Beta Blog v 0.0.01

Soon, I’ll be on my way to Austin, Texas for the annual ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). This year, I am presenting the paper “In Dialogue: Methodological Insights on Doing HCI Research in Rwanda” on Wednesday, May 9 in the ICT4D Session at 11:30 am [conference program]. It is the product of a collaboration with a team I worked with for a summer internship at the University of Nottingham (Horizon Digital Economy Research). Thanks to the help and guidance of many people there, the people of the Kigali Memorial Centre, and Aegis Trust, we were able to write and share this case study with the CHI community. Personally, I leaned and grew from working with my mentors (Abigail Durrant, Stuart Reeves, and Dave Kirk, with some help from Tom Rodden), and I simply cannot thank them enough for my time there (and their patience with me).

Now, I just have to present our work! No small task, I’m afraid.

Here’s the abstract

This paper presents a case study of our recent empirical research on memorialisation in post-genocide Rwanda. It focuses on the pragmatic methodological challenges of working in a ‘transnational’ and specifically Rwandan context. We first outline our qualitative empirical engagement with representatives from the Kigali Genocide Memorial (KGM) and neighbouring institutions. We then describe our application of Charles L. Briggs’ analytic communication framework to our data. In appropriating this framework, we reflect critically on its efficacy in use, for addressing the practical working constraints of our case, and through our findings develop methodological insights with relevance to wider HCI audiences. [1]

I cannot say enough about how wonderful our collaboration turned out, and I am excited to share our ideas. Even more, I’m looking forward to taking the methodological ideas presented in this paper forward in my future work. I cannot speak for the rest of the research team, but this project has had an integral role on my own trajectory and work, and I hope it proves useful to others as well.

Also at CHI this year, I am looking forward to my participation in the Qualitative Methods in HCI workshop on Saturday, May 5. This will be an opportunity for me to explore my own research agenda as well as find out how other colleagues are tackling the qualitative methodological issues in HCI.

Bring it on CHI 2012!

[1] (forthcoming) Merritt, S., Durrant, A., Reeves, S., and Kirk, D. In Dialogue: Methodological Insights on Doing HCI Research in Rwanda. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA 2012). ACM Press.

For the summer 2012 term, I am honored to receive a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship to study Swahili from the Indiana University African Studies Program (a participant of the US Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships program). Thanks to the assistance and guidance Eden Medina (who initially encouraged me to pursue this opportunity) and Erik Stolterman, I will be able to begin learning a new language this summer and receive a (much needed) stipend.

Anxious to get stared on my summer goal, I have already started gathering Swahili books and materials. Here we go! Napenda kazi yangu!

Original Map Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maeneo_penye_wasemaji_wa_Kiswahili.png

In reading a new book, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer, I have run across a breath-stealing excerpt the author quoted in his introduction: “The Nobodies” by Eduardo Galeano.

It’s a poignant composition reflecting on the emotion of being in poverty and the labels applied by those who are not.

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them–will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.
    Who are not, but could be.
    Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
    Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
    Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
    Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
    Who are not human beings, but human resources.
    Who do not have faces, but arms.
    Who do not have names, but numbers.
    Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.
    The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.

I went to Botswana and South Africa in December and January (with this fantastic travelmate). Planning and taking a trip to southern Africa taught me innumerable lessons. One of the most salient lessons concerned the concept of “staying outside the velvet ropes,” not exiting through the gift shop, and not being one of those tourists who tries too hard to pretend or force exoticism.

To be clear:
I did not go to Africa to see the animals.
I did not go for safari.
I did not go to “help” the “needy.” ⁽¹⁾

I wanted to meet people. I wanted to get my body and mind in that place and feel what it feels like to be there. So, this is the gist of it. I want you to understand, that my primary objective was to be present with my eyes open. Officially, I was there to participate in life as an observer of technology usage and appropriation; I was on the lookout for research questions and curiosities and reflections and insights. Emotionally, I was there to just be, for as much being as could be had.

Now, I should provide another disclaimer: I completely understand that I’m white—not black, not African, and utterly different than the majority of Africans; I stand out. I am not in denial of my race. I also know that the status of my white-ness is completely loaded in Africa. Depending on the country and region you are in, being a white chick from America can cause a range of stereotypes about me and elicit a range of thoughts and emotions within people who live there. I will explain how that changed as I traveled in later posts.

Now I want to tell you a story that will get you in the moment and help illustrate the general context of my experiences.

The Story:

In the village of Serowe, through some connections we made in Botswana, we visited another American, Patti, who was living in Serowe and loved to visit the Khama Rhino Sanctuary nearby, which I discerned as something like the Botswana version of the Wild Animal Park in San Diego; it’s not a major tourist attraction for foreign visitors though. It’s a sanctuary that makes some operation costs with visitors and aims to “protect and nurture endangered rhinoceros.” This visit was my only intentional animal encounter, and I went mostly because Patti and some other guests of hers were interested in going. I’m glad I did, but not for the animal viewing (though it was pretty neat).

The most fantastic thing that happened occurred after we left the rhino sanctuary and went outside the front gate to the road. I hadn’t thought of it when we left Patti’s place that morning (I’m not much of a sharp thinker in the morning): we had gotten a ride from a neighbor to get to the sanctuary, but we did not arrange a ride home. Patti, having been in Botswana for a while, understood that wasn’t necessary. Turns out Patti planned to hitchhike home. In the spirit of being there in the moment, I went with the flow and resisted the urge to panic and attempt manage the situation. (Though, obviously, there was absolutely nothing I could have done that would have changed anything. Also, in preparation for the trip, I read that it was normal and relatively safe to do that in Botswana.)

So, five white ⁽²⁾, American females ranging in age from 50-something to 20-something are standing on a roadside at 9 a.m. (that’s right, we were finished by 9 a.m.) waiting for car to come by and take us back to the village. Here is where I would like to tell you where I was waiting (pictured in the image above), but the road, as far as I can tell, has no better label than: “the main road between Serowe and Orapa.” (I could not find a name for it and never heard it referred to as anything else.) So… we were somewhere on the main road between Serowe and Orapa.

We stood there for more than an hour before we figured out that traffic was not only light that day, but no one had space for five people. We saved a giant caterpillar from being potentially squashed (by non-existent traffic); I photographed some weeds and a CocaCola can; and we waited. Despite our best efforts to look in need of a ride and our vibrant signaling (which in Botswana is putting your hand in the air and waving your hand up and down, bending at the wrist with your palm facing the road), no one stopped to pick us up. We split up. Three people stayed in the original spot and two would go across the street and down a bit. I picked the wrong side.

After another thirty minutes or so, the two people on the other side found a covered army truck full of soldiers being dropped off at the sanctuary (apparently soldiers were security there) to take them. Originally, the soldiers said there was not room for the other three, but we apparently looked desperate or pathetic. After they drove past us about 100 feet, they reversed and squeezed everyone together and two soldiers stood up and held on to the canopy frame so we could sit. There were two other hitchhikers, two off-duty soldiers getting a ride, and a few other soldiers (in addition to the five of us) in the back of an army green canopy truck driving down the main road between Serowe and Orapa. Everyone talked and listened as much as possible–everyone: soldiers, strangers, and friends. It is as if we all knew we had just a limited time to learn from one another, and we did. As the truck slowed, I was told we would be dropped off at a kombi ⁽³⁾ stop, and though there would be no kombis today, we could probably have an easier time hitchhiking from that location.

And so it was. We were dropped off at a metal and cement structure with a red dirt pull in next to the road. There were more weeds to look at and a goat across the street. Traffic was a tiny bit busier there, in about twenty minutes, a small red Toyota pickup truck with a couple in cab and a family of three in the bed of the truck came along. They said they would take all of us if we could fit in the back of the truck with the other hitchhikers. We made it happen. I’m not sure either the driver or the family of hitchhikers knew what to make of us, or what possible situation led us to that circumstance. It was impossible to make much conversation, it was windy, hot, and dangerous in that truck. No one flew out of the bed of the truck, though it was a valid concern. When we arrived in the village commerce and market area we each gave the driver a small amount of money and said goodbye. It was now about 12:30 pm.

The Lesson:

I have only just described a little over three hours of just one day in Botswana, and they were all kind of like that. We woke up with a rough plan, set out with a general destination in mind and took what the day had for us. Panic and stress were useless emotional states. Alertness and perpetual satisfaction in any circumstance were required. By that I mean, panic and stress were dangerous and generally caused poor decision making and should be avoided at all costs. Being alert means being aware of the richness of the situation around me and all the positive and negative components of a situation at once. Being perpetually satisfied means remaining cognizant and respectful of the goodness of every circumstance, even if you are working to change it or get out of it.

I want to live every day of my life by those rules: do not panic and do not stress, just remain alert and satisfied. I lived my life that way for 33 days in Botswana and South Africa. I still cannot manage it here at home. Returning from my trip, I was sure I could keep it going, but I failed. I have tried to figure out why, and I have not yet decided I know the cause. Perhaps life is just different here. Perhaps my culture doesn’t allow it. Perhaps I am too familiar with my surroundings. Perhaps I feel that I have more control of my circumstances here.

I don’t know why it’s so difficult to live by my new rules here, but it remains a perpetual goal.

Image Credits:
Roadside Image: Samantha Merritt
CocaCola Can: Samantha Merritt
Army Truck: Nina Mehta (cropped by Samantha Merritt)

Footnotes:
^1. I have a particular feeling about the concept of help and of the widely accepted label of needy placed on people in non-Western cultures who have different consumer cultures than we do. I put them in quotes because that’s what some people might say about a trip to Africa to do “volunteer work” that can actually do more harm than good. I’ll save that for another blog post. If you want to hear more about it or get a blog post on the topic faster, contact me. My trip had nothing to do with helping or philanthropy in general, I was there to learn.

^2. For those of you who know that I traveled with Nina Mehta, you might not consider her “white.” People in Botswana do. It has very little to do with the color of her skin, and more to do with the appearance of her face and hair. So for the purposes of this story, Nina is white. :)

^3. I cannot spare the space here to tell you all that you need to know about the kombi (or combi, depending on where you are), but know that it is loosely a form of public transportation run by independent people/companies running along sort-of standardized routes with a flat rate for rides. The vehicle is typically an unattractive version of the Volkswagen Type 2 vehicle (or alternate make/model with similar features). Riding the kombi taught me so much about myself, humanity, and the world as a whole… but that’s definitely another blog post (or more).

I’ve planned out a set of books to read this summer while I’m working on my ICTD 2012 submission and other papers. …well, these books in addition to A ZILLION papers, of course.

• The Reflective Practitioner (D.A. Schon)
• Michel Foucault (B. Smart)
• Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity (M.A. McLaren)
• Women Fielding Danger: Negotiating Ethnographic Identities in Field Research (Huggins and Glebeek, eds.)
• Learning How to Ask (C.L. Briggs)
• The Professional Stranger (M.H. Agar)
• Feminist Fields: Ethnographic Insights (Bridgman, Cole, and Howard-Bobiwash, eds.)

In a few short hours, I’ll be on my way to Vancouver, Canada for the annual ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). I’m more excited about it than I can admit without being embarrassed. This year, I am presenting a poster for the Work-in-Progress (Group 1), which will be on display at the conference on Monday and Tuesday (May 9 and 10). I will be present and ready to talk about it on Tuesday 10:00 – 11:00 am. The title of this work is: Postcolonial Language and Culture Theory for HCI4D.

Here’s the abstract:

As technology design spreads to less technologically developed countries, issues of cultural identity, language, and values manifest in the form of methodological and ethical challenges for HCI4D designers. We offer a new theoretical perspective, in the context of HCI4D design, to advance the HCI postcolonial critique and highlight fundamentally Western design practices. Application of Thiong’o’s language and culture theory provides a tool for designers and researchers to face assumptions, cultural communication, and the potential repercussions in cross-cultural design. Upon future development, this postcolonial orientation could be used to create responsible, successful designs and create awareness of inadvertent Western language culture embedded in HCI4D design. [1]

Through talking to people about the draft of this paper and poster, I have learned that I am involved with some ideas that can be controversial depending on what discipline you come from. I will be working to refine this idea and figure out what tangible examples point to the issues I raise in this work. Right now, I am having trouble designing a way to collect and observe examples that specifically show a duality of culture caused by technology design. I will find a way.

I also want to make sure that I can adequately explain what I mean by including “language” in this theory. The language itself is not the issue, words can be translated; it is all the culture that is comes with a language that is of concern here. Ultimately, I am concerned about empowering non-Western cultures during HCI user research and design methods. It is my position that methods that do this properly cannot exist until there is a deep understanding and identification of causal variables.

[1] (forthcoming) Merritt, S. and Bardzell, S. 2011. Postcolonial Language and Culture Theory for HCI4D. In Proceedings of the 29th of the International Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA.

It’s all just pay grades now!

You’ve made it. You are doing what you wanted to do with your life.
You are.
You just make less money right now.
Think about it…

The Story:

Living on the edge of your thirties (or in them) most of my peers are in a realm of nearly constant career life planning and improvement. We’ve all been out there in the world a bit—long enough to be wise enough to know we are not doing what we planned, or where we thought we’d be, or who we thought we’d be at this age. Time to evaluate, strategize, and keep moving forward.        Now that’s the spirit!

Recently having one of these career planning conversations with a friend, I realized: I’m there. I’m where I’ve always wanted to be, and I like it. Weird.

Let me explain. I am one of those lunatics that always wanted to be an academic (even when I was fighting the nerd urge and trying to work my way up the proverbial ladder in industry). Even if you recently learned you are the “academic type”, when you decided to be a PhD student you basically announced that you like to do the following things (the common goals of research-oriented universities):

• Research: You like studying and contributing to a topic you are passionate about.
• Teaching: If you were going to academia with that PhD, you’ll likely teach somewhere in there.
• Service: Face it, you’d make a lot of money a lot faster in industry with those brains; you work in service of knowledge and others in the same pursuit.

As PhD students, what do we do? We do the same stuff (that list above) that we are going to do as tenured faculty members… we just do it with guidance, training wheels, a lot more mistakes, and a LOT less pay. (The obvious caveat here is that you are a PhD student aiming to be a tenured faculty member somewhere, someday. If that’s not your goal, well, Sam’s PhD Lesson #2 just doesn’t apply to you, sorry about that.)

The Lesson:

It’s all just pay grades now. This brings me to that magical, admittedly oversimplified, happy realization that I am already doing exactly what I want to be doing, just for less money.

Obviously, we are not very good at it yet—at least I know that I am not. We have a few long years ahead of us to learn how to do this better, to earn our way into the next pay grade: post-doc or maybe Assistant Professor. Then, we will be in training mode again, still getting better and putting in the time to prove you are ready for the next pay grade: Associate Professor …and so on until we are rich, famous, old Distinguished Professors.

This whole idea came from a simple, genius piece of advice from my advisor while I was preparing to apply for my PhD program. She said something like (paraphrasing here), “as a PhD student, you are essentially a junior colleague to us.” Until she said that, I had not thought about it that way before. That’s right. I am. Weird.

Note: I’m in the United States, so all of this stuff is referencing the research-oriented universities in the United States. As much as I cringe saying this, there is a pretty good summary of all of the academic position ranks on Wikipedia.

Don’t be a chicken.

I am learning that most academic people, despite the occasional genuine narcissist, are very self-conscious and full of complete, absolute self-doubt. I’ve heard it described as the “impostor syndrome.” I am no exception to this phenomenon. I think I’ve always had this problem, but finding out that a committee of worship-worthy academic professionals thought I am smart enough for the PhD pursuit caused all of my insecurities to amplify at least 100 times.

The Story:

So, the first paper I tried to write as an accepted (but not yet started) PhD student was a position paper to attend a CHI 2010 workshop—Critical Dialogue: Interaction, Experience and Cultural Theory. I really wanted to be at that workshop. My mentor gave me great feedback and was prodding me to keep moving on it and send her a draft. The paper was already officially going to be a late submission (but I had gotten permission via email of the workshop organizer). What did I do? Well, I procrastinated, wrote the paper, re-wrote the paper, re-re-wrote the paper, re-named the re-re-written paper, then, I hid. Yep, I was hiding like a chicken.

I was pretty sure the paper was total crap, and I had no idea what I was talking about. That was probably true… but after I came out of hiding and showed it to my mentor (way too late to submit the paper at all), she says something like, “This would have been a perfectly fine position paper to submit.” What!?

The Lesson:

Don’t be a chicken. If you have an idea, paper, draft, position, thought, or sketch, run it past your mentor or advisor or a colleague or a smart peer. Test it out, talk about it. Oh brace yourself, it’s probably not as crappy as you think. Granted, most people you talk to could probably find something wrong with your idea or argument, but that’s a good thing. Now you know what to address to make it stronger.

I’m not suggesting that you will never have a genuinely crappy idea; you probably will. I know I have some and will have many more to come. I am saying that you will chicken out and write off some perfectly fantastic work. Prevent that sad possibility by not being such a chicken.

I know I said I would get going on this blog thing soon, but so far, not so much.  I have noticed that making websites for others makes me detest making websites … including my own.  I know I should—a webmaster should have an excellent, interesting site.

I am apparently leaning towards simplicity and carte blanche. I have learned and experienced enough about design to create potentially interesting aesthetics, but for now it seems like cliche overkill for a site with so little content. Standby, it could get interesting …

That’s it.  I am going to blog.  Really.  I have no idea what about yet.  I think I will just see where it takes me.  In the meantime, I’ll be trying to design something lovely to look at with these thoughts.  I promise.