Analyze

In our group we had Dr. Jessica Sewell come speak to us a little while ago about her book Women and the Everyday City and we landed on the topic of “imaginaries of space” for a long time. And the visual politics of space- so how do we notice things? What do we notice? What seems out of place or in place. Thinking about how imaginaries make certain presences completely invisible (thinking here about gendered labor, black labor, and more). And how powerful imaginaries are, how they intersect with our construction of language. But also how resistance can work with these imaginaries.. thinking about women’s sort of take over of dept stores during the suffrage movement as an extension of their private space, a space for organizing. This is long winded way of trying to think through COVID-19 national models in the context of national imaginaries. What has been puzzling me is so many Americans’ response to the Swedish model of governing in Covid and how imaginaries of Sweden have been warped in such a way that there is a complete erasure of how xenophobic policies have gained traction in Sweden in recent years.  

This CMU-led initiative tries to be ethical by taking privacy seriously in the sense of making users anonymous. Yet you have to allow the app permission to run constantly on your phone and access your mic. The app polices your violation of social distancing with another app user - if you come within 6 feet of someone who reports that they have tested positively for COVID-19, you will be alerted. It is important to know you have been exposed. What are the tradeoffs that come with doing it this way? 

Training in programming skills takes a new prominence as an area of tech-for-good: previously, there was a great deal of focus on k-12 and university education to teach programming skills in order to increase social mobility and access to high-paying jobs, or just because STEM education is a good in some stories, or to increse diversity in tech fields as an end unto itself. 

Now re-skilling, in this case through a private corporation's CSR and advertisement campagin for new paying membership, is taking on new significance as massive layoffs and furloughing has left people at home, responsibilized to find a new job. Meanwhile, the tech industry is in quite a few cases hiring as reliance on digital connectivity for things that were once done in-person has increased with quarantining.