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

[Tania Pérez Bustos]

Dear all,

First of all I want to thank Kevin and Fabian for making me part of this
very stimulating month of conversations which I have followed closely,
since this southern corner of the world. (A footnote, English is my Second
or Third Language, so I expect you to have that in mind in case I do not
make myself completely understandable ... be sure I will do my best to
communicate my ideas, but please be prepared for mistakes and errors, just
as it happens with life).

I like the idea proposed by Fabian of bringing my closest research
experience and see from there were it can take us. While writing this I
think of the work of Precarias a la Deriva (another footnote about
translation, that translates: Precarious in drift, but with the peculiarity
that precarious is written in feminine). Precarias a la Deriva is a
collective of researchers based in Madrid who took the challenge of
documenting the experiences of care of different (mostly) women in urban
settings. Since care happens in the domestic sphere and is usually taken
for granted and made invisible the research they undertook had to be
performed in movement, and in the movement that care allows (considering
its dailylifeness and invisibility). So ... lets take these conversations
as an opportunity to perform drift while thinking, let's do it carefully,
not introducing concepts, but introducing very concrete realities, which
might speak more about how I see research embedded in my life, than how I
see research or concepts in general.

There are very personal reasons which explain how I ended up studding
knowledge dialogues between a team on engineers and a group of women
embroiderers in Cartago (picture here women above 65 years of age who
embroider to sustain their families and whose ideas about technology are
that it has nothing to do with their craft, and a group of mostly men
engineers who have never hold a needle to seam or repair a cloth, and that
not always think about designing technology from the craft perspective of
its materialities). Not just personal reasons but even intimate and
affective ones. Those reasons (that include the people that are part of the
project and my personal relation to them) some how weave the ethnographic
perspective that has emerged of those encounters. Initially I had expected
to understand the practice of embroidery in Cartago as a knowledge practice
which could enlighten ethnographically the trope of care to understand
knowledge. Embroidery is performed parallel to many care labors, related to
the sustainability of people's life, but it is also a labor of care, or
better a labor performed with care, in relation to the way it is done in
interaction with diverse materials: hands of embroiderers are hidden from
the craft, ans so are hidden their stories and the multiple mending
practices that sustain the beauty and symmetry of craft embroidery.

To ethnographically comprehend the complexity of how care was embedded into
the making of embroidery (consider here the intimate intermingling of
different micro and macro scales), I myself had to learn the craft, and so
had to do it the engineers part of the team, in particular and directly the
only woman part of the group, and sporadically and more indirectly the rest
of the men engineers. This process of learning the making and doing of
embroidery, through my hands, connected me with the making and doing of the
engineering design, not just in the sense that it allowed me to observe how
Laura designed a particular Tangible User Interface inspired in embroidery
from Cartago, but also because I became part of the design in itself.
Learning to embroider implied a particular connection between us, an
affective and touching connection, one that engendered a setting where
embroidery was seen not just as precarious labor that had to be saved by
engineering, but as a language that could embroider the technology in
itself, literally speaking.

While embroidering I saw myself not just comprehending stories about
people, but understanding how a particular technology was being brought to
life through the mating of artisans and engineers life stories, and the
materialities that weave and sustain them. I did not choose to think design
as a matter of care, it happened through a particular affective and
political disposition towards ethnography.

Let see where this leads us know ... Dear Fabian, tu turno


2015-03-24 9:17 GMT-05:00 Prieto Nanez, Fabian Mauricio <
prieton2 at illinois.edu>:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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?
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>



-- 
Tania Pérez-Bustos PhD
Profesora Departamento de Antropología
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
Edif. Manuel Briceño of 322. Tel 3208320 ext 5934

http://taniaperezbustos.jimdo.com/
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