First, some publishing; a new piece of mine, covering Boston Gender Identity Services and titled “Clinics and Collectives”, is out in The Baffler. Extremely fun to write, thanks to a wonderful editor, and hopefully an enjoyable read, too.
Second, for those interested in doing their own work: some new archival collections! Many years ago (okay, about…three), I was doing my thing and reaching out to all and sundry who had any connection to the early clinics, and was lucky enough to reach out to the Pearson family - the kids of M. Joseph Pearson, the founding psych at the University of Michigan clinic. I asked if he’d left anything behind, and lo and behold, he had: research memos, correspondence, entire patient files, even. And after a bit of chatting back and forth, they donated it to the UMich archives for researchers!
That collection is now processed and available, as is the Os Keyes Collection (I didn’t name it), which features the oral histories I did with surviving clinic staff. Enjoy.
]]>What the fuck, as technologists, do we do right now?
There are a lot of answers to that question, which I provide, because, well, they’r perfectly good answers; you can try to be thoughtful about where you work, what you work on, and how, if you’re able to do so. You can work to smuggle the resources available to you in tech out to other spaces (Corinne and I wrote a whole book chapter about this). All of this is good and necessary and only partly sufficient, because approaching this moment “as technologists” is a trap.
It’s an attractive trap, to be sure. And it’s an understandable one. School and employment and society writ large encourage us to think of being technologists as the most important aspect of our identity, and our skillset - as part of encouraging us to think of technologists more broadly as the most important part of society (I once had a boss who opened the company wide all-hands meeting with “programmers are wizards” and it got worse from there). If you’re in a U.S. university to study computer science or UX design or anything in that range, you’ve made a commitment of tens of thousands of dollars to the idea and image of yourself “as a technologist”. So it stands to reason that’s a big part of the lens through which you would view the world, and select your responses to, well, Events.
And so when confronted with Events, and Horrors - particularly those enabled by the technology industry - it is entirely understandable that many of us ask, to be facile, for a second, whether there could be an app for (fixing) that. And if the answer is no - if our expertise as computer scientists, or data scientists, or designers, doesn’t obviously map on to solutions to the problem - we…freeze. Or, having framed ourselves as technologists first and foremost, guiltily declare the issue to be a matter of someone else’s expertise, and go in search of problems that fit ours. It’s part of why you have little unionisation within technology; organising is a matter of social expertise. It’s also part of why you have people trying to fix police brutality, or government transparency, with apps and websites; it’s what we know how to do.
But: we are not simply technologists. We are entire people, with other interests, lives, and forms of expertise. This expertise may not look like a degree: it’s often a matter of experience, or access. It’s knowing how to cook, or having a car, or access to a printer. It’s living in a particular neighbourhood, with an investment in local organising or elections. All of those are things we can contribute, right now.
Moreover, we are never just what we are right now. We are also who and what we choose to put the work into becoming. Part of the trap of thinking of ourselves as technologists, first and foremost, is not only that it stops us from taking action in other ways right now, but that it stops us from seeking to develop the ability to take other action; to flourish in other ways, that will provide more resources, more angles of contribution and attack, in the future. Doing so is…hard; I know that far, far too well. But it is also human. To expose ourselves to tasks we are not-good-at, or problems we do not have a familiar solution to. To see ourselves as more than the tools we have to hand, that we have internalised as our “thing”, and to ask what else we can do, or what else we could do, in the future.
Design that app, if an app is needed. Build that website, if a website helps. But if you find that it doesn’t - and you probably will - then cook. Clean. Drive someone somewhere. Show up to meetings. Organise your coworkers. Contribute in ways that build meaning beyond your degree, or your job. Because if people can only see themselves as their work, we’ve already lost an important part of the fight.
]]>On talks, I just got back from speaking at the “Beyond Borders, Beyond Binaries” conference at Kalamazoo College, where I was presenting on a pioneering gender program in Boston in the 1970s (more on that soon, because I now have a contract from The Baffler to write about it!). And in a couple of months I’ll be the discussant at UC Berkeley’s Hitchcock Lecture with Jules Gill-Peterson, for what promises to be a spirited Q&A.
And on papers, I have two small things out; the first, in collaboration with Abie Flaxman, looks at what applying Salome Vijoen’s fantastic idea of relational governance to data would look like. The second, a followup to the classic(?) “A Mulching Proposal”, applies the same satirical logic to the nonsense that is “pluralistic alignment”. They made me tone it down, alas.
Both (like I said) are small; there’s a ton of other stuff under review or in-process on political creativity, AI and biosecurity, the history of various gender identity clinics, LLMs - I do a lot of stuff. But it’s all “in process” and so not worth reporting out on yet!
]]>Technology continually carries fragments of politics—design choices and values shaping outcomes. This workshop explores how broader ideologies—coherent worldviews underpinning political and technological systems—influence and connect work in HCI. We aim to foster explicit discussion of ideology’s role in shaping research agendas, values, and assumptions through a hands-on half-day workshop.
We invite up to 20 scholars at any career stage to submit a 2–3 page position paper (ACM single-column or DIS2026 pictorial format) engaging with any of the following: how they define or interpret “ideology”; examples of ideology in HCI research or practice; or political/methodological suggestions for making ideology visible. Nonverbal or pictorial contributions are welcome, as submissions will serve as materials for the workshop activities. Papers will be reviewed for relevance, originality, and potential to advance the conversation. Selection will balance diversity in background, seniority, geography, and perspective, if oversubscribed.
Selected contributions will be published on arXiv with author’s consent. One author per submission must attend, either in person at the conference or during the pre-workshop online event. For more details and submission instructions, visit: https://ideologies.digital
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