Situated, Autonomous, and Free? Hacking Diversity in Technical Work

Christina Dunbar-Hester is the author of Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton U Press, 2020) and Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism (MIT Press, 2014). She is a faculty member in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, USA, and she holds a PhD in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University. She is currently writing a book on multispecies life and death in the Ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach, under contract with University of Chicago Press.

Talk: Situated, Autonomous, and Free? Hacking Diversity in Technical Work.

Zoom link to attend: https://bit.ly/3mcAGHd

Abstract: In recent years, conflicts over values and practices have emerged in hacking and free/libre and open source (FLOSS) communities, centering around diversity and inclusion. This talk features ethnographic research on feminist hacking and "diversity" efforts in mainstream FLOSS. It explores how participants work through thorny issues of inclusion through their practices with code, hardware, and one another. It illustrates how there is more at stake in "hacking diversity" than a politics of representation can capture, and argues that how diversity advocates bound their interventions matters for both hacking communities and "tech" more broadly.