Article ID: CBB487672024

Times Thirty: Access, Maintenance, and Justice (2019)

unapi

Based on an ethnographic project in a public high school in a low-income neighborhood in South Los Angeles, this paper argues that access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) cannot be taken as helpful or empowering on its own terms; instead, concerns about justice must be accounted for by the local communities technology is meant to benefit. This paper juxtaposes the concept of technological access with recent work in feminist science and technology studies (STS) on infrastructure, maintenance, and ethics. In contrast to popular descriptions of ICTs as emancipatory and transformative, in the setting of an urban school, access produced extensive demands for attention, time, and information. This paper focuses on the labor of a group of student workers, Student Technology Leaders (STLs), and how they became responsible for the significant amount of repair and maintenance work involved in keeping hundreds of new computing devices available for use. An expanded process of accounting can more realistically frame issues of justice and its relationship to ICTs. I use a town hall meeting held with these students as an example of a processual vision of justice, one that encourages the beneficiaries of technological access to evaluate costs, benefits, and ethical concerns together.

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Authors & Contributors
Benjamin, Ruha
Allen, Barbara L.
Nukaga, Yoshio
Suchman, Lucy A.
Vinck, Dominique
Weber, Jutta
Journals
Science, Technology, and Human Values
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society
Engineering Studies
Social Studies of Science
Transfers
Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society
Publishers
MIT Press
Polity Press
Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group
Concepts
Science and technology studies (STS)
Ethics
Justice
Equality
Ethnography
Technology and society
Time Periods
21st century
Places
United States
Chile
India
Mexico
France
Italy
Institutions
Committee on Publication Ethics
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