Summary
Dr. Yalanda A. Rankin discusses leveraging Black feminist epistemology, particularly Black feminist thought and intersectionality, as a powerful critical framework to address wicked problems in technology design and innovation. She highlights the historical oppression of historically excluded groups such as Black women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people with disabilities, and underscores how technology can unintentionally perpetuate these inequalities, referencing a UCLA facial recognition study that misidentified people of color. Rankin explains her research involving Black women gamers on a historically Black college campus, revealing their casual but legitimate participation and preference for mobile puzzle games as episodic and social experiences with family and friends. She stresses the importance of including Black women not only as consumers but as creators in the gaming industry, where they remain severely underrepresented. The talk details a Black feminist game design project co-created by Black women involving an educational mobile game for Spanish vocabulary acquisition, featuring intersectional characters like Afro-Latina and African Spanish speakers, and empowering players with self-defining avatars to combat stereotypes. Throughout, Rankin emphasizes Black women's diverse experiences and the need for researchers to use their power and privilege to foster equitable and non-oppressive technology. She also addresses practical questions about applying Black feminist epistemology in qualitative data analysis and engaging skeptics of oppression frameworks. Her work, funded by the NSF, promotes resilience, agency, and collective empowerment within marginalized communities.
Key Insights
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Technology and innovation can unintentionally perpetuate oppression against historically excluded groups if not critically examined.
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Black feminist epistemology centers Black women's lived experiences as valid knowledge and positions them as agents of change.
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Intersectionality reveals the complexity of identity, showing multiple overlapping axes of oppression beyond race, including gender, class, nationality, and ability.
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Black women gamers are often invisible in gaming research and industry but represent a legitimate, mainly casual player group with distinct behaviors.
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Mobile and puzzle games are preferred by Black women gamers due to episodic play opportunities and social interactions with family and friends.
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Including Black women as producers and designers in gaming challenges industry underrepresentation and fosters equitable game content.
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Designing intersectional game characters, such as Afro-Latina and African Spanish-speaking figures, helps increase representation authenticity.
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Players value control over self-representation in games to avoid perpetuating harmful racial and gender stereotypes.
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Applying Black feminist thought in qualitative data analysis requires mapping participant interactions to core principles like othermothering.
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Critical frameworks like Black feminist epistemology promote action and resilience, combating victimhood narratives and empowering marginalized communities.
Notable Quotes
"Technology with all this innovation can be used for harm, like facial recognition systems misidentifying people of color as criminals."
"As researchers, we have the power to determine who is at the table making decisions about participants and data."
"Black women’s ways of knowing position them as agents of knowledge, change, and intellectuals."
"Intersectionality illuminates the human experience shaped by multiple overlapping identities beyond just race."
"Black feminist thought arises because African American women remain oppressed within a US context of injustice."
"Black women gamers were playing mostly mobile games as episodic, social activities with family and friends."
"Black women are less than 6% of those who greenlight or produce game titles in the industry."
"Players should have the ability to define their own digital representation to resist negative stereotypes."
"Feeding the power of self-definition to other groups replicates existing power hierarchies."
"Black feminist thought is not about victimization but about resilience and a call to action against oppression."
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