https://altcph.dk/event/opening-ceremonies/BOCHUM - CAIS
https://www.cais.nrw/wp-94fa4-content/uploads/2018/03/CAIS_Call.pdf
-- write them to inquire about applying for both -- we wrote in April and can apply for both
-- write Helena Stehle -- ask if she would be willing to check out our application 
-- talk with Renee re experience of CAIS

Deadline 9 August 2021

Fellowship sections to complete:
    
1. Personal data and requested funds
- no fees 
- travel and accomodation up to 10,000 Eur
Eric, Helen, Ren = 2000 Each for travel
Romi = 5000 for travel & stay
have 3,000 Eur leftover
-- we can stay for 3 weeks about -- 3 week working session with 2 workshops -- with a lead up period to it, the workshop is 2/3 days long -- when a couple of other more local invited guests could come --  
2 Europe based guests, 1 international people
-Winnie + Dottie + Smarika + Edna Bonhomme-

Smarika Lulz
IV Year Ph.D. Candidate 
Chair for Public and Comparative Law
Faculty of Law, Humboldt University of Berlin

CAIS notes -
The Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) promotes the active shaping of the social, political, economic and cultural change that is triggered by digitization. It sees itself as a place of innovative interdisciplinary research and as a source of inspiration for a critical public that wants to come to an understanding about models for a self-determined life in the digital society.

Upon request, the CAIS supports innovative projects that deal with the social opportunities and challenges of digital transformation and develop perspectives for practice. The funding program is basically open to all disciplines and areas of investigation as well as to basic research and application-oriented projects. The decisive factors for funding are excellence, topicality, social relevance and interdisciplinary connectivity of the projects.

In-house research projects, which the CAIS carries out together with various partners, deal with central issues of digitization and make a contribution to the development of constructive design concepts.
In addition, the CAIS offers a wide range of offers for representatives from politics, administration, law, business, education, culture, media and civil society to exchange ideas with researchers and contribute their own experiences to the CAIS, researchers and representatives from politics, administration, law, business, education, culture, media and civil society come together to exchange ideas about the social effects of digital change and to jointly develop design perspectives.

The CAIS offers numerous events for different target groups: scientific colloquia, practice-oriented workshops and networking meetings, public lecture series and public dialogues, working groups with experts.

CAIS language:
    digital transformation
    practice-based expertise
    public discussion on the social, political, and economic changes that are caused by the impact of digitalization
    The exchange between academia and society is a main objective of the center.

What we will actually be working on for the working group:
    (1) speculating with Black feminist thought for computing otherwise and (2) ethics of care of critical pedagogy. (need to make a narrower field/and set of questions) 

Building upon our work at ACM FAT* and through a series of workshops.

Research Questions: What is ethics within Black Feminist Poetry, how does Black Feminist Poetry intervene on exisiting ethical frameworks mobilised in digitilization research and allow us to create frames for an ethcis specficially for digital transformations and how can we design pedagogical devices for opening up these practices to wider publics/practitioners?

AIMS:

OBJECTIVES:
co-written paper on the intersections of Black feminist poetry, Trans*feminist technoscience and digital methods  

April 11-30: Three week residency at CAIS for the working group for working on
Activities:
April 11-20: Workshop planning and preparation:
      prototyping of visual and digital methods for the workshop
      collective literature review of current work in the field
      co-writing a research paper on the intersections of Black feminist poetry and digital methods with the aim to develop frameworks for ethical engagements with AI  
      preparation of access materials, such as access copies for talks and alt-text for image based work
      generating the 
April 20-22: Three-day workshop for working group plus up to four invited experts 
During the workshop specifically 
April 20: Presentations and introductions 

April 21:  Prototyping poethics - by working with Black Feminist Poet
    speculating
    prototyping ethical, or what we describe as poethical...,
    /hands -on programming - end of day showing what had been done in the working group -
April 22: Summary and presentation of workshop outcomes, including sharing and knowledge exchange of outcomes with CAIS members.
April 23-30: Processing of materials from workshop for research paper, and pedagogical handbook                                          

Black feminist poetry and digital methods with the aim to develop frameworks for ethical engagements with AI 
critical pedaogogy for digital practitioners (including those working in academia, industry and public contexts).       

Title: Speculating with Black Feminist thought for Computing Otherwise
//words for a new title: ethics, collective, practice
Technological Black Feminist Practices: caring for poet(h)ical engagements in Computer Science
Poetries of ethics and computation: challenging current methods and frameworks around ethical practices in computing with black feminist thinking and poetry

2. Outline of proposal

• abstract of proposal (max. 300 words)

• The working group aims to generate collective practices for questioning contemporary cultures of critical computation through engagement with Black feminist theory and poet(h)ics (da Silva 2014). In their 1999 book Sorting things Out: Classification and its Consequences, science and technology scholars Bowker and Star asked: "Why should computer scientists read African-American poets? What does information science have to do with race critical or feminist methods and metaphysics?". More often than not, taken up as debates on bias or automated injustices (Noble 2018), the care and labor needed for radically reconsidering the ethical groundings of computer science practices have not been instituted in computing.
• This grant creates space for an emerging group of researchers to develop engagements with Black Feminist thinking as a tool of creative and critical technical practice (Agre 1997) that rethinks ethics for computational practices. Practicing, imagining and generating possibilities for accountability within computational practices are crucial. This working group would work to establish an international network of scholars, computer scientists, artists and technologists critically evaluating computational ethics and accountabilites that are now emerging, but underdeveloped. Through a series of meetings with international scholars (who already contribute to this research but are not yet linked), we will consolidate a research group and prepare a larger grant at the intersection of Computer Science, Ethics and Black Feminist Thinking ((make them feel more special, not a stepping stone)).
• (220 words)
• new attempt:
• This working group aims to generate collective practices for questioning contemporary cultures of critical computation through engagement with Black feminist thinking and poet(h)ics (da Silva 2014) ((go with poetry rather than poethics for accessibility reasons?)). In their 1999 book Sorting things Out: Classification and its Consequences, science and technology scholars Bowker and Star asked: "Why should computer scientists read African-American poets? What does information science have to do with race critical or feminist methods and metaphysics?". More often than not, taken up as debates on bias or automated injustices (Noble 2018), the care and labor needed for radically reconsidering the ethical groundings of computer science practices have not been instituted in computing.
• In a time of...discriminative algorithms, invasive data privacy... practicing, imagining and generating possibilities for ethics and accountability within computational practices are crucial. This grant creates space for an emerging group of researchers to develop engagements with Black Feminist thinking as a tool of creative and critical technical practice (Agre 1997) that rethinks ethics for computational practices. In order to do so, the working group will establish an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars, computer scientists, artists and technologists critically evaluating computational ethics and accountabilites that are now emerging, but underdeveloped. Carried out as a series of carefully crafted creative workshop settings, the project will show how collective interdisciplinary engagements with Black feminist thinking and poetry can generate new insights and approaches for intervening into the challenging contemporary question of how to conceive ehtically minded forms of computational practice. The intended outcome of these workshops is to generate new and potentially transformative ethical methods and frameworks for researchers and practitioners involved in contemporary digitalization practices, including a set of accessible pedagogical handbooks that will act as generative devices for sharing these ethical methods and frameworks to wider publics and practitioners.
• (290 words)

• *clarify a bit more how we work notions of practice
• *"CAIS supports innovative projects that deal with the social opportunities and challenges of digital transformation and develop perspectives for practice"
• *perhaps use their language of digitalization somewhere here: "public discussion on the social, political, and economic changes that are caused by the impact of digitalization"
• *also their language of interdisciplinarity
• *social exchange: "researchers and representatives from politics, administration, law, business, education, culture, media and civil society come together to exchange ideas about the social effects of digital change and to jointly develop design perspectives."
•     The exchange between academia and society is a main objective of the center.
• *possible refs: maybe winnie and geoff book has a good line, or some German-readable reference? Flusser? Perhaps Pat Treusch: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5203-1/robotic-knitting/
• *think about what kind of deliverables we offer in the grant vs the fellowship for Ren
• *see what Claude (Ren's boss) thinks about this

• subject and lines of research (max. 1.500 words)

• ((title of project)) sets out to initiate research that addresses questions of ethics in contemporary practices of computation through an engagment with ongoing traditions of black feminist thinking. Despite recent rising scholarship around the need to address questions of ethics and practice within computationally informed practices (Amoore 2020; Amaro 2019), ongoing discussions around topics such as ethics and data privacy (Benjamin 2019; Draude; data privacy ref) and fairness and accountability (refs: FAT* conf) have been highly limited in regards to the the shapes and forms they might take. While major computational actors such as Google have opened up ostensible forums and spaces for discussions on ethical computational practice, it has become evident in one case after another (refs: Bureau of investigative journalism article; Gebru ref; bias and police article) that these spaces and discussions don't make room for interruptions or questionings of the logics and epistemological assumptions that underpin computation (Ali 2016). As the recent firing of Timnit Gebru (Google's Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team) makes clear, large tech corporations embodied by (but not only) GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) have not proven capable of taking onboard conversations that aim to disrupt their own practices, preferring to instead keep discussions on ethics limited to narrowly defined issues, such as bias and debiasing, that ultimately leave their infrastructures and forms of computational worldmaking unquestioned.
• **consider how the GDPR operates and forecloses (potentially in a helpful sense) some of this in Germany? Try to root this conversation more locally? think more about data privacy?
• **worth mentioning Helen's bug report work in this context?
• **Kate Fletcher + AI Institute as another example of what they are thinking of public-academic exchanges
• At the same time, there is a similar narrowness to the way in which scholars working to develop ethical (need to define (how we mean) ethics more specifically) understandings and dialogues within fields such as computer science have conceived of what an ethical engagement might look like. Thus, in panels and discussions of ethics in comptutation, it is common to see a standard set of relatively unquestioned references (the canon of white, Western and mostly male philosophy) invoked for these discussions. Furthermore, in those cases where a broader set of references are invoked, the format for researching discussions of ethics tends to be text-based in nature and focused on a cerebral intellectualism when it comes to the formats and dialogues for holding group discussions around ethics. An intellectualism that misses the chances for addressing other possible registers and ways of learning and knowing together. (what does this discussion of 'cerebral intellectualism' do for us?)
• This proposal for research initiation aims to address this problem (could flip this and say what 'innovative' or 'new' thing we will do instead) of narrowly defined and imagined ways for practicing collective ethical engagements in computational practice by drawing from complex and rich traditions of black feminist thinking. By doing so, the proposal seeks to craft new methods and modes of engagement that can help rethink ethics with computational practice. ((what methods? more specificity)) Practicing, imagining and generating possibilities for accountability within computational practice are crucial.
• The working group will focus on initiating research within two main and overlapping areas of interest: (1) speculating with black feminist thought for computing otherwise and (2) ethics of care of critical pedagogy. (for the things in bold, by the time we say this I think we need to have more specifically defined what those things are)
• In asking what it can mean to speculate with Black feminist thought for computing otherwise, the first strand of this research initiation aims to address how cultures of computer science have proven unable to address the multiple forms of ethical and material injustices spilling out of computationally-informed practices. Having first presented themselves (when? how?) as the be all and end all solution to many contemporary problems, such practices now can be said to suffer from a self-inflicted crisis of imagination (is it the field itself?). A lack of imagination and conceiving of alternative, inclusive and creative approaches to computing which this project explicitly aims to address.
• ((introduce Hartman's background)) Saidiya Hartman asks, "If it is no longer sufficient to expose the scandal, then how might it be possible to generate a different set of descriptions from this archive?" (Hartman, Venus in Two Acts) ((lovely quote, maybe a bit abstract for Bochum if they don't know Hartman)). This proposal aims to explore what it can mean to trouble contemporary computational modes of thinking and practice with the insights and inquiries of Black feminist thinking. In the workshop we will enage such questions together by engaging with black feminist poetry and ethics, queer risk, and nonlinear futurities. By this we hope to dislodge notions of (computationally-informed) futurity as eventual, passive, solution-oriented and linearly progressive. Instead, the workshop will explore modes of speculation such as Tina Campt speaks of, one in which "the grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must" (Listening to Images).
• //look at oracles notes from Barcelona for further descriptions of Black feminist thought
• The workshop will be structured so as to include events and activities including but also beyond the standard literature review style and scholarly text-based research that make up much of contemporary discussions of ethics in computation. Speculation (Rosner? Stengers on practical speculation?) as imagined here will include opening up imaginations to the ehtics and accountability as they occur in everyday practice, as well as exploring these questions through engaging with elements of ritual (Romi & Ren have worked on this), indeterminancy and open-endedness. Approaches that can act as disuptive modes and wedges, and also poetical registers for opening up stagnated and narrow conceptions of ethics and accountability in computing. With the workshop attempting to achieve something like the vision that poet and pedagogue Alexis Pauline Gumbs has described: "My intention is for the technologies of Black women poets, fiction writers, hip-hop artists, priestesses, singers, mamas, fugitives, stylists, and literary theorists to converge in the same space... because for me they all feature a desire to be free and the urgent impossible-to-ignore presence of the ongoing obstacles to our freedom" (ref). An intentional form of critical and creative collective speculating that might generate alternative possibilities for computing otherwise (Pritchard 2016) and reimaginging and retooling possibilities for ethical accountability within computational practice.
• (900 words)
• *perhaps use their language of digitalization somewhere here
• Engaging collective practice with computation requires careful attunement to the pedagogies, methodologies and practices that have shaped what we know and how we have come to that knowledge. M. Jacqui Alexander, writing on her relation to the divine writes "I first had to confront the limits of the methodology I had devised to know her" (Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 294). What kind of pedagogy is well positioned to make our collective interiors realigned towards collectivity?
• Multiple pedagogical frameworks in technology education take learning to be largely about “improving the quality of the workforce” (Kitching 2015) and “optimizing” or “enhancing” learning ((Gurung & Schwartz, 2013) quoted in ibid). By focusing on modes and methods of teaching that heavily reinforce unquestionable information, students learn to be efficient, optimized, and subservient to be able to correctly reproduce correct technical knowledge. It is not uncommon for knowledge to be decontextualized so it can be “learned, tested, and applied more or less independently of particular contexts ((Brown, Collins & Duguid 1989) quoted in Biggs: 347)”.
• These contemporary norms of teaching in technology education reify similar pedagogical models by traditional pedagogues like Seymour Papert who became known for his “learning-by-making” (1991) style of teaching. This “learning-by-making” or building upon what one already knows and constructing from that point (indeed Papert’s pedagogical framework is called constructionism) has resonances with the oft warned against “I- methodology, the reliance on personal experience, whereby the designer replaces his professional hat by that of the layman” ((Akrich 1995) quoted in Oudshoorn 2004)”. These approaches within pedagogical frameworks and design methodologies are deeply intertwined due to multiple omissions of critical questions and subsequently produce major glitches for marginalized people in diverse instances of socio-technical systems ((Noble perhaps better ref here)Bowker and Starr 1999: 64).
• In this project, critical pedagogical (Freire 1970; hooks 1993; Giroux xx; Alexander 2005; Hickey-Moody 2015; Soon 2020) frameworks are taken up as tools which build upon the histories of decolonial and Black feminist scholarship and understand that (computer science) education and practice is already politicized (Philip et al. 2017). Some critical pedagogical frameworks that are concerned with teaching/enacting technology otherwise include: ‘critical community technology pedagogy’ (Wagoner 2017), ‘participatory action design (PAD)’ (Ding 2007), a ‘Justice-centered approach’ (Vakil 2018), ‘abolitionist pedagogy’ (Love 2019), and ‘anti-racist crip teaching’ (Shelton 2020). Informed by this rich scholarship we will tune to practices of making technology otherwise through our workshops that challenge the maintanience of racist, ableist, gender-binary, heteropatriarchial, capitalist society as it is embedded in technological artifacts. We will focus our attention on enacting non-separability as praxis (theory and practice that cannot be constructed apart) for technologies otherwise for Black feminist presents. Together we plan to remake dominant Computer Science as it currently “is”— a field built on colonial and imperial violences. These hard coded violences continuously uphold and stand in for what Sylvia Wynter describes as “universal généralisant”: the unquestionable reason, value, and authority" that is the illusion of all colonial constructs.
• //this paragraph really great

• More often than not, taken up as debates on bias or automated injustices (Noble 2018), the care and labor needed for radically reconsidering the ethical groundings of computer science practices have not been instituted in computing. To bring Black feminist work into computing practice requires an emphasis on care, labor relations and building trust together to enact radically different computational practice. Understanding that care cannot be determined in advance. We create infrastructures for care with critical pedagogical practice that includes: care for missing voices,  disabled people, non technical experts, those interested in technological practice with very different political orientations than us, caring for ourselves in doing this work and care for those we have not named yet but will remain open to working with. 
• //great
• In order to open up the possibilties and imaginations for rethinking accountability and ethics for computational practices. This is an attempt to rethink where we start from and how we might radically rethink our practices for addressing the problems (and possibilities) that arise with various modes of automation. We will work with pedagogical practices that mean that hierarchies, timelimits, abelisms are challenged, and intentional, diverse, slow, undetermined, care-ful and multiple modes of engagement are practiced. Rather than practicing legitimasation within the classroom through student teacher relationships and dialectic patterns, we practice creating space for each human and non-human to be part of our work as a teacher, and to understand that the pedagogical practices that we work with become a form of cultural politics enacted in the workshop space.
• Working with technologies is an inherently social thing, whether between people or not. Our work does not make distinct seperationas between cerebral intellectualisms and effusive affective mode of learning: our process is trying to be capacious enough for those to happen simultaneously. We propose that our approach highlights what is missing in current discussions within CS and technoscience audiences, an interruption of the epistemological praxi that work explicitly against separation.

• academic results (max. 300 words)

• articles: one academic, one popular science?

• practical results (max. 300 words)

• pedagogy handbook (Design Justice, Aesthetic Programming, ai and ethics zine allied media, Sins Invalid Texts, http/api zine person: https://jvns.ca/blog/2019/09/12/new-zine-on-http/, )
• creative workshops for engaging with issues of ethics and data privacy

• preliminary work (max. 300 words)

• Fat*
• Burn, dream and reboot!: speculating backwards for the missing archive on non-coercive computing. FAT* '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Association for Computing Machinery. January 2020 Pages 683. https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3375697
• HKW
• Future(s) Otherwise: Dreaming with Oracle Practices. https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_168691.php
• aftermath * the nth of letting go / P * training in the everday (new modes of living together) by: oracle(s). https://newalphabetschool.hkw.de/aftermath-the-nth-of-letting-go-p-training-in-the-everday-new-modes-of-living-together-by-oracles/
• Alt Cph
• Opening Ceremonies. https://altcph.dk/event/opening-ceremonies/
• Soundings
• For CS
• https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2020/for-cs
• Nocturnes
• Institute's bug reports

• work plan (Fellowship) (max. 300 words)

• 6 months
• October, November: Online Workshop
• December, January : 
• Feburary, March : (hopefully in person) Symposium
• April : workshops

• work plan (Working Group) (max. 300 words)

• concept for own contribution to the exchange at CAIS (max. 300 words) 
• in the case of academic projects
• *to do: look at their projects and see how this would add to the exchange with CAIS

• current state of research (max. 700 words)

• //next section is on theory and methods so think about what goes here and what in next
• black feminist writings
• computational cultures
• critical pedagogy
• art praxis?
• • -CS
    • -Katta Spiel, Seda Gürses
  • -ethics
    • -Coding Rights, Katherine McKittrick
  • -black feminist thinking
    • -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, J. Khadijah Abdurahman
  • -art praxis (with a focus on technology)
    • -Winnie Soon, Micha Cárdenas, Nora Murchú
  • -pedagogy
    • -Elizabeth Patitsas, Aimi Hamraie
  • --Abdoumaliq Simone (rogue care)
• --Audre Lorde (erotics) - attuning to the potential to feel fully in the doing
• --Ren-yo Hwang (deviant care) 
• --Trinh T Minh-ha (speaking besides) - attending to the wish to respond and amplify 
• --Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (care work) 
• --Mia Mingus (access intimacies) - the feeling when someone gets your access needs and is investing effort into making access for disabled people a primary part of their work 
• --Sins Invalid
• -- Tina Campt
• • --pedagogy references
• --M. Jacqui Alexander on the sacred
• --bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
• • --Womxn of Color Technoscience
• --Kara Keeling, Queer Times Black Futures (terms to explore: modulation, queer temporality, antifragility) 
• --Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Black Feminist Calculus Meets Nothing to Prove: A Mobile Homecoming Project Ritual toward the Postdigital (black feminist calculus)
• --Noble
• --Da Silva (terms to explore: poethics)
• --Jessica Marie Johnson (black digital practice) 
• --Katherine McKittrick (science, mathematics black life) 
• --Tawana Petty (our data bodies) 
• art praxis references
• --Agre critical technical practice
• --Winnie and Geoff book?

• theories and methods (max. 700 words)

• design justice
• art praxis?
• (workshop as method?)

3. Where applicable: application for the invitation of a visiting fellow and/or of experts for talks or workshops

4. Curriculum Vitae (PDF, max. two pages with no more than five publication references)

5. One relevant publication (PDF, max. 5 MB)

Working group parts different or not in fellowship application sections

• 3. Curriculum Vita (PDF, max. two pages with no more than five publication references)
• 4. One relevant publication (PDF)
• 5. List of participants with the following information: name, institution/company, discipline/profession, traveling from/to, status of participation (invited/confirmed) (PDF)

notes from reading the call:
- "It aims to actively contribute to the public discussion on the social, political, and economic changes that are caused by the impact of digitalization."
- "The exchange between academia and society is a main objective of the center."                            
-"innovative and interdisciplinary research"       
- Their current agenda is: Understanding the risks and opportunities of digitalization.
The internet has produced important innovations over the past few decades – which create many opportunities, but also significant risks.
Actively shaping the digital transformation requires both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research – research that is in dialogue with citizens as well as representatives from the fields of politics, administration, law, business, education, culture and the media.
- "the criteria you are judged on are:
• professional expertise and qualification 
• relevance and topicality 
• originality and innovative potential 
• academic results 
• practical results
• interdisciplinarity 
• accordance with the CAIS-Agenda 
• feasibility of the work plan in the case of academic projects 
• theories and methods in the case of working groups 
• expertise and qualification of other participants"
- "It is expected that each fellow will initiate at least one exchange format on a cross-sectional topic of digitalization research (e.g. reading group, discussion group, workshop)."
- "CAIS supports the exchange between academia and practice and the public discourse on the process of digitalization"
- "Therefore, the practical implications of academic projects and the academic benefits of practical projects should be stated clearly in the applications."
- "The voting members of the program committee are the academic director, the program manager, the head of knowledge transfer and public relations, six distinguished scholars from the field of digitalization and internet studies as well as two professionals with practice based expertise."
- "the practical implications of academic projects and the academic benefits of practical projects should be stated clearly in the applications."

**need to emphasize how we will engage with publics
**work with the word "digitalization" more
**making the academica practical is super important

**Data for Black Lives
**Ai Institute?

**How can we