Stephanie_GradScholarEdit
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Stephanie Dinkins: [00:00:00] I'm thinking about a lot about the stories we tell our machines and the myths that we use to create our world and what that means in the technological and digital spaces. 

Jasmine Banks: I'm primarily interested in how Black people engage in meaning making processes, particularly around race and how they engage in digital world building through different engagements online.

Stephanie Dinkins: Hey, I'm going to ask you guys some elemental questions, right? Okay. Because I always find that helpful. What do you mean by digital world building? 

Jasmine Banks: Oh, yes, that is the question of my entire dissertation. Hopefully, I will get to ask it. So I haven't fully figured it out yet. So something that I'm working with Brock on thinking more of, but for me, how I'm thinking of digital world building is essentially how People, particularly black users are creating different aspects of their social lives online and thinking about the social media ecosystem and how they're recreating and forming relationships.

But [00:01:00] also looking at how the digital serves as an extension to the offline world, but also thinking about what else the digital can add to that to create things and allow for imagination and creating of spaces that don't exist in their physical spaces. 

My work is really 

pruneah Kim: thinking about cooking and eating as a perform like a racial performativity and thinking a lot about- I'm going to use the word world building again also, but thinking about food as a world building practice for communities, especially like Asian diasporic women.

So thinking about like the cooking of my mom is something that is like way more creative than we understand it to be. As well as like super crucial to creating provisional moments in this like dumpster fire world that we're living in.

Elise Nagy: My project is looking at how undergraduate women's health education in the U. S. reinforces or disrupts like normative and hegemonic ideologies of embodiment. 

Jessica Rucker: Basically, I'm curious about how black people, I'm curious about a few things, [00:02:00] but for the context of DISCO how black people leverage digital media and platforms to circulate messages that influence Black people to think about liberation, freedom.

David Tortolini: I'm with the HAT Lab. And my work is looking at flavor and how flavor is a part of colonialism and upholding social class. By looking at how coffee roasters talk about flavors, define their flavors, and transcribe their flavors online when they selling it to consumers. How can you decolonize design online now?

S. Nisa Asgarali-Hoffman: So right now I'm looking at the notion of authenticity and how that and how I can problematize systems of authentication for human beings based on genetic data. So authenticating a human by using their DNA. Conceptually and philosophically. 

Stephanie Dinkins: Where does one entity fit amongst other entities and that spectrum includes the technology and the [00:03:00] biological right? And as things shift, I have a feeling that humans are going to have to do human beings are going to have to do a lot of work to reconcile what and who we think we are in that spectrum as their intelligences become more prominent and I'm going to say useful, but it's not a good word. 

Like what does that mean for us? Not only as like humans, but then as racialized bodies, right, like, where does that all sit and how do we, how do we start to define or explode, right, some of the definitions that we hold onto so dearly becomes a really big question for me that I'm just like grappling with all the time and feeling crazy about as well.

I'm not sure how much y'all know about me, but I'm here because I started talking to a robot that is a black, she comes in the form of a black female. Her name is Bina48, really fascinating story. If you're [00:04:00] interested in these things, because I think it's a love story. But it's also this story of like techno representation and what that means.

And really, I think a lot about it now in terms of what standards I was trying to hold a robot to based on the human standards that I've been given and the standards of blackness that I want to see versus what it is. And wondering like, how do you allow something to be what it is, accept it for what it is and make clear space for it instead of ostracizing it.

That's been some of the space that I've been trying to reconcile in my mind. Cause at first I was like, this thing looks black. It says it's black. Yeah. They try to be pro Black and they're saying things like, they're examining race, but on a very what, politically correct level and what does that mean to the rest of us, right?

But over time, I've had to grapple with the complexities of all that, because the person who it's actually based on, she is a [00:05:00] Black woman. She doesn't want to have to grapple with these questions. She's I just wish I didn't have to gravel with these questions. And then I realized, Oh, I'm just asking of you all the things I hate when people ask of me and try to stick me in a very particular corner of the world because of what I look like, how does that feed a system, but okay, so then we're talking about a broad spectrum of colonial things. 

I'm going to ask you one other thing. Do you want to see things? Do you want to hear things? Do you want to think about how we might collaborate across spaces? Because I hear all speaking the same language in some ways.

And when I think about collaborative work, I so I was told that we're thinking a little bit about collaborative work. I think about finding whatever that common language is, and then trying to destabilize it. So that we can't hold on to the ways in which we've been trained. I also find education highly problematic only because we're trained into the colonialist thinking often that we're trying to fight against. And even though new [00:06:00] ideas come in, the training and the way that we train and pass down that is based on a system that is meant to hold things in place. 

I'm always trying to figure out okay, how do I look at the system? How do I recognize what's going on with the system and then break it open in some way, shape or form? And one of the questions I'm going to have for all of you so far, I think is like the amount in which practice comes into your ideas and how you're exploring in both those ways. Cause I am a great proponent that a little bit of practice goes a long way in understanding more deeply, whatever it is, you're thinking about. 

David Tortolini: I'm also really interested in giving agency back to the coffee farmer and having them describe their coffees versus having somebody translate it for them. 

Stephanie Dinkins: Yeah, and that was interesting when you were talking I'm interested in even the language that you're using.

We're using so like the idea of [00:07:00] translation, the idea of transcription, like where does that sit? And when do you go to the source and just say, what is this? And make the assumption that they understand the spectrum of world that they function in. Cause I feel like so often it's we're going to take this from you. You don't quite know what you're doing. Although you've been doing this probably generally generationally in some places. 

And how do we draw on that knowledge and really put it forward? 

David Tortolini: We're trying to decolonize something that we use every day, the senses, and we don't realize that even our sense of smell is based on colonial erasure.

Stephanie Dinkins: The language that we're using is based in colonialist terms. How do we start to change that? I actually just started to use new words. I'm talking all about nurturing AI these days, right? And I'm doing it very specifically because I think that AI is a tool and a media and a digital space that will construct us and we are constructing.

And if we don't nurture it [00:08:00] to know who and what we are, we've given up that space. And so I want to inject the things that I find important to my people whoever they are, and I think others need to lend I've been talking about data gifts in certain ways we're all being told, oh, our data is precious, we shouldn't give it, we should be paid for it it should be protected, and I believe in this in certain ways, but I often think about what things do we need to gift a system so that it could care for us in some way?

Because without that information, I don't think it has a possibility of doing it. It's going to paint us already. We know how these different systems paint the picture based on supremacist ideas of what we are because of the folks who are making the systems. And if we leave it at that, we know what happens in terms of collaborating and working with the communities or ideas that you're working with.

I'm going to ask you all this, like, how do you parse [00:09:00] what is deep knowledge from super primary sources to what is knowledge that has been learned and re injected into a system so that what, one, you can communicate with the system. Or two, that you can sell your goods, because we know sometimes if we just shift a word or two, it's suddenly more accessible and acceptable to certain communities. And so we make those shifts to make the, let's say, economic turn, turn in this instance. Like how much unraveling of our internals are we doing? Or of the internals of the communities that we were working with, are we doing? 

S. Nisa Asgarali-Hoffman: With the work I'm doing now, I came into it immediately just really hating the idea of this DNA ancestry testing stuff because I was like, where it's scientific racism again, and it's gonna lead to the same types [00:10:00] of, the ethnic cleansing and ethnic purity and this pull towards that eugenics is the word I was looking for.

And so I, I just had this knee jerk reaction that this is bad. And so I wanted to do a dissertation about how bad this thing was. But then I very quickly realized that was actually the wrong thing. Perspective. It wasn't like, this is better. This is good. It was very quickly became like, how are people using this?

And in what ways are people actually finding this extremely useful? Or in what ways are people using this that are problematic? And so I think actually working with, within the, so going to the YouTube videos of people who are from the Caribbean and seeing what they said about it, I realized how fruitful a space it was creating for them to dissect or, deconstruct notions of authenticity, like they weren't, [00:11:00] it wasn't being reinforced by the test. It was actually like deconstructing it and it provided this amazing space for the entire diaspora because it's a YouTube video and so people from all over are coming into the comments and having these really rich discussions redefining their Caribbean identity and what that means.

And I actually found that it was like, it was much more, it was a much more, it was a much more productive and like liberatory space than what I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be very like, narrowly defining Western colonial concepts being reinforced, and it wasn't, and I I found that to be so useful to just try to go into things without that preconceived idea of what I think the value judgment is, and really try to take what everybody else is getting from it.

Stephanie Dinkins: Yeah, really interesting. Other comments related to that?

I [00:12:00] actually think that the hard yes or no, black or white questions get you there, but if you're open enough. To go okay. And cause sometimes we need that catalyst just get me in the space. I'm thinking about it. Then you get there and you're not like, so committed to the no or so committed to the yes, that you can't see what's going on in the gray spaces and how folks are engaging with the things and what's possible with the things like that's totally something I think a lot about in the AI space, right? Because we hear it all the time. It's horrible. It's going to take our jobs. It is surveilling us, right? But it's also a super powerful medium. That is at a kind of beginning and flexible and open and available to massaging into what you need it to be.

And for me, it's a lot of power to give up, like for any bit of society to just say, this is bad. But I'm looking for okay, [00:13:00] I see this thing. I see it has problems. That's clear. But I also see that there's a lot of opportunity, be that economic or and there's a lot of possibility and while there are these overarching companies that do all this stuff, there's also space to manipulate and build through it.

And that's I think that can be so transformative about the way that we, a, think about our worlds and, The way that we craft our worlds, like we're thinking about world building, right? If you're thinking about AI and AI is literally a set of ecosystems that are building worlds and building them at exponential rates.