What is it about?

In this paper, we talk about how participatory design practitioners can help bring organizational change when vulnerable populations depend on the organization. We reflect on our five-year year engagement with survivors of sex trafficking in Nepal and an anti-trafficking organization that supports the survivors to present ways in which we sought to bring organizational change while attending to the complexities that arise due to the vulnerable population's dependency.

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Why is it important?

Institutional change requires contestation of the existing power dynamics. Participatory design is well suited to do so. However, when contesting, we have to be careful. In particular, supporting contestation and political change requires actors to be on equal grounds in terms of power and agency. When there are vulnerable populations who are dependent on the organization, such contestation has to be supported carefully. Considering this, we argue for the need to bridge the move to contestation. In doing so, we emphasize moving away from an us-versus-them contestation towards incremental moves that focus on collaborative entanglements, attend to contingent factors, and encourage provisional collectives.

Perspectives

I was inspired by Carl DiSalvo's book ("Adversarial Design") and wanted to support agonistic approaches in the anti-trafficking organization in Nepal. Change was (and is) required in the organization. However, the realities of the ground required several moves before we could reach a position where agonistic approaches could be feasible. So, this paper is a reflection of a pragmatic issue we had been grappling with for quite some time. When working with an already-vulnerable population, we need to be careful about what we do (especially since researchers are temporary actors). Sometimes, that care requires taking small steps (and not vying for a drastic revolutionary change) which may not be the most "attractive" (or impactful) thing to do.

Aakash Gautam
San Francisco State University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Empowering Participation Within Structures of Dependency, August 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3536169.3537781.
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