Search

Mishuana Goeman in Mark My Words talks about remapping as a way of rethinking space and temporality, so the future is driving the study of the past and the past is interrogated for the future.

Goeman uses the fiction of Native women to push forth the idea that words don’t only represent reality, arguing that by using narrative “in (re)mapping, we as Native people have the power to rethink the way we engage with territory, with our relationships to one another, and with other Native nations and settler nations” (38–39).

So imagining spatial encounters and relationships is actually a way of mapping alternative relationships

Massey’s understanding of space is the “product of interrelations,” “spheres of possibility,” “and always under construction or a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (6-7), so space is a meeting of histories.

What histories are meeting now? Maybe more importantly, whose histories are meeting? I think this is where scalar analysis can come in to complement Massey’s thinking about space.. to start to tease out a bit these entangled encounter or meeting space, knowing it will never fully be disentangled.

Also, when think about Massey’s line of space as a meeting place, something always in transit, I’m thinking specifically of encounters. And space/place as encounter. And stay at home orders rethink the way many of us are encountering each other, also in certain contexts, especially for those with the privilege of staying at home, change encounters are being lost. The sort of tranistness of space is being lost.

I’ve been thinking a bit with Elizabeth Povinelli’s use of “abject” status (the excess, to cast away, the throw away) which she pulls from Judith Butler and spaces of liminality. The subjective experience of an abject status intersects so harshly with systems of power, the economy, national policy, etc. So, thinking about spaces of abjection. Who occupies this space during this time? How is it changed? How is it being embodied?

Gonzales, Roberto G., and Leo R. Chavez. 2012. “‘Awakening to a Nightmare’: Abjectivity and Illegality in the Lives of Undocumented 1.5-Generation Latino Immigrants in the United States.” Current Anthropology 53 (3): 255–81. https://doi.org/10.1086/665414.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2012. “BEYOND THE NAMES OF THE PEOPLE: Disinterring the Body Politic.”Cultural Studies 26 (2–3): 370–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.636206.

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.  

Gendered Spaces – We keep seeing these headlines over and over  (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/world/coronavirus-women-leaders.html) and I think there’s a lot more analysis that needs to happen here.. But women leaders = success in governance in these reports and I think we should complicated this more. What does this look like from the scale of the body to national political offices?

Failed governance - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/michigan-lawmaker-armed-escort-rightwing-protest

^ For many this is failure, but for others the ability to have militarized weapons in the state capitol is a success. So how do we blur the boundaries between success/failure?

Senators write a letter to corporate CEOs to see if they will voluntarily participate in this form of corporate social responsibility.

It is clear that in the conditions of the pandemic, people who cannot afford internet connections and functioning devices will suffer more social, economic, and other hardships. People who are in places without internet infrastructure will be even less able to do their jobs, schooling, socializing, etc. 

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. 

By matching purchases of Pro Membership of their programming training with five donation subscriptions, this private business is casting itself as socially responsible. They are re-skiling people who have been furloughed or laid off during the pandemic and this allows them to be competitive for jobs that are still in demand as programmers. Programming and tech industries are the most resilient in a situation of social distancing, as everyone more or less fully relies on digital connectivity for interaction, and this company is capitalizing on that situation to increase its paying membership while boosting its image of social responsibility. 

As a purchaser of Pro Membership, I'm doing a good because I'm "unlocking" the donations to 5 people who get the opportunity to receive training in a new skill through a premium version of a free platform, and this might get them employment. 

An oversight board of 20 well-known, reputable individuals has been (publically) convened to make final decisions about contested content removal from the platform. 

Critics note that content removal is not the only ethical issue Facebook has, and Siva Vaidhyanathan notes that the proprietary algorithm that shows people content is a serious issue over which this board has no authority. 

Joan Donovan notes that the slow legalistic pace will not keep up even when damaging content is a serious ethical issue, as even only a few hours is sufficient for viral digital content to reach huge audiences: 

Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center and an expert on media manipulation, raised concerns that the board would become “weaponized” by bad actors, who will use it as another opportunity to get their issues into the press.

“This theory of oversight is heavily informed by legal scholarship, which is slow and administrative and technical in nature, when we need something much more suited to the speed of the technology itself,” she said. “They’re going forward with this really long drawn out procedural mechanism that doesn’t address what the problem is – which is that viral content only needs to be on the internet for 4-8 hours for it to do its damage.”

Looking at the scale of the “infodemic” facing Facebook amid the coronavirus pandemic, Donovan said that the much more pressing concern is to solve the problem of “information curation, especially in a place like Facebook, that helps guide the user toward correct content and information rather than putting them in the middle a landfill and saying, ‘You sort it out’.” The oversight board is ultimately a distraction from “what really needs to happen”, she said, “which is to design technology that doesn’t allow for the expansive amplification of disinformation and health misinformation”.

Here Verizon presents itself as socially responsible by supprting small businesses with small grants. 

Individuals are encouraged to support the "cause" of keeping businesses open. Businesses become like charities or a good to support with the dollars of consumers. The rest of Verizon's loans are "unlocked" with the shallow digital participation of using the hashtag #PayItForwardLIVE by viewers of the Verizon-sponsored living-room streamed concerts of famous artists. 

Digital products that underly payment for small businesses (PayPal, Venmo, Square) are also portrayed as doing a social good by virtue of being platforms through which individuals can "Support" thier local businesses with gift cards, tips, and more. 

Relatedly, in the USA Today article: 

"The Small Business Administration program offers firms employing 500 or fewer workers low-interest loans to cover their costs while they're shuttered. But while the SBA has approved billions in loans since April 3, businesses point to a myriad of challenges in the PPP's rollout: technical glitches, an avalanche of requests, a lack of response, and an exhaustion of money." - so the Verizon grants as well as other grants are portrayed as heroically and competently stepping in to save small businesses, portrayed as the backbones of disadvantaged communities.