The Department of Information Science Fall 2021 Colloquium series welcomes Christina Dunbar-Hester, faculty member in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton U Press, 2020), Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism (MIT Press, 2014), and is currently writing a book on multispecies life and death in the Ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach, under contract with University of Chicago Press.

Talk: Situated, Autonomous, and Free? Hacking Diversity in Technical Work

Abstract: In recent years, conflicts over values and practices have emerged in hacking and free/libre and open source (FLOSS) communities, centering around diversity and inclusion. This talk features ethnographic research on feminist hacking and "diversity" efforts in mainstream FLOSS. It explores how participants work through thorny issues of inclusion through their practices with code, hardware, and one another. It illustrates how there is more at stake in "hacking diversity" than a politics of representation can capture, and argues that how diversity advocates bound their interventions matters for both hacking communities and "tech" more broadly.