplinary knowledge practice, integrated and expanded by ZB.
Contemporary academic training calls for more interdisciplinary models, which could produce more mediators for multidisciplinary teams. These mediators do not always squash or quell conflict, but rather harness the productive role of the disciplinary unsettling that bioethnography facilitates among established academics, including the resulting misunderstandings and moments of uncertainty. These moments of generative friction offer critical points of reflection and surprise, and can reveal disciplinary assumptions and blind spots – which might be what is most valuable in bioethnography. This generative friction is a function of the unexpected: to borrow from studies of cognition, it is when a habit, in this case a disciplinary way of thinking, is contradicted and calls for a new way of understanding (Clark 2018), as well as epistemic humility. Here, these new ways of understanding are the interdisciplinary insights that are made possible through practices of bioethnographic integration. The mediators make friction productive by “paying attention to the diverse concerns of different disciplines and incorporating responsive negotiation of their collaborative possibilities and the tensions between them” (Mol and Hardon 2020). Here, mediators provide the crucial vector required to propel the group forward.
The making of truly interdisciplinary knowledge often requires overcoming epistemological paradigms through disciplinary destabilization. Mediators both manage interdisciplinary tensions and foster the generative friction that emerges, allowing for new kinds of knowledge to be produced together. Mediators can recognize, hold, and harness the discomfort of competing objectives and respond accordingly with the symmetry of the meta research process continually in mind. While disciplines will transform as opportunities for interdisciplinary training continue to increase, our experience with these bioethnographic collaborations underscores the importance of maintaining spaces for generative frictions that mediators can render into positive momentum.
[1] See https://www.ucl.ac.uk/soc-b-biosocial-doctoral-training/soc-b-centre-doctoral-training-biosocial-research; https://new.nsf.gov/funding/learn/research-types/learn-about-interdisciplinary-research
Clark, Andy. 2018. “A Nice Surprise? Predictive Processing and the Active Pursuit of Novelty.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (3): 521–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9525-z.
Lewis, Ashley. 2021. “Questioning the Promise of Interdisciplinarity: An Ethnography of an Interdisciplinary Research Project.” University of Nottingham.
Lin, Wei, Rob Procter, Peter Halfpenny, Alex Voss, and Kenny Baird. 2007. “An Action-Oriented Ethnography of Interdisciplinary Social Scientific Work.”
Mol, Annemarie, and Anita Hardon. 2020. “What COVID-19 May Teach Us about Interdisciplinarity.” BMJ Global Health 5 (12): e004375. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2020-004375.
Roberts, Elizabeth F. S., and Camilo Sanz. 2018. “Bioethnography: A How-To Guide for the Twenty-First Century.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society, edited by Maurizio Meloni, John Cromby, Des Fitzgerald, and Stephanie Lloyd, 749–75. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52879-7_32.
Roberts, Elizabeth F.S. 2021. “Making Better Numbers through Bioethnographic Collaboration.” American Anthropologist 123 (2): 355–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13560.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2011. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7s1xk.
Wild, Christopher Paul. 2005. “Complementing the Genome with an ‘Exposome’: The Outstanding Challenge of Environmental Exposure Measurement in Molecular Epidemiology.” Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention 14 (8): 1847–50. https://doi.org/10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-05-0456.
In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
How do people get into the flow of writing new material again when it's been a while? I'm hoping to have a really productive summer research-wise, but I've found myself spinning my gears far more than I'd like. I'd love to hear of any tips, tricks etc. from others who've struggled with this and have found some success combating it. I'd especially love to hear from any fellow ADHDers...
Great question! Another reader submitted the following reply:
I have long struggled with the same issue. What I find helps is a time every day where I just write. It could be 20 minutes, it could be 90. But set time aside every day and have a goal for the session. The goal could be very specific, e.g., finish bibliography or write flowchart for objection. It could be fairly nebulous: free write for 30 minutes about x. But it makes a difference because a) if gets you writing and b) it helps you build better habits, making writing later easier.
This seems like good advice to me. I do something similar, setting a goal of free-writing a certain amount of words each morning (e.g. 500 or 1,000 words). I find that if I do this every day that I do work, I'm usually always moving forward with something while leaving ample time for other things.
Do any other readers have any helpful tips?
"Researchers have only so many hours in a day; if they can spend one less hour on a research article because we have implemented improved workflows and better technology, that’s one more hour they can spend on research to try to save my life, and the lives of all ALS patients." In today's post, Bruce Rosenblum shares his experience as a clinical trial participant and how that contributed to scholarly publications.
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Download the transcript of this interview.
For this episode of Platypod, I talked to Dr. Tanja Ahlin about her research, work, and academic trajectory. She’s currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and her work focuses on intersections of medical anthropology, social robots, and artificial intelligence. I told her of my perspective as a grad student, making plans and deciding what routes to take to be successful in my field. Dr. Ahlin was very generous in sharing her stories and experiences, which I’m sure are helpful to other grad students as well. Enjoy this episode, and contact us if you have questions, thoughts, or suggestions for other episodes.
Dr. Tanja Ahlin, image from her personal website.
Dr. Tanja Ahlin is a medical anthropologist and STS scholar with a background in translation. She has translated books about technology and more. She has a master’s degree in medical anthropology, focusing on the topic of health and society in South Asia. Dr. Ahlin has been interested in e-health/telehealth for a long time, before the recent COVID-19 pandemic years, in which those words became part of our daily vocabulary. Her Ph.D., which she concluded at the University of Amsterdam, has focused on everyday digital technologies in elder care at a distance. Her Ph.D. research is being published as a book at Rutgers University Press. The book will be available for purchase starting on August 11, 2023.
Calling Family – Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives | Rutgers University Press
In our conversation, we talked about Dr. Ahlin’s blog focusing on the Anthropology of Data and AI. This project—in which Dr. Ahlin writes about the intersection of tech and different fields such as robotics, policy, ethics, health, and ethnography—is a kind of translation work, since Dr. Ahlin is writing about complex topics to a broader audience who are not familiar with some STS and anthropological concepts and discussions. “The blog posts are not supposed to be very long. I aim for two to four minutes of reading … I realized that people often don’t have time to read more than that, right?” says Dr. Tanja Ahlin.
Dr. Ahlin’s book is based on ten years of ethnographic research with Indian transnational families. These are families where family members live all around the world. The reason for migration is mostly due to work opportunities abroad. In her research, Dr. Ahlin looked at how these families used all kinds of technologies like mobile phones and webcams, the Internet, and Whatsapp, not only to keep in touch with each other but also to provide care at a distance. Dr. Ahlin conducted interviews with nurses living all around the world, from the US to Canada to the UK, the Maldives, and Australia. This varied and diverse field gave origin to the concept of field events that Dr. Ahlin develops in her work. In her work, Dr. Ahlin also developed the notion of transnational care collective to show how care is reconceptualized when it has to be done at a distance.
In sum, this episode of Platypod highlights how anthropologists come from different backgrounds and gives an honest overview of how we get to research our topics and occupy the spaces we do. We do not have linear stories, and that does not determine our potential. We at Platypod are very thankful for Dr. Ahlin’s time and generosity.
If you’re already familiar with my work, then you know I do Black feminist sociology that draws on Black feminist thought as conceptual framework for the mixed methods study of digital society. In this blog post, I want to discuss one of the predecessors of the field: Black sociology.
Black sociology analyzes society from the standpoint of Black people to highlight how historical social structures affect them today. It offers a non-eurocentric perspective to address the interrelatedness of racial and economic inequality affecting society, making its practitioners scholar-activists who bridge the gap between academia and the masses. White sociology contradicts its purported tenets of humanism and objectivity through anti-Black scientific racism that manufactures claims of racial inferiority to justify subordination. In contrast, Black sociology argues the social problems Black people experience, such as higher rates of poverty or lower rates of educational attainment, are indicative of the interdependency between racism and capitalism.
This framework seems poignant at a time when state and local governments across the United States aim to eliminate the presence of Black intellectual thought from the halls of academia. For this reason, this blog post explores the historical roots, evolution, key figures, and current state of Black sociology as a field.
From the very beginning, Black scholars have navigated sociological negation characterized by varying patterns of exclusion that can be summed up in three distinct periods: exclusion and segregation (1895-1930), accommodation and assimilationism (1931-1964), and co-optation and containment (1965-Present). These periods also produced three distinct groups of Black sociologists respectively: the Beginning School, the New School, and the New Black Sociologists. Contra to notions of liberalism rife within sociology, the experiences of Black sociologists throughout indicate they have consistently faced persist oppression and racism.
In 1895, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois earned the first Ph.D. awarded to a Black person from Harvard University from the Department of History. Despite this disciplinary background, he is now widely considered a founding father of sociology. Consequently, the awarding of his degree is considered the genesis of Black people’s involvement in sociology. Du Bois used his training to research the lives of Black people in America as did several other early Black sociologists, including George E. Haynes, Richard R. Wright Jr., and Kelly Miller. Anti-Black racism from white sociologists fostered academic segregation within the profession, making it difficult for their contributions to be recognized and acknowledged.
The New School of Black sociologists was initiated by DuBois and developed by E. Franklin Frazier, Charles S. Johnson, and others. Through applied research and social reform orientation, they drew on prevailing sociological methods on the immediate effects of urbanization, integration, rural poverty, and segregation on the Black community. Yet, they still faced racism including having their work labeled propaganda and other discriminatory practices. Their inclusion necessitated adhering to positivism to compete for rewards that were often defined by standards of the white dominant group. Despite this challenge, they performed social science research as a form of protest. Thus, they had to balance advocating for freedom, justice, and Black people while also submitting themselves to standards of merit based on research principles defined according to white norms.
The New Black Sociologists experienced increased professional visibility due to racial integration, which has also drained Black institutions and threatens their existence and that of the Black sociological tradition dependent upon them. In integrated spaces, a caucus structure often constrains Black sociology, leaving little promise of parity while it dismantles the Black sociological tradition. Additionally, predominantly white universities often hire a token number of Black sociologists solely as race relations experts, which negates the diversity of Black intellectual traditions. Into the present day, whiteness defines the substance and epistemology of sociology.
Overall, the historical roots of Black sociology created a framework of social science based on self-definition and self-determination that reinforces Black identity. Still, the dynamics of negation from the broader discipline create a precarious reality for a tradition that rejects its scientific racism.
The evolution of Black sociology has been shaped by an extension beyond the study of race to incorporate intersectionality; an emphasis on social justice and activism; and an incorporation of diverse perspectives, methodologies, and approaches rooted in the standpoint of Black people. Black sociology continues to amplify marginalized voices and expand our understanding of power, resistance, and liberation
The framework of Black sociology has evolved due to the transformative role of intersectionality, particularly in the field of Black feminist sociology. The paradigm highlights the interconnectedness of race, gender, and other social identities in shaping the social inequalities that affect individuals’ experiences. This concept also expands Black sociology beyond the single-axis framework of racism to explore the complexity of multiple systems of oppression intersecting and mutually reinforcing each other. Black feminist sociology therefore deepens our understanding by providing a more nuanced analysis of power, inequality, and resistance in society.
Black sociology’s evolution also includes a growing emphasis on social justice and activism. By emphasizing the link between theory and praxis, this emphasis fosters transformative research agendas, community engagement, and collective resistance in pursuit of liberation and Black self-determination. Based on this activist-theorist orientation, Black sociologists have also challenged traditional notions of objectivity and neutrality in sociological research, arguing these ideals often serve to perpetuate the status quo. Instead, they advocate for a more applied approach to research that acknowledges how Black social scientists develop interpretations rooted in their experience of oppression. This approach therefore acknowledges the importance of centering the voices and experiences of marginalized communities, rather than relying on dominant sociological interpretations about how race relates to social inequalities.
The field of Black also evolved through the incorporation of perspectives such as critical race theory, which provides nuanced understandings of power relations and racial inequality. Adopting such frameworks enables it to challenge dominant narratives and foster a more comprehensive understanding of social phenomena. Such a liberatory approach to sociology develops new areas of research, such as Black feminist digital sociology, which studies of digital technologies and their impact on Black social life primarily from the perspective of Black women.
W.E.B DuBois’s study of race and social inequality in The Souls of Black Folk provides the groundwork of the sociological examination of Black American life as conceptualized by his theory of double consciousness. Double consciousness describes the social psychological experience of Black Americans who must constantly navigate between their own cultural identity and the norms of a white-dominated society. In addition to DuBois, numerous scholars have done work that exemplifies Black sociology, but I will focus on three: Oliver Cromwell Cox, Orlando Patterson, and Patricia Hill Collins.
I chose Oliver Cromwell Cox because I intend to delve deeper into Black sociology from the Caribbean perspective in my future writing. Cox was born in August 1901 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He moved to the United States during his childhood and later received degrees in economics and sociology from the University of Chicago, including a Ph.D. in Sociology in August 1938. Cox went on to teach at Wiley College, Tuskegee Institute, Wayne State University, and Lincoln University.
Cox’s scholarship primarily challenged dominant theories of race relations from a diasporic perspective that recognized the interrelations of racism and capitalism. He rejected biological determinism, instead arguing that race was a social construction of the power relations of a white supremacist society. His writing also characterized racism as the foundation of the capitalism system and that this system had global implications. Cox’s most influential works include Caste, Class, and Race; Capitalism as a System and Foundations of Capitalism. Overall, Oliver Cromwell Cox’s contributions to sociology have been invaluable in advancing our understanding of race relations both in the United States and globally.
Orlando Patterson, born in Westmoreland, Jamaica, is another Caribbean sociologist whose work has contributed heavily to Black sociology. He studied economics at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica before completing his doctorate in sociology at the London School of Economics, where he graduated in 1962. He has served as faculty at both schools and now works at Harvard University as the John Cowles Professor of Sociology since 1971.
Patterson’s scholarship challenges mainstream sociological theories of racial relations through an emphasis on the impact of slavery on contemporary society. His seminal work published in 1982, Slavery and Social Death, argues slavery was both a social and economic insinuation that profoundly shaped the lives of enslaved people and their descendants. Other publications include Freedom in the Making of Western Culture; Modern Trafficking, Slavery, and Other Forms of Servitude; and The Ordeal of Integration. In addition to his rigorous research and insightful analysis, Patterson co-founded Cultural Survival, which demonstrates his commitment to social justice for all indigenous people of the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
Born in May 1948, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Patricia Hill Collins is one of the founders of the field of Black feminist sociology. She earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Brandeis University in 1969. Her academic journey continued at Harvard University, where she completed her master’s degree in teaching in 1970. After a career in education, Collins returned to Brandeis where she completed a Ph.D. in 1984. Collins’s career as faculty include the University of Cincinnati and the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is now Distinguished University Professor Emerita.
One of the key contributions of Collins’s work is her exploration of the concept of the matrix of domination. The groundbreaking work Black Feminist Thought uses this concept within sociological research to illuminate the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in an investigation of the unique experiences of Black women. Additionally, Collins’s scholarship has also explored the importance of Black feminist activism and community organizing as tools for social change in movements for justice and liberation.
Currently, the field of Black sociology faces several challenges that affect scholars within the discipline. Despite progression, Black sociologists remain underrepresented in academic spaces and receive less recognition for their contributions to the field. Their careers often encounter barriers such as limited access to resources, scholarly networks, and funding opportunities due to biased evaluation criteria. Moreover, the eurocentric quality of white sociology undervalues the experiences and perspectives of marginalized communities, particularly Black people.
Nevertheless, Black sociology remains a crucial component of the discipline due to how it continues to center the experiences and perspectives of the African diaspora. Centering Black people in sociological analysis enables a more comprehensive understanding of social dynamics and power structures. Furthermore, this approach also cultivates more inclusive and equitable approaches to the social sciences. Should the academic racism Black sociologists navigate ever got resolved, the field of Black sociology can actively contribute to dismantling systemic inequalities and fostering social justice.
By centering the experiences and perspectives of Black people, Black sociology challenges dominant explanations of societal phenomena. It addresses the interrelatedness of racism and capitalism affecting the experiences of Black Americans to emphasize social justice and activism guided by a paradigm of intersectionality.
Key figures in the field, such as W.E.B Du Bois, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Orlando Patterson, and Patricia Hill Collins, have made significant contributions to our understanding of how social systems such as racism and capitalism affect the experiences of Black people. Still, Black sociology continues to face challenges, including underrepresentation and the undervaluing of marginalized communities’ perspectives. Despite these challenges, Black sociology remains a crucial area of the discipline.
To learn more, check out the hyperlinks in the essay above.
The post Black Sociology:Race and Power Dynamics in Society appeared first on Blackfeminisms.com.
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There is an increasing focus in academic and policy circles on research-policy partnerships. These partnerships are often achieved through co-creation, or “the joint production of innovation between combinations of industry, research, government and civil society.” Co-creation is central to innovation in the hard sciences and technology, but its role in international relations scholarship and aid policy remains underdeveloped.
As scholars of international aid practice, we believe that co-creation can help us design and conduct more relevant, rigorous, and impactful research. It is also a core mission of the Research on International Policy Implementation Lab (RIPIL), whose co-creation process engages policymakers and practitioners in: 1) the generation of important, policy-relevant research questions; 2) research on these questions, through regular validation and consultation; and 3) the development and dissemination of findings and their policy implications, which often leads to the identification of important new research questions and opportunities.
In this piece, we focus on the first phase: the co-creation of research questions. This is one of the trickiest phases of the co-creation process because it requires researchers and policymakers to find a common question and research design that aligns with academics’ incentive to publish rigorous research and policymakers’ incentive to feed evidence into the policy process. Future blog posts will discuss how to implement co-created research and disseminate co-created findings.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we initiated a collaboration intended to generate policy-relevant research questions on the changing nature of international aid. Our aim was to get a sense of whether the combined shocks of COVID-19, growing calls to decolonize aid, and the rise of populism and popular protest had changed the underlying power dynamics in aid.
Importantly, in this project, we did not just want to learn from practitioners based in Western Europe or North America. We wanted insights from key thinkers and actors from the context where aid dependency has been most acute: the African continent. We wanted to understand how these thought leaders viewed aid-related power dynamics and how research could help answer their most puzzling questions.
Between 2020 and 2022, we conducted one-on-one interviews, organized virtual focus groups, and hosted a high-level roundtable in Geneva with donor governments and international non-government organizations (INGOs) on power in aid, all to better understand the changing nature of aid and the research questions that matter to policymakers, practitioners, and key African thinkers.
A synthesis of our thematic findings is available here. In this blog, we discuss our four most important lessons learned about the co-creation process itself.
We saw our discussions as an exchange of knowledge. Therefore, we wanted to make sure that we brought something to the table. Before each meeting and workshop, we circulated a summary of the existing research and our discussions from previous meetings. Having set the stage with these syntheses, we then focused each interview and workshop on listening (not talking). This allowed us to build on the existing academic knowledge, and to use the conversations to identify how it diverged from the everyday experiences of our interviewees and workshop participants. It also allowed each participant to arrive feeling well-prepared, in part through the materials we provided.
Importantly, we began each workshop and roundtable with presentations by African scholars and practitioners. They helped shape the power dynamics of the conversation from the outset.
The process worked. Our preparation, planning, and careful facilitation enabled open and respectful communication among key African thinkers and representatives of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), donor governments, recipient governments, and the United Nations.
We wanted to hear what donors, recipients, and key observers had to say about changing power dynamics around aid. We wanted to understand the perspectives of people from different recipient and donor countries to see if there might be broader trends.
Most of the people who participated in our discussions did not know us or each other. To enable an open conversation, we had to create an environment where they could trust us, and each other. This took time. We had to reach out to people repeatedly; build relationships through one-on-one conversations at the beginning of the process; and use these one-on-one conversations and our repeated meetings over time to establish our own credibility. This paid off in the quality of the conversations we were eventually able to have in our focus-group discussions and, subsequently, in our high-level panel in Geneva.
If the point of co-creation is to spark new lines of inquiry, researchers involved in co-creation must be willing to let go of the questions they think they should be asking and be open to the questions that others think are most important.
In our initial one-on-one conversations, we focused on asking open-ended, big picture questions to get a sense of whether participants thought power dynamics had changed and, if so, how. In some cases, their answers confirmed our assumptions. In others, we were surprised by new insights.
For example, respondents indicated that the rise of populism in Africa was leading to a backlash against aid recipients and donors. This led us to start a new research project on aid and populism that we could not have imagined at the beginning of the process.
This is hard to understate. Co-creating research questions involves the translation and transfer of ideas between science, policy, and practice over an extended period. This means that researchers should not engage in co-creation expecting quick wins or immediate research results. Co-creation is not a quick strategy to increase your research output, but a long-term commitment to identifying important research questions and building the relationships necessary to answer them.
When done well, co-creation has the potential to improve the relevance and impact of research, foster greater collaboration and understanding between researchers and practitioners, and ultimately contribute to positive change in the aid sector. But it is time-consuming and requires patience, careful planning, regularly questioning one’s assumptions, and continuous communication.
We believe that the investment of adequate time up front has been worthwhile, greatly enhancing our understanding of the power dynamics in aid today and enabling us to ask (and answer) cutting-edge research questions. It has also given us the connections necessary to conduct research on these dynamics, ensuring that our research authentically reflects the views shared by African stakeholders and is relevant to aid policymakers and practitioners globally.
To learn more about RIPIL, visit https://bridgingthegapproject.org/ripil/.
I am writing a book about Malaysia’s ethnic order*, using the Malay world as a way to think more generally about social categories like ethnicity and how to conceptualize them. This book project combines all of my interests: maritime Southeast Asia, political economy, colonial history (Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Japanese), language, analytic philosophy, social ontology, diaspora studies, criticizing things for not really making sense, trying to subvert paradigms, making custom maps, and statistics. The last of these is the subject of this post.
One of the tasks of my book is to demonstrate that my understanding of Malaysia’s ethnic order is not simply a projection of my own biases onto Malaysian history, society, and culture. To do this, I’ve been using survey data collected from Malaysians (and Indonesians… although that’s not really relevant for today’s post) to try to characterize the country’s ethnic order. An ethnic order, for me, is
the set of beliefs, practices, and ancillary institutions that organize and sustain ethnic categories within a given political community
Such an abstract concept is hard to characterize, and hard to survey people about without supplying exactly the answers that I hope that they will provide (thus invalidating the exercise). So what I have done is to survey Malaysians and ask them questions about what comes to mind when they think of various ethnic groups in the country. They provided open-ended responses, which I analyzed through a Structural Topic Model to estimate the relative salience of different types of responses for different types of ethnic groups.
The result is an analysis that says that, for example, when responses are generally focusing on things like language and religion, they are more likely to be talking about Malays versus Chinese. When they’re talking about economic matters, they are more likely to be talking about Chinese than Indians. And so forth. When the book is done, it will explain why such results are consistent with my particular approach to understanding Malayness in Malaysia.**
But with ChatGPT-4 and other large language models (LLMs) completely blowing up everything, it occurred to me this morning that one might wonder what the computer says about my data. I was inspired to do this by reading this paper from Petter Törnberg, which used ChatGPT-4 to predict what the partisan affiliated with the authors of tweets. I’m reporting here what I found from some initial playing around, and it is remarkable, scary, and open to a lot of interpretation (more on this at the end).
Here is what I did: I logged into ChatGPT-4 and opened up my file containing the open-ended survey responses. I then typed the following at the prompt:
I asked a Malaysian survey respondent the following question:
Now I am going to ask you about several different ethnic groups. I would like to you to tell me two (2) things that come to mind when you think about these groups. There is no right or wrong answer; you may think of particular words or phrases, or perhaps nothing at all.
I asked this about ethnic Malays, ethnic Chinese, and ethnic Indians in Malaysia. Imagine that the respondent gave the response “kurang rajin Islam.” Which of the three ethnic groups above do you think this response would be associated with?
The words kurang rajin Islam are the responses that one survey respondent actually gave. It is a combination of two responses, because I asked the respondent this question twice (one response was kurang rajin and the other was Islam). After hitting Enter, the ChatGPT-4 spit out the following:
Based on the response “kurang rajin Islam,” it is likely associated with the ethnic Malay group in Malaysia.
“Kurang rajin” translates to “less diligent” in English, and “Islam” refers to the religion of Islam. The phrase suggests a perception or association related to the Malay community and their commitment or dedication to their religious practices. It’s important to note that this response reflects the perspective of the individual respondent and should not be taken as a generalization for the entire Malay ethnic group.
This is actually bananas. The computer correctly identified which group that response was associated with. And it kept doing it. I asked
Imagine that the respondent gave the response “pemegang ekonomi.” Which of the three ethnic groups above do you think this response would be associated with?
And the computer said
The response “pemegang ekonomi” translates to “economic holders” or “economic owners” in English. Given this response, it is likely associated with the ethnic Chinese group in Malaysia.
The phrase “pemegang ekonomi” suggests a perception or association related to the economic prowess or prominence of the ethnic Chinese community in Malaysia. It reflects the recognition of their significant contributions to the economic sector in the country. However, it is important to note that this response represents the viewpoint of the individual respondent and should not be taken as a generalization for the entire ethnic Chinese group.
It gets worse, but I’ll spare you. And although it doesn’t always work, these initial forays show that LLMs are remarkably accurate at predicting what group a short survey response was referring to in this specific example. You can think of a lot of other ways that one might study social categories using these AI tools.
I don’t know exactly what to do with these results, but I do know that they’re getting at something significant. For one, the AI developers are mostly trying to rein in LLMs to prevent them from saying racist, sexist, and otherwise biased things. But here is a case where we have the reverse: actual statements (and rather explicitly biased in both cases) by real humans that can be classified according to the best guess of who is being referred to. How can this be stopped?
But I think that there’s another level at which to think about this result. That is, knowing that ChatGPT-4 is not thinking, but rather just doing a super-duper prediction model of what words are most likely to be sensible responses to other words, what could one learn from this? Is this evidence of something, and if so, of what? What people think? What people have written down? What Malaysians have written down? What researchers or journalists have written down?
There are even more levels. What about the coarseness of my own prompt (I wrote Malaysia, when I really mean peninsular Malaysia)? Should I give feedback on these results, thus contributing to reinforcement learning? If I write up these results, would I then be further contributing to stereotypes by producing a text that will feed into the same LLMs to produce even more such results? What if my own ethical goals are not to reinforce, but rather to undermine the present social order?
I don’t have any great answer to these questions. I am a pessimist about what LLMs will do to human society who nevertheless marvels at what they can do sometimes.
* You can think of an ethnic order as like a “racial order.”
** But not Indonesia. That’s important. And also, not really even Sabah/Sarawak, this is about peninsular Malaysia. That’s also important.
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The positive benefits of youth interacting with technology are often ignored while the negatives are emphasized. It’s time for that to change. In a commitment to this effort, the Connected Learning Alliance, along with the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine, are excited to share the new Connected Wellbeing Initiative with the... Read more »
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