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.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB487672024/

Similar Citations

Article Ruha Benjamin; (November 2016)
Informed Refusal: Toward a Justice-based Bioethics (/isis/citation/CBB856025239/)

Article Erin A. Cech; Anneke Metz; Jessie L. Smith; Karen deVries; (September 2017)
Epistemological Dominance and Social Inequality: Experiences of Native American Science, Engineering, and Health Students (/isis/citation/CBB816459691/)

Article Barbara L. Allen; (November 2018)
Strongly Participatory Science and Knowledge Justice in an Environmentally Contested Region (/isis/citation/CBB069762669/)

Article Sara Giordano; (May 2018)
New Democratic Sciences, Ethics, and Proper Publics (/isis/citation/CBB369714455/)

Article Sabine Roeser; Udo Pesch; (March 2016)
An Emotional Deliberation Approach to Risk (/isis/citation/CBB657243437/)

Article Andrew Sixsmith; Becky R. Horst; Dorina Simeonov; Alex Mihailidis; (2022)
Older People’s Use of Digital Technology During the COVID-19 Pandemic (/isis/citation/CBB218869342/)

Book Ruha Benjamin; (2019)
Race after technology : Abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code (/isis/citation/CBB249686116/)

Book Emiliano Treré; (2019)
Hybrid media activism : Ecologies, imaginaries, algorithms (/isis/citation/CBB953847626/)

Article Yoshio Nukaga; (July 2016)
Ethics Expertise and Public Credibility: A Case Study of the Ethical Principle of Justice (/isis/citation/CBB610704199/)

Article Jennifer S. Singh; (Marvh 2015)
Narratives of Participation in Autism Genetics Research (/isis/citation/CBB713757349/)

Article Lucy Suchman; Karolina Follis; Jutta Weber; (November 2017)
Tracking and Targeting: Sociotechnologies of (In)security: (Introduction) (/isis/citation/CBB721841161/)

Article Carmen McLeod; Sarah Hartley; (July 2018)
Responsibility and Laboratory Animal Research Governance (/isis/citation/CBB564349730/)

Article Adrian Deoancă; (December 2020)
(Dis)Connected Rail: Infrastructural Suspension and Phatic Politics in Romania (/isis/citation/CBB551561342/)

Article Sarah Pink; Juan Francisco Salazar; Melisa Duque; (2019)
Everyday mundane repair: Banknotes and the material entanglements of improvisation and innovation (/isis/citation/CBB927398238/)

Article Dominique Vinck; (2019)
Maintenance and Repair Work (/isis/citation/CBB490647925/)

Article Mandy de Wilde; (November 2021)
“A Heat Pump Needs a Bit of Care”: On Maintainability and Repairing Gender–Technology Relations (/isis/citation/CBB932272197/)

Authors & Contributors
Benjamin, Ruha
Mandy de Wilde
deVries, Karen
Juan Francisco Salazar
Cech, Erin A.
Emiliano Treré
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Justice
Ethics
Equality
Ethnography
Protest movements
Time Periods
21st century
Places
United States
Philadelphia, PA
Peru
Romania
Spain
North America
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment