Gender, Sexuality, and other taboos
I'd like to organise a workshop around taboos in HCI research. I've found that it can be difficult to talk to people about topics that really shouldn't be difficult to talk about (such as sex, sexuality, gender, or even drugs and alcohol). While some of these issues are picked up by the HCI community, they are often picked up in ways that are only about behaviour change and / or follow a very normative thought process.
It would be interesting to have a workshop to collectively figure out what these 'taboo' topics are and what the similarities between all of them are; how we can learn from each other about publishing and talking about these topics.
Matt Wood Tue 22 Mar 2016 5:16PM
Yes yes - would be very up for helping you with this, I think this is an issue in lots of people's research :-)
Vanessa Thomas Wed 23 Mar 2016 11:52AM
As mentioned in the FB group, I think this is an excellent idea! I'd be really interested in talking about these issues and learning more about when/why someone labels something 'taboo' and how that influences HCI work... my only concerns would be about who facilitates this workshop and how they handle facilitation. Would an anthropologist or a social scientist or someone trained in 'taboos' be leading the discussion? Do you have someone in mind? And would/could we set a code of conduct? Because I've been to way too many events around similar topics that end up being (unintentionally?) quite offensive towards people who practice 'taboos', and also towards people, say in HCI, who might label something a taboo.
Angelika Strohmayer Wed 23 Mar 2016 2:10PM
aww yiss, thank you!
I really like ht idea of having a code of conduct...maybe we could write that together - I'll start a proposal about it ;)
about the facilitation: I have no idea. I didn't think that far and was not expecting to be able to get people in to facilitate it - do you have someone in mind?
Vanessa Thomas Wed 23 Mar 2016 3:12PM
The only person that jumps to my mind is based in Canada... but I'm sure there would be some good people in the UK! :)
Angelika Strohmayer Wed 23 Mar 2016 3:30PM
Who do you have in mind from Canada? - Might be interesting to read some of their stuff ;) I'll have a think about people that might be interested...
having said that, aren't these workshops supposed to be student-run?
Vanessa Thomas Thu 24 Mar 2016 1:27PM
The person who jumped into my head is actually a friend of mine, anthropologist Zoe Todd (http://carleton.ca/socanth/people/todd-zoe/), but her publications don't explictly deal with taboos. I was just thinking of some conversations we'd had together... :)
My understanding was that these have to be student-organised workshops, but we have £500 to work with (including for inviting a speaker). So, on such a sensitive and complex socio-cultural topic, it'd probably be wise to have an expert show up to discuss how they approached taboo(s) in their research.
Sorry if this isn't helpful! I'm sure someone must know a UK-based taboo expert (or we could ask Google).
Angelika Strohmayer Tue 29 Mar 2016 10:27AM
ah yea, that makes sense! It depends who we want, really. I mean do we want someone to facilitate talk about taboos more broadly, or do we want to focus on gender, sex, and sexuality?
Poll Created Wed 23 Mar 2016 2:12PM
Code of Conduct Closed Sat 26 Mar 2016 2:08PM
Like Vanessa said in her comment, it would be great to have a code of conduct at this workshop that everyone agrees on so we can have a safe space for discussion and collaboration.
There are several ways of doing this:
Agree: We come up with it before the event
Abstain: We come up with some of this before the event and let participants come up with more points as part of the workshop
Disagree: We come up with the entire code of conduct during the workshop
Block: I don't want a code of conduct at this workshop...
Results
| Results | Option | % of points | Voters | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Agree | 100.0% | 1 |
|
| Abstain | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Disagree | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Block | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Undecided | 0% | 30 |
|
1 of 31 people have participated (3%)
Vanessa Thomas
Wed 23 Mar 2016 3:11PM
I definitely think it'd be wise to have a general code of conduct beforehand... with the caveat that we can add to it at the event based on participants?
Nataly Birbeck · Tue 22 Mar 2016 5:11PM
I love this idea Angelika - the work around self-harm I am doing feeds into this perfectly and I am interested in exploring other taboo topics...