[-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week 04 : Prieto-Nanez and Pérez-Bustos

[Prieto Nanez, Fabian Mauricio]

Hi everyone, I'm pleased to host this week's dialogue. 

I want to introduce Tania Perez-Bustos as a Feminist anthropologist based in Colombia, but with an increasing number of links to current discussions on knowledge practices in global settings. I met her several years ago, when she was finishing her Ph.D. in education in a Colombian university. She  worked on the process of science "popularization." and the role that women took in it. Her multi-sited ethnography chose cases from Colombia and India, and focused on science museums and free software communities. Her commitment to thinking alternative pedagogies inspired my approach to technology production and their use in Latin America. She also examined the concept of science communication by introducing the idea of communication as a caring practice through trans women scientists experiences in Academia. More recently, she has deepened in design practices by allocating ethnography in the dialogs between  women embroiderers and engineers in a Colombian town. Her approach conducts her to work on the idea of "Design/Think with care”, allocating “care” as a central category of collaborative  and participatory design. 

Our point of departure will be her micro social regard of knowledge practices in the Global South. By drawing attention to the context of those encounters and the bidirectionality of knowledge exchange, as postcolonial computing suggests (Philip, Irani, Dourish, Vertesi), we can include discussions on translation, global research and, hopefully, to think/design with care alternatives to our academic environments. 

As Tania's experience can guide us to a lot of places, I just want to start this conversation by asking her to tell us about her most recent project, and especially, on her choice to move into design practices.  Can you introduce us to the core ideas of designing/thinking with care?