“Computers aren’t good at inclusion,” he says. “They’re good at exclusion, because they’re only based on past data. The business opportunity for the future-thinking designer is in inclusion.”
Source: The Most Important Design Skill For An AI-Dominated World
It seems to me that a genuine, critically inclusive pedagogy strives for reception rather than appropriation, for radical openness rather than a quest for self-affirmation. If those are the goals we share, then it’s imperative we be mindful of the ways in which we frame our pedagogy. My own thought process has reached a place where “empathy” is too fraught a concept-especially in our current context-to entrust my pedagogical philosophy to. A pedagogy of care, on the other hand, welcomes students on their own terms, includes them for who they are, and-most importantly-commits us to doing the type of work to maintain that climate and approach.
Seeing others as full and complicated human beings should not require their resonance with some part of our own selves. We don’t need to become them, or think that they could become us. We simply need to care.
Source: Some Thoughts on Pedagogy and the Problem of “Empathy” – The Tattooed Professor
I added Steven Universe’s “Let’s Only Think About Love” and Aurora’s “Queendom” to my Steven U. heavy “Inclusion Songs” playlist. This list lifts me after a day of self-advocacy.
I like the pairing of “Let’s Only Think About Love” and “Rainbow Connections”: two happy cry inducing gay weddings.
BTW, if you like Aurora, me too.
“Why am I so sure that I’d rather be this than everything I was supposed to be?” —Garnet
This interview with Rebecca Sugar is as emotionally rich as the show. I love Steven’s gender-expansive Universe.
Moving rendition of “Here Comes a Thought” at the end.
The Mind Behind America’s Most Empathetic Cartoon – 1A
CW: assault, hate crime
It was hard to accept some of the (valid) criticism, especially the idea that women and people of color felt particularly unwelcome. There’s a weird paradox with bias. Those of us who have privilege, but care deeply about reducing bias should be uniquely positioned to help, but we struggle the hardest to recognize that we are (unintentionally) biased ourselves.² As it happens, making people feel left out is a deep personal fear of mine. (There is probably a seriously repressed playground kickball thing in my past somewhere.) Ironically, that made it harder for me to accept the possibility that something I work on could make outsiders feel unwanted. So I focused on what we were proud of: We _are one of the only large sites where it’s practically impossible to find a single slur – our community takes them down in minutes. _We _don’t tolerate our female users being called “sweetie” or getting hit on. But _we _weren’t listening. Many people, especially those in marginalized groups _do _feel less welcome. _We know because they tell us.
Source: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change. – Stack Overflow Blog
Over and over, the humanity of certain people is allowed to be put up for debate in the name of “ideological diversity.” How can a liberal institution square its essential humanism with an ideal of inclusion so baggy as to promote the sort of cruelties that liberals, at least publicly, mean to oppose?
And I think the problem for us, or the essential conflict for us, is that we set ourselves up with I think a pretty admirable value that says, OK, we are going to debate different poles of politics in this country. And we want that well-represented, and we want people that can do it effectively, write well. But if one pole is — and again, I’m only speaking for myself here — if one pole is batshit crazy, you’re in trouble. It actually throws the whole endeavor out of whack.
Source: Leak: The Atlantic Had A Meeting About Kevin Williamson. It Was A Liberal Self-Reckoning. | HuffPost
I updated “Sex Ed: Toxic Masculinity, Emotional Expression, Online Privacy, Identity Management, Dress Codes, Bodily Autonomy, and Purity Culture” with a link to “The internet is enabling a community of men who want to kill women. They need to be stopped – The Verge”.
We must stop raising MRAs, PUAs, incels, and GamerGaters who reject inclusion and pluralism.
I updated the “agent, not a patient” section of “I’m Autistic. Here’s what I’d like you to know.” with a selection from “Liz Jackson: Designing for Inclusivity – 99U”.
disability’s no longer just a diagnosis; it’s a community
I updated “Bring the backchannel forward. Written communication is the great social equalizer.” with a selection from “Microsoft’s Radical Bet On A New Type Of Design Thinking”.
One day someone will write a history of the Internet, in which that great series of tubes will emerge as one long chain of inventions not just geared to helping people connect in more ways, but rather, to help more and more types of people communicate just as nimbly as anyone else. But for the story here, the most crucial piece in the puzzle is this: Disability is an engine of innovation simply because no matter what their limitations, humans have such a relentless drive to communicate that they’ll invent new ways to do so, in spite of everything.
You could describe this in that old cliche that necessity breeds invention. But a more accurate interpretation is that in empathizing with others, we create things that we might never have created ourselves. We see past the specifics of what we know, to experiences that might actually be universal.
“So Lisa, the show’s unshakable crusader for justice, including in matters of popular culture, has been reduced to a mouthpiece for the lazy idea that asking for better representation is an unfair burden on creators.”
Source: ‘The Simpsons’ To ‘The Problem With Apu’: Drop Dead : Monkey See : NPR
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