Mycelium Is Technology Is Power Is Poetry

Taraneh Fazeli
Cannach, my co-editor, and I invited you to talk with us, because we have been working on a long-term project culminating in a book that takes access practices as a site of intervention in the many ways that disability, debility, racialization, and imperialism are structurally connected but have often been addressed separately. As part of this investigation, we have been thinking about the role of tech in injustices around race and disability — issues like algorithmic oppressions and biases, limited physical access to technology, the use of surveillance tech in public space, data and wealth transfer via proprietary software when accessing health services, and so on. We wanted to dialogue with people working through technology to build more liberatory futures who also have a sharp analysis of technology’s role within systems of power, so we came up with these questions together.

The project we’re working on together emerges from an iterative art exhibition I curated, Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time, that had its final version in Detroit in 2018. Tawana, we became familiar with your work since you’ve collaborated and organized with many of our book’s contributors from Detroit. As a poet, author, facilitator, and organizer focusing on racial justice, equity, water rights advocacy, data privacy, and consent, you both critique systemic inequities and work to build infrastructure independently and anew on more just principles. For example, you’ve published essential reports on the effects of surveillance technologies to police public space, like A Critical Summary of Detroit’s Project Green Light and Its Greater Context, and you were a Data Justice Director at the Detroit Community Technology Project, which runs the Equitable Internet Initiative, a community mesh network that enabled my work on this very publication. In your essay here, “Interrogating Detroit’s Innovative Future,” you dispel criminalizing and “comeback” narratives of your beloved city that are used to justify surveillance and gentrification by deconstructing media representations, outlining how massive technology investment is operating in a city decimated by environmental racism. You also provide historical and present examples of resistance through organizing.

Rua, we got to know your work more recently. As a researcher and educator, you combine your computer science and user experience design knowledge with disability justice principles to analyze the assumptions encoded into tech, including adaptive and assistive tech used by disabled people. You run the CoLiberation Lab at Purdue University where you and your students work on projects that envision alternative futures where tech is created “for Disabled-led action and transformation.” At Purdue, you develop more accessible approaches to pedagogy overall and you teach students who create tech to understand the ways they risk building injustice into it. In your essay, “Cyborg Realities / Cyborg Imaginaries / Cyborg Revolutions,” you give a multidimensional window into the work of the CoLiberation Lab through descriptive vignettes of some of the designs you and several collaborators are working on to address different limitations in assistive tech, all illustrated with your own vivid digital drawings.

All that context given, I wonder if you each could tell us something about the projects you're working on that you are most excited about, which may or may not relate to the essays you contributed, and how this work connects to the communities of practice you’re engaged in.

Tawana Petty
Thank you for that. Wow, there's so much that I've been involved in and thinking about regarding these technologies as we move forward in a society that is far less consentful than I would like it to be. Some of the work that I am most proud of is work that is building upon that. I was able to do some incredible work with Una Lee with the Consentful Tech Project, and we developed a Consentful Tech Curriculum, which I think is very important because it thinks about moving from protecting ourselves to taking care of each other. It’s a curriculum that leans into building and using technology consentfully.

And then I’ve also recently been engaged in some work with the Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy (AISP), where we developed A Toolkit for Centering Racial Equity Throughout Data Integration 2.0. There was the initial toolkit we did a few years ago, and then we just recently launched the 2.0 version of that toolkit.

I’m consistently thinking about these technologies in ways that counter the current push to remove any reference to equity, any reference to racial equity, any reference to treating us as full human beings and simply replacing the ways that we engage and deal with one another in a very non-dignified way. My contributions have mostly been artistic in form or to create curricula and different tools that community members, organizations, policymakers, etc., could leverage so that they’re moving into this work in a more holistic manner.

Through my organization, Petty Propolis, I run a fellowship. It’s a visionary resistance fellowship, I launched it in 2024. What we do is resource five fellows to support them in either existing or newly imagined work in data justice and environmental justice. The fellowships are, right now, just in Detroit and Highland Park, Michigan, but they have supported some wonderful projects. One is Detroit Strawbale Revolution, which is a prototype of a mud and strawbale small structure multi-use building that’s thinking about Afrofuture technology. Another one is You Should Ride the Bus — it’s a project that is thinking about accessibility with community members who ride the bus and making the signs more artistic, more vibrant, and more accessible. And then we have Naming and Claiming Space and Place in Detroit — that is utilizing digital and analog technologies through fuzzy, colorful maps and highlighting neighborhood community-defined assets. Watershed Voices: Connecting Communities to the Rouge River in Detroit is leveraging artistic installations. And then there's a community member who’s doing a project called Alter EnerG, and she’s retrofitting her childhood home into an eco-friendly home that’s a community center. So, although I’m not always the specific person who is doing the actual initiative — sometimes I am, but other times I leverage opportunities to resource other community members who might not have the same opportunities that I have — I try to seed some existing projects, contributing to the ecosystem like mycelium under the earth, so that it spreads and connects and the work becomes more systemic.

Rua Williams
The Cyborg Imaginaries project has been about how disabled people configure their own socio-technical worlds, but it’s also about how policy will not save us. In my interviews, we really uncovered how the inadequacies and intentional obstructions in policy organize society against disabled life. In my work, I am targeting policy reform in particular. I’m also trying to work with technology researchers to understand how when you do research, particularly in adaptive and assistive technology, and you don’t look at the policy landscape, then that thing you made will probably never wind up in a disabled person’s life. So we work on that problem, but I’ve also always had an eye toward how to get away from the dependency on policy to protect us. Sometimes I view policy as a kind of band-aid on a society that won’t take care of itself. Policy can also be a scaffold that supports a society to organize different ways of relating to each other, and the opposite is also true. Many of the policy workers I interviewed were always anxious about how complaints about inadequacy in their policies could lead to the removal of those policies — and now we see that they’re taking it all away anyway. So now, more than ever, we really have to think about how we can organize outside of this structure. I’m kind of terminally irritated by how often my work has accidentally been prophetic; I would like to not be good at that. That’s not a skill I want to have.

Other projects that we’re working on have similar flavors in the sense that they are trying to organize multiple ways of dealing with a problem. I take a lot of inspiration from Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed¹ — I talk about it all the time. I’m annoying about it, I think! What she argues is that the multiple strategies that marginalized people use sometimes seem like they are mutually exclusive or in opposition to each other, but that opposition actually creates positive movement — that articulation and that tension between strategies actually moves forward.

In another project, I’m looking at how dangerous the internet can be from a literal ocular- and graphic-based sense. There have been actual uses of flashing graphics to attack photosensitive epileptic people, but many of those graphics also hurt people who have chronic migraines. We talk a lot about the danger of social media in the sense of e-stalking or harassment, but there's this other thing, right — the literal aesthetics of the internet can be harmful for certain people. So, we've looked at what an ecology of protection is for people that deal with this issue and how our platforms are failing to provide it. Knowing that you can’t actually enforce a platform to make any changes, how do you recommend changes to them while also working on community campaigns? In the same way that we started getting more traction on adding alt text to images, how do we get people more aware of how to avoid dangerous graphics?

The other thing that we’re doing is developing a filter that goes over the screen and prevents the flashing graphics from hitting the graphics card — basically, we take the pixel buffer and we edit it before it ever flashes you. That’s something that we’re trying to release as an open source free thing for people, because we also know that Apple won’t make it and Android and Samsung won’t put it on their devices until somebody else does it first. That’s kind of a weird example that is technically outside the Cyborg Imaginaries project but is based in it.

Taraneh
Thank you so much both for these really amazing micro examples of all of the multiplicity of projects you’re working on. I’m just going to pull back for a second. So, the word technology has such a broad range of possible meanings and often gets very simplified at a policy level to focus on whatever new tech has a lot of investment behind it. These days, with tech giants exercising increasing influence over governments and constituting new constellations of empire, it makes sense that when someone says technology, artificial intelligence or the auto industry come to the fore. But technology is also a chair, a cane, an ancestral ritual, the Underground Railroad.

I’m wondering if you each could say something about how you understand technology and what it is for you in your daily life and work. What kind of frameworks help you think about it and the tensions embedded in the term? Are terms like “just tech” useful to you? Tawana, you had mentioned these projects like mycelium under the earth — that’s another technology. Can you reflect on what the term “technology” means?

Tawana
Yeah, absolutely. I’m grateful that you framed the question the way that you did, because most times I find myself in a position of explaining to policymakers, community members, academics — a lot of folks actually — that technology is not just digital technologies. It has been watered down to the point where a lot of people that I come into contact with have been in a singular focus since this particular hype cycle started around AI. So, getting back to the root of things, thinking about mycelium, right, under the earth, the interconnected ways that we communicate and the tools and the resources that we need to just live in our daily lives, that’s the way we’re going to humanize the existing digital technologies — by reminding folks of all the other technologies that are necessary for us to survive and thrive and just be in community with one another.

As someone who shattered her ankle a couple years ago, my cane was my best friend, and I still pick her up and speak to her occasionally — that was a technology that I needed to just go about my day. My car is a technology. I get teased because I got the bare minimum on my recent vehicle, right? I manually roll my windows up — I don’t have automatic windows — so I’m the running joke because of that, but those little roll-up windows, they remind me that I need to use my arms in certain ways. There are different ways that the small things that get minimized and disregarded as a technology are replaced with a kind of imagination that is really limited and is being funneled into one sterilized direction right now that is frustrating.

I’m of the mindset that we haven’t fully defined what intelligence is for humans, so I'm not really interested in creating a replica of the type of society that we’re struggling through right now with some digital technologies. I think if we can get folks to reconnect with the various forms of media that are not online and the various forms of ways that we communicate and the various tools that we need to take care of our seniors and our most vulnerable, then we could humanize some of the technologies that are being driven to us by policymakers and tech companies and lobbyists in a policy space.

There’s more I could say. I could always say more. But that’s where I’ll leave it.

Rua
The question of what technology is comes up a lot in my research because my participants — the people that I recruit and basically pay to talk to me — sometimes they’re resistant. They’re like, “Well, I don’t really know if I actually use adaptive and assistive technology. I don’t really know if I should be here.” And I have to go through, like, “You know, a rock is technology. Your blackout curtains are a technology.” I go through all of the different things in their lives that they don’t see as technology anymore because they’ve been taught not to. And another reason why that happens, particularly for disabled people, is because only certain things count, right? Only certain things count as medicinal and only certain things count as something that can be provided for you. And even then it’s a struggle.

So, for me, I’m always working on the most expansive definition of technology possible. But also, just literally, the word technology has nothing to do with silicone chips; it has always been about how beings articulate with other matter to perform tasks and to understand, through their interactions with objects, the world. This expansive definition of technology is extremely important to me even though I am a “computer scientist” and I’m surrounded by people who have a very narrow definition of technology. It’s very interesting — and I think this happens because we have gone on these very concerted campaigns to extract history and politics from our understanding of science and technology — where you can even have somebody who’s been a computer scientist for thirty years not be able to recognize how their own definition of technology has narrowed over time.

I am currently living in a 126-year-old house, and there are still objects inside the window frames, like the actual mechanics of chain and pulley door frames, that are also weirdly beautiful. These things that you can’t see unless you look inside the frame of your house are engraved and stuff. And I’m not trying to idealize the past, because I also have a backstairs in my house and probably maids’ quarters — I have a house that gives you a history of servitude, right? So I’m not idealizing past technologies, but there’s this idea that we used to have a clearer understanding of craft and mechanics and we were alienated from that through industrialization, and the digital revolution also alienated us from the idea that we all have the capacity to be technology designers and makers. Every single thing that we orchestrate within our own environment is a technology that we made for ourselves.

As far as terms like “just tech,” are they useful to me? Yes and no. I believe in the concept of just tech and in the idea that when you are thinking about organizing technology and designing technology, you’re doing it toward an idea of justice and a transformation of the world toward something that is better for all people. But you also have to be in relationship with people in order to understand what justice is: you don’t get to decide what is justice. You have to be in community with people in order to understand what justice is for them. And this is a big deal in disability technology because you have technologists making things, and they don't really have meaningful relationships with disabled people to understand what justice for disability is. So it’s a useful term, but it has its limits, like any language.

Taraneh
Thank you so much. Now I’m going to pivot from being more expansive to diving really deep.In thinking on whom to invite, Cannach and I noticed quite a divide between people working on the ways that technology impacts disabled people and the ways that technology impacts negatively racialized people (as if those are even two discrete groups of people).

Discourses around access aren’t always in touch, and we think they could benefit from being more so. I’m talking about ideas of access in digital tools (like open-source software and hardware); disability access (like changes to the built environment and changes to social norms); and efforts to address restrictions on access to public space or infrastructure rooted in racial and economic injustices (like community healthcare, education, safety, Black-owned farms and co-ops, or mesh internet projects).

Imperialism, ableism, and racism have constructed ideas of who gets to be a supposedly autonomous subject in modernity, whose bodies are “normal” and whose are “monstrous,” whose have minds and whose are expendable, whose are valuable enough to warrant recognition or protection and whose are to be controlled or extracted from. In many ways, thinking through the constructions of race and disability (and class, gender, and sexuality) together could be really generative, right, but different experiences of oppressive systems often function to divide and fracture us or simply exhaust energies to get together. An example of that could be when a gentrifying developer lauds the inclusivity of their building’s universal design and automation, while glossing over the displacement and surveillance of low-income communities and communities of color.

Rua, your work addresses algorithmic biases against disabled people and ethical problems in assistive and accessible tech (whose data, whose profit, etc.); and Tawana, your work addresses algorithmic biases against Black people and ethical problems in accessing everyday tech (whose data, whose profit, etc., and issues around material access to the internet). While you each focus on certain biases, you think them intersectionally — of course I’m being reductive here.

So, do you experience any division or differences in research frameworks or knowledge bases around racial equity and disability justice in tech? If so, do you have any reflections on what you attribute this to or examples of how you work around it? I’m just really curious to hear what you both think about that.

Tawana
There are definitely divisions in thinking about disability justice and racial justice, racial equity; marginalized communities are dissected and compartmentalized in ways that try to diminish our empowerment around particular subjects. It’s a generations-long strategy for limiting interconnectedness and preventing human rights campaigns from being successful. It’s beneficial to whoever the powers may be, however they’re defined, to separate racism from capitalism, to separate disability justice from racial justice, to separate LGBTQ communities from racial equity and racial justice. There are so many strategies that have been taken on, and erasing our history so that we don’t know about those opportunities where we have connected, is one of those strategies. And that is no different in the tech justice space. I find myself in a lot of conversations saying, hey, you know, actually, there aren’t Black people and disabled people, there are disabled Black people. There aren’t Black people and LGBTQ community members, there are Black LGBTQ community members. I’m always having to marry those relationships in dialogue so that folks don’t make such a distinction, where we think that we can only fight for whatever our particular small struggle in the corner is and that we don’t have to care about what’s happening to other communities that are marginalized, because there’s intersection in all of those communities.

Another thing that I get a little bit frustrated with is with the silo conversation. I don't think it's always necessarily that folks want to be in a silo, but I think that there's been such a concerted effort to make it so difficult to struggle for the thing that you're most passionate about, or the thing that you're most experiencing, that you often don't get an opportunity to think outside of that trauma that you're enduring. In Detroit, as an example, surveillance capitalism, racial capitalism, disaster capitalism: they're all a big conglomerate coming together to attack us at all ends. So in my work, mainly through art, honestly, I try to rehumanize and re-spirit so that we can all see how we're aligned in receiving the trauma from all of those existing forces and how, if we come together — you know, I'm going to keep naming the mycelium under the earth — if we come together, even in our little corners, and we weave our work in a way that is re-spiriting and rehumanizing and not dissecting and compartmentalizing, we don't necessarily have to jump over into this other corner to do that work specifically, but we should be doing work in such a way that it doesn't minimize the impact or the importance of that work. And then we should find ways to weave it together. And so, I can't say that my focus on data justice is always tackling some of the other issues, but I'm never going to say that those other issues are not significant and that they don't have an impact on the work that I'm trying to do as well.

Rua
So, you know, the disability justice movement was founded by Black and Indigenous disabled and queer people, and so it shouldn't be that there's this division, but as disability justice gets co-opted into the academy, it becomes very whitewashed. Vilissa K. Thompson² has that hashtag #DisabilityTooWhite, and this is sort of a self-perpetuating thing that the academy in particular is guilty of. When people talk about disability, they like to bring up this idea that 25 percent of the world is disabled — sometimes it's 20 percent, sometimes it's one in five, sometimes it's one in four, but that's the stat that people like to use. And that stat's not necessarily incorrect, but what is incorrect is to then think that this distribution of disability is proportional, right? So when people use this stat, they begin to imagine that it means that 25 percent of white people are disabled, and 25 percent of Black people are disabled, and 25 percent of Asian people are disabled, etc. And that's not actually true. Disability is disproportionately distributed because of state and ecological violence. So when we are talking about this idea that 25 percent of the world is disabled, we have to understand that disability also comes from empire.

The other thing that you have to understand when you think about disability and empire is that certain people are allowed to become disabled because they're allowed to live. So, a child born with spina bifida in the United States may actually live, whereas a child born with spina bifida in Fallujah will not survive because we destroyed all their hospitals.

And so who gets to be disabled has to do with empire and has to do with race, in the sense that certain people get to live and other people are made to die. And then you have the very rational compulsion for some racialized people to hide their disability, because they're trying to survive a society that devalues them, and if they acknowledge all of these other vectors of oppression then they feel that precarity and that danger, that threat. And so I hear some people sometimes complaining like, “Well, if more Black people would claim disability, then…” and I'm like, “Nah, shut up, don't do that.”

My work tries to help people to see themselves in the story of disability, to recognize that disability is happening in their own homes and in their own lives. To make it that personal, I hope, can help people see past these divisions. I like what Tawana said about silos, because I feel like this idea of siloing has a sort of victim-blaming nature to it, this idea that you chose to be in a silo and not that the silo was constructed for you to keep you away from each other and to keep you from fighting together.

There was a paper that I wrote called “Oh No, Not Another Trolley! On the Need for a Co-Liberative Consciousness in CS,” and the first time that I submitted it, I submitted it to a special issue for AI fairness for people with disabilities. This chapter was about the different ways that social policies and technologies have been used to endanger the lives of disabled people through COVID-19. The review that I got was that this paper was too much about race and not enough about disability, because I was working so hard to make sure that the connections between these issues were seen and that Black disabled people in the context of COVID-19 and the context of triage disparities, and, basically, COVID disparities were acknowledged. I had to send it somewhere else because the reviewers didn't understand why disability and race belong together in an analysis. I think about that all the time and it’s a problem that we're still working through.

Taraneh
Thank you so much. Now I'm going to pivot to speaking a bit about strategies of change. While you each draw from different communities, expertise, spheres of influence, and cultures, both of you combine analytic work, media advocacy, and practical change-making. You work with art’s world-making potential in community, and your efforts span the gamut from reform to abolition. Again, we’re being reductive in what might be classified as that.

It's resonating, Tawana, what you said about your work in re-spiriting, and, Rua, what you said about the band-aid and policy, the band-aid and engaging, when you choose to engage with policy.

Tawana, as highlighted, with others you create viable alternatives while simultaneously reforming policy. For example, you’ve contributed to Green Chairs, Not Green Lights, a community project which fosters community safety in resistance to dangerous surveilling. You also co-edited a special issue of the Detroit community magazine Riverwise about the police surveillance of Project Green Light, which is a system where a business or individual pays to install security cameras that go through a central feed to the police and gives them priority response. A particularly nefarious component of this system was that it incorporated facial recognition software known not to work on darker skin. In opposition to this, Green Chairs, Not Green Lights promotes sitting on the porch and getting to know your neighbors, and makes green benches from shipping pallets to encourage sitting outside and provide spaces of rest and safety in public space.

Rua, in the CoLiberation Lab, you’re working on a whole range of interventions to rethink tech in ways that start with people’s own needs and desires as articulated by them. A fundamental part of this is talking to people and sharing experiences, listening, and then bringing design problem solving to whatever those needs and desires are. Some of this is very practical and some of this is about building what is even possible to imagine. For example, you’re envisioning modular wheelchair design that allows for aesthetic expression, or workshops where people could get their prosthetics adapted to suit them, or ways that access practices can be rethought to involve emotional and spiritual needs.

You both inhabit multiple kinds of expertise in technological design, advocacy, research, scholarship, art, poetry, and community organizing. Although your work is seated in very different spaces, pedagogy is a big part of what you both do. Could you reflect on your many roles and the change-making strategies you employ amidst them? What lineages did they emerge from, and how do you decide who you work with?

Tawana
Oh, this one's such a deep one — it's so layered. So, I'm definitely heavily influenced by the late Grace Lee Boggs and I spent a lot of time under her tutelage, particularly as someone who's not an academic who's frequently misidentified as one.³ [laughs] She taught me, you know, that there was a difference between schooling and education, and in thinking about that, I always tell people I'm not very schooled, but I'm highly educated. And so, that encouraged me to learn from various modalities, to utilize everything at my disposal to be a teacher and an educator for how I want to show up in society.

And since I've known I was a poet since I was seven, that's one of the tools that I use frequently. I have a series called “Poetry as Visionary Resistance,” and through that series, I teach multiple workshops. One of my workshops that I'd like to lift up is “Deconflating Surveillance with Safety.” In this workshop, I'm teaching poetry in a way that shows community members or participants who come to the workshops how to think about the differences between surveillance, security, and safety, and how the things that make us safe are in direct contrast to what a mass surveillance system like Project Green Light in Detroit is. And it doesn't take much, honestly, for community members to reframe that thinking, right? Security and surveillance, much more aligned; safety, not so much. And young people, especially elementary school students, they're the main ones who are right out the gate, like, “How could you possibly be safe if you don't know your neighbors and you're just locked in your house with surveillance?” You know, it doesn't take much, just a little bit of nostalgia — and not a romanticized past… like, I love what Rua said, but more of a, like, “What are the times that you felt most whole? What are the times that you felt joy enter your life?” And it's almost always connected with friends and family and not worrying about where your meal is going to come from or your water is going to come from and whether you can pay your rent. These are things that create safety. It's not a mass surveillance network with facial recognition technology. That's “Deconflating Surveillance with Safety.”

A second workshop I’ll lift up is “The Poetics of Making Public Comment.” I leverage poetry to teach people how to respond politically in public comment, how to use poetic tools to frame a public comment in a community meeting, a city council meeting, a Board of Police Commissioners meeting in Detroit — that's the “civilian” oversight body of the police. One of the strategies that they like to use in those public meetings is to tell you that you have two minutes, but you get there and because there are so many people, you find out you have thirty seconds.

Well, one of the things that you learn as a poet, especially as a slam poet — I'm a former slam poet — is how to dissect a poem, a thirty-second poem, a one-minute poem, a two-minute poem. Those are just tools that you know how to do — you can look at your two-minute speech and now you have a thirty-second speech. And these are just little tools that I use to teach community members to be prepared for the pushback on our civil liberties and human rights, in ways that don't provide you with the opportunities to give your full voice in the way that you may have initially planned for. So if you go in there ready with thirty seconds, you go in there ready with one minute, you go in there learning how to dissect a two minute, they'll never catch you off-guard. I leverage poetry in those types of ways, and so many others, but those are just two examples that I would like to lift up.

Rua
This idea of poetry in the town hall is amazing and I want to witness it.

So, I often say I hated computer scientists so much I became one, and I have a similar attitude toward academia. When I think about who my pedagogy is directed toward, it's directed toward the institution. I am trying to reform the hearts and minds of the people, the bodies, that make up the institution. So a lot of my research focuses upward, is lensed in that way to actually reform researchers, rather than to bring our “wonderful technological advancements” to the public.

You know, even though I do research — on what do disabled people actually desire, want, and need and how is that configured? — it is meant as a demonstration of how research can be conducted differently. I have other research projects that involve bringing researchers into a community and giving them the opportunity to reflect and to understand critical research that would usually be considered outside their discipline, to consider how to integrate that into their practice — basically, how to transform their orientation toward the people that they believe that they’re serving.

In the classroom, my pedagogy gets me in trouble on the internet. I often get in fights about, like, I don’t have any deadlines, I don’t punish students for stuff, I don’t really take attendance. I do take it so that I can notice when somebody doesn’t show up and check on them, but I don’t actually grade them with attendance. There are deadlines so that you can scaffold your work, but you don’t get punished when it’s late. If you’re really late, I start contacting you about, what’s your plan? How can I help you make a plan? Let’s make a plan together. But I have a very non-punitive approach to education that people don’t like. I also am still doing unconditional hybrid access to all classes and I absolutely will never stop. The students don’t have to tell me why they don’t feel like coming in person that day, and that’s… fine. So these two projects of, you know, trying to reform the rotten heart of the institution and trying to show students a different way of relating to their education and to each other are the things that I try to do on a daily basis.

Something else that I do in the classroom is… a lot of our classes are project-based, so students are working in teams. And if you’ve ever been on a class project, you know there's that big resentment that happens when somebody is the “slacker.” And every year I give my students the unconditional positive regard lecture, where I tell them: that person that is not showing up has something going on in their life and you don’t know what it is, and their non-participation is not going to tank your grade because I don’t do that, so we’re going to talk about how do we constantly give that person every opportunity to show back up? To catch back up when they get out from whatever they’re underneath? How do we give them that grace? And then, if they never show up, that’s my issue, I deal with that, I take care of that person. I'm trying to untangle their ideas that everything must be transactional and punishable. Those are the things that I do in my life.

I have a poem. It’s really short, but I think I’m going to tell it to you because it’s related.

Flowers
must consume
death to bloom
I pray we learn
we have never been flowers

And the purpose of that is to help people understand… sometimes I see this glorification of death as something that we all benefit from eventually, and I want us to stop.

Taraneh
Wow, that was a very powerful end — stop — to this conversation.

I was going to close with a question about sharing practical tools or resources or people making them that you’d recommend for readers for generating better access and liberation through tech. For people listening to the audio, the answers to the question will be dropped in as links at the end of the transcript in case you’re using text to speech readers and want to navigate down there. But I will say, this conversation has already been a robust proliferation of resources, so I think we can collate some of those. Thank you so much for sharing your work, it's been a real pleasure to get to learn and see the intersection of the work that you two do. Thank you for that and thank you for sharing so many entry points to it.

Tawana
Thank you.

References

Here is a list of resources shared by Rua and Tawana during the conversation.

A Critical Summary of Detroit’s Project Green Light and Its Greater Context

A Toolkit for Centering Racial Equity Throughout Data Integration

Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy

CoLiberation Lab at Purdue University

Consentful Tech Curriculum: From Protecting Ourselves to Taking Care of Each Other

Consentful Tech Project

Cyborg Imaginaries

Detroit Community Technology Project

Equitable Internet Initiative

Green Chairs, Not Green Lights

Oh No, Not Another Trolley! On the Need for a Co-Liberative Consciousness in CS Pedagogy

Petty Propolis

Petty Propolis Visionary Fellowships

Watershed Voices: Connecting Communities to the Rouge River — Maya Davis

You Should Ride the Bus — Nathanial Mullen

Naming and Claiming Space and Place in Detroit — Alex B. Hill

Alter EnerG — Audra D. Carson

Detroit Strawbale Revolution — Aziza Knight

Riverwise: Special Surveillance Issue