About Tech Justice Lab
The Tech Justice Lab (TJL), housed in the Belonging, Equity, and Inclusion Unit of the John Martinson Honors College at Purdue, is a cross-college collaboration that prioritizes the development of interdisciplinary, justice-oriented undergraduate technology researchers and practitioners. The TJL builds on the Honors College’s mission of fostering well-rounded and highly engaged students, equipped with the interdisciplinary knowledge and skills to impact society for the better. Interested students from any discipline, with guidance from TJL affiliated faculty and peers, will develop their toolkits of critical frameworks for evaluating the ethics and social impacts of technology. The TJL seeks to empower students to carry out projects that help us imagine what it means for technology to be “just,” and to envision ways to change how technologies are designed, implemented, evaluated, and/or contested, in order to bring about a more just future.
Major Goals:
- To create a community of education, research, and practice that allows students and faculty to work across disciplinary, organizational, and cultural boundaries in order to address unequal distributions of technological harms and benefits in society.
- to cultivate students’ capacities for critical thinking, self-reflexivity, and responsiveness concerning how historical and present-day power relations impact the research, design, development, and application of technology.
- to build upon existing efforts to diversify STEM majors at Purdue—both representationally and epistemologically—through the development of interdisciplinary curricula, inclusive mentorship practices, and campus-wide events that center the justice-related implications of technological design, development, and implementation.
- To support all students in acquiring both the social and technical knowledge needed for making critical interventions into tech justice.
Major Principles:
JUSTICE
From the increasing role of algorithms in the criminal legal system, to the use of biometrics and automation for public services, to big data in healthcare and insurance, to new technologies for warfare, managing borders, and monitoring the environment, technology plays a key role in structuring social life. Scholars from a range of fields have documented the significant implications of technology within systems of social and economic inequality, and the need for more robust technology ethics education and practice. The lab draws inspiration from several calls to focus on “justice,” in particular, given the ways justice provokes a reckoning with how technology is implicated in the distribution of economic, political, and social rights and opportunities. In the TJL, we grapple with how technology is deeply entangled in its historical, social, and environmental context in order to imagine more just futures. We work to be mindful of the ways our vision provides partial perspectives, to be accountable for our projects, and to be self-aware about their possibilities and limitations.
DIVERSITY
Currently, at many institutions, technical competency is often split from the social, political, and ideological world. STEM curricula that privilege instrumental, abstracted, and efficient techniques at the expense of social and ethical considerations limits students’ knowledge of the broader systems technical practice is embedded within. Underrepresented minoritized students often leave STEM due to dissatisfaction with the social and epistemic cultures of these fields. Furthermore, AI Now researchers have explicitly linked the diversity crisis in STEM to the prevalence of biased and discriminatory digital technologies in society. There is a significant lack in needed diverse perspectives and contextual insights for addressing the injustice that technological practices all too often perpetuate. Thus, one of the major aims of the TJL is to support and build upon existing efforts to develop research initiatives, mentorship practices, curricula, and campus-wide events that center the justice-related implications of technological design, development, and implementation, and support students from diverse backgrounds and experiences in making critical interventions.
INTERDISCIPLINARITY
An interdisciplinary approach to technology ethics that is inclusive of the most incisive and critical theoretical approaches at our disposal allows for a more robust engagement with the social and ethical implications of technology. Students need to be able to work across disciplinary, organizational, and cultural boundaries in order to address unjust distributions of technological risk, harm, benefit, and reward in society. Through participation in the TJL, students from across STEM and non-STEM disciplines will develop their awareness of critical frameworks for evaluating the ethics and social impacts of technologies that center questions of power, perspective, and politics, where politics is understood as the work of structuring how problems are conceived, how decisions are made, and how advantages and disadvantages are distributed across the social field.
