Databite No. 130: Sasha Costanza-Chock
Channel: Data & Society Research Institute
Date: 2020-05-06

Data & Society kicks off our online Databites series with Sasha Costanza-Chock, whose new book "Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need," re-imagines how design led by marginalized communities can become a tool to help dismantle structural inequality, advance collective liberation, and support ecological survival.

In this conversation with Data & Society’s Events Producer Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, Sasha shares her experience as a design researcher and a practitioner, highlights helpful Design Justice Network best practices, and explores how we might apply the principles of design justice to COVID-19 responses.

About the Speaker and Host
Sasha Costanza-Chock (pronouns: they/them or she/her) is a scholar, designer, and media-maker, and currently Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. They are a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Faculty Affiliate with the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and creator of the MIT Codesign Studio (codesign.mit.edu). Their work focuses on social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha’s new book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need was published by MIT Press in March 2020. Sasha is a board member of Allied Media Projects and a Steering Committee member of the Design Justice Network.

Rigoberto Lara Guzmán (pronouns: they/them or he/him) is a xicanx producer, artist, and community technologist. His work attends to the interaction of humans, objects, and the lived environment to explore coded knowledge systems and emergent ecologies. He designs experiences that facilitate situated learning and is currently unsettling socio-technical worlds at Data & Society.

About Databites
Data & Society’s “Databites” speaker series presents timely conversations about the purpose and power of technology, bridging our interdisciplinary research with broader public conversations about the societal implications of data and automation