Tag: Autumm Caines

Bookmarked The Weaponization of Care — Real Life (Real Life)

Weaponized care is not a monolith, and we must be attentive to how it can be wielded in different directions and for different purposes. Most insidiously, it seizes upon how care is necessary and essential for our social lives. But it can be weaponized in a different way: As Audre Lorde wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Here Lorde rejects gendered ideas of care and posits a different approach to its weaponization: not as a way to sell harmful surveillance technology but to protect herself from overextension and despair in the face of disease and the stigmas attached to several overlapping marginalized identities. Realizing and recognizing that care can be used as a weapon against the interests of our communities, our loved ones, and even ourselves is a step toward respecting this powerful construct.

Autumm Caines discusses the way in which survelliance technology is often packaged with notions of care. This often comes in two flavours, the virtuous “caring about” used to promote remote proctoring systems, or the relational “caring for” used by products like ClassDojo to promote “bringing families into the classroom.” Across the board, this weaponization of care is used to normalise various practices.
Bookmarked The Zoom Gaze — Real Life (Real Life)

Even though the Zoom gaze existed pre-pandemic, its effects are now amplified, thanks not only to the increased volume of video calls but also the diversity of situations in which they have been adopted. As the pandemic pushes us to use these technologies for what we can’t do in person, let’s not forget what we are giving up to do so. Thinking about the gaze — who is watching and how we are watched; who controls the watching environment and how power dynamics are systematized — allows us to look beyond how companies would like us to see their products. Zoom would like to habituate us to these new power alignments until we regard them as normal and natural, but we do not have to accept this uncritically. We should question these alignments and resist such habituation now, so that we may more thoughtfully shape what we want togetherness to look like when the social is no longer distant.

Autumm Caines reflects upon the rise of Zoom during the pandemic and explores some of the implications. She unpacks some of the features, assumptions, practices and power dynamics associated with what she calls the ‘Zoom Gaze’.

Film scholar Laura Mulvey theorized a “male gaze” that was structured and reproduced through cinematography, presuming a male hetero viewer and depicting women primarily as sexual objects rather than subjects. In this interview, Toni Morrison describes how she rejected centering the “white gaze” in her fiction: the presumption of a white audience and the white perspective as neutral. If Foucault used the idea of a “medical gaze” to describe how doctors objectify patients’ bodies to treat them, and the “panoptic” gaze to explore how carceral discipline is internalized, what might we say the Zoom gaze accomplishes? Whose perspective does it seek to naturalize? Whose subjectivity does it center, and in what sorts of forms? What does it condition us to see?

In regards to approach, Caines’ piece reminds me of Ian Guest’s interview with Twitter and Ben Williamson’s assemblage of Class Dojo.

Bookmarked Education before Regulation: Empowering Students to Question Their Data Privacy (er.educause.edu)

We must work not only toward providing better security around student data but also toward educating students about the need to critically evaluate how their data is used and how to participate in shaping data privacy practices and policies. These policies and practices will affect them for the rest of their lives, as individuals with personal data and also as leaders with power over the personal data of others. Regulation is necessary, but education is the foundation that enables society to recognize when its members’ changing needs require a corresponding evolution in its regulations. And for those of us in academia, unlike those in industry, education is our work.

Autumm Caines and Erin Glass discuss data privacy and the importance of educating students about the topic. To support this, the two authors provide a number of resources and references, including the Ethical EdTech wiki and a collaboratively created course statement.  This is also something Sonia Livingstone, Mariya Stoilova and Rishita Nandagiri discuss.