Support as a radical research method
I currently have the pleasure of working with our new cohort of Community Data Campaigns, five campaigns spanning health, housing, online harms, and care, all thinking about how their communities can be empowered through data. On the one hand, these are grassroots campaigns firmly rooted in the immediate needs of their communities, and on the other they are visionary in their thinking about systems change and shifting power to make data, and all that it impacts, more equitable for us all.
My role in this project is as a connector. I am thinking about how and when to bring these campaigns together, and who else to invite to support their work and help them flourish. This has put me in a reflective mood, considering how much of my career has been in this kind of supportive role, not in the least as I started out as a librarian - a social justice profession entirely built on the ethos of helping others. But sometimes, I do pause and ask myself - should I not be doing myself, rather than just supporting?
Before I joined Connected by Data almost a year ago, I worked at The Institute for Community Studies, part of The Young Foundation. The work I am most proud of from my time there, and perhaps from my whole career thus far, was scoping research commissioned by UKRI to examine how the formal research and innovation system could be made more equitable for those most marginalised by it. I convened and heard from those working with communities who have a wealth of knowledge and expertise, but who have traditionally not been valued (or have been actively exploited) by the research system with all of its extractive practices. I then tried to translate what I learned from these communities into recommendations that land, and in doing so would challenge the system’s power. The result was the Community Knowledge Fund and Community Research Networks that gave 4 million pounds of research funding directly to community led projects, to which UKRI have since committed a further 8 million. My heart still thrills when I think about this. In a team retreat activity we once wrote lines of poetry about our work, and mine was “_Robbin Hooding research funding.” _
Part of the conception of these community funds was that they would receive more than the money alone, but that these various community actors would be linked up to learn from each other and share their journeys. There would be an ongoing support programme in place, and I was dying to meet them all and see how their various social justice oriented strands of work might coalesce. I had experience of this kind of relational work, becoming the connective tissue between different participatory projects, from another UKRI project supporting Citizen Science. That experience taught me how incredibly rich and valuable the stories of research projects are, as ongoing, unfolding, changing journeys, so much more than what gets truncated into a journal article at the end. You can hear me talk more about this here, and I have also worked to frame the whole journey and its complexities as a critical form of impact when evaluating this type of research. And while I never did get to be the connector for the community research projects my work helped fund, my zeal for supporting grassroots community based knowledge work hasn’t abated, and nor has my curiosity for the whole journey and how it can be mapped and shared.
What I am thinking about now is how much I have learned in these connective roles, and how much this in fact constitutes a whole stream of new knowledge in and of itself. In reading 191 applications for the Community Research Network fund, I learned a great deal about how communities are configuring themselves around knowledge work across the UK, what needs they have, and how they are conceiving of new ways of researching that challenge power and fight oppression. This was revealing of different kinds of innovation, new ways of working, which can’t be valued if they are not visible. In reading expressions of interest and interviewing for our Community Data Campaigns, I feel I have had a glimpse of a rich world of community driven data action, and I am hungry to learn more.
Current narratives about the development of AI and related innovations centre entirely on large scale actors, engaged in top-down, often extractive, practices with narrow ideas of how these technologies should be shaped. Other kinds of work are not seen, so cannot be held up as alternatives.
Community groups are working to collect and steward their own community data, to challenge harmful data practices, to rethink how data categorises us and identifies us. They are configuring themselves in new ways to challenge old entrenched power imbalances, and work towards new visions of futures where our data and technology collectively empowers us. By working with five such groups, I am learning about so much possibility and potential. I want to start to chart what I am learning, to map these community action landscapes, and render them visible.
Mapping of specific practices, such as current work by the Ada Lovelace Institute on participatory data stewardship, point to the possibility of, and value in, charting specific aspects of community data and AI ecosystems. However, there is a surprising dearth of wider charting of community based data and AI action to be found, leaving the landscape of this work unknown, and the stories and impacts of these groups unsung. I would not expect to see a comprehensive map of actors (any attempt at which would be inherently limited and would be problematic in who was left out). But I can see the need for a typology, exploring the configurations of community around data and AI work, and highlighting their innovative practices. As part of this I think there is a need for co-designed methods of charting their impacts, reflecting what impact means within communities rather than seeking to apply prescriptive impact assessments from without.
In undertaking some of this exploration, I find my answer to my question to myself - in supporting, I am doing.
My personal research practice has coalesced into investigating and learning by supporting the learning and investigation of others. I don’t quite have a name for this, but it fits very comfortably into my Paolo Freire inspired Critical Theorists’ shoes. Instead of doing research about communities, I aim to support and help network community groups in their work, and help to chart their landscape and surface their strengths.
Top-down approaches to data and AI, and indeed to making communities trust them, proliferate. In my view, the real potential and power lie in the opposite direction. Instead of pursuing technological development and arguing it should (or just inevitably will) be accepted, I see the truly radical innovation path in supporting the work being done at the community level, and seeing truly visionary technology practice grow from those strong roots.