Disinheritance [electronic resource] : design, agency, and the art of clever work-arounds; studies from Zimbabwe
Keywords: Education.

The language used to describe exclusion and deprivation relies on spatial metaphors. "They"—the poor, the oppressed, the Other—are in a position that distances, alienates, marginalizes them. But life and work on the "margins" often entails learning work-arounds rather than dismantling oppressive systems. Contrary to the spatial metaphors, the so-called "marginalized" are not relegated to the periphery of the social structures that oppress them, rather they are operating within, through, and around these systems. This dissertation explores the mental models for finding clever work-arounds, a complex cognitive function that I call disinheritance. Disinheritance builds on Vygotsky's notion of mediation by cultural artifacts, but incorporates an understanding of how mediation is not always a smooth flow. Vygotsky describes cultural artifacts as the tools mediating between subject and object. Cultural artifacts intellectualize behaviour, and encode social values into how the world is perceived. The theory of disinheritance starts by recognizing that mediation is marked by interferences, disruptions in flow, and spontaneous failures in processes of decoding and encoding. In communication theory ruptures of this kind are attributed to noise artifacts. Noise artifacts are the spatio-temporal or visual jumps ("skipping") in the message conveyed by a medium. They generate voids in meaning. The study of noise artifacts in media and art has shown that interferences create new forms of usability. Disinheritance, then, is the process of leveraging as "cultural artifacts" alternative meanings that disruption (noise artifacts) generate. The implications of this are two-fold. First, if noise artifacts are an integral part of how technologies function, then the use of "noisy" or dysfunctional technologies must be better understood. This study is set in Zimbabwe where the dysfunction, breakdown, and disorder of technologies and infrastructure is especially conspicuous and evokes a particularly vibrant material experience. The goal is to unpack how conceptions of the world coalesce around the broken, and dysfunctional technologies at the centre of three case studies. This objective calls for dialogue with informants about their take on citizenship, modes of living, and how technologies shape their subjectivity. I augment these personal narratives with rich ethnographic data, multimedia exploration, and design-based research. This emphasizes a combination of research methods that can bring "blind spots" into relief. In this dissertation, informants are analyzing how technologies affect the livelihoods of those around them, exploring the social implications of technologies, and collaborating on creating new technologies that they see as social interventions. The methodological approach is to bring analytical techniques from different disciplines into conversation with each other. The first case study outlines the disinheritance framework by focusing on the kombi, a vehicle used to provide informal or illicit transportation for those unserved by formal bus services—over half of the world's population. Traditionally, large surveys, participant observation, and interviews have been used to understand informal transport. Taking a cognitive approach enriches the discourse on informality with accounts of the role the technology plays in shaping conceptions of the everyday. The approach is to prompt Zimbabwean informants to come up with conceptions of the kombi experience by articulating empathetic observations of the commuter life and using these insights to drive the design of new technological solutions, a process called needfinding. My analysis of those conversations and conceptual blocks incorporates the semiotic square, a tool more common to literary and media studies, to understand the spectrum of conflicting but co-existing realities for kombi passengers. This approach to analysis helps to show the ambiguity of statuses such as "victim" or "beneficiary." That is, the semiotics open up the possibility for passengers to simultaneously have agency and be vulnerable. My finding is that, informants flash from "seeing" passengers through different socially structured gazes or competing "fields of visibility" to "seeing as themselves." Disinheritance is that flashing between conflicting conceptions and it indicates that agency is perceptual. The second case study focuses on a musical instrument, mbira, an indigenous Zimbabwean technology dated back to the Iron Age. The instrument is designed to interlace melodic musical signals with multiple layers of noise such as buzzing and sympathetic vibrations, creating a rich profusion of sounds that is perceived as a gestalt. From the perspective of ethnomusicology research, the buzzing quality of mbira has received much attention because of its unique psychoacoustic registers and cultural symbolism—that is, the modes of perception of sound between the ear and brain, and their social significance in the context of rituals. The mbira sounds that are paid attention to in this gestalt point to how distinctions between what counts as "music", "noise", and "interference" are sustained and given meaning by mbira's various listeners. I use situated cognition theory as a lens for examining the mediation of interference in mbira. I examine (1) the technological design of the instrument; (2) the kinds of listening activity that take shape around it; and (3) the social contexts that structure techniques for discerning "music" out of mbira's ambiguous complex sounds. I also discuss the multimedia formats that make mbira accessible and meaningful to its audiences all across the globe. I emphasize interferences in transmission because the interruptedness, not flow, is a mechanism for fostering intersubjectivity between players and listeners. This case study integrates ethnographic methods with deep multimedia analysis of mbira jam sessions. I examine video and audio footage using exploratory manipulations of the media files, media excavations, collected during the jam sessions. Like archaeological digs, these excavations unearth elements of the whole that are not perceptible from the surface. Using media software, I build back the noise and interferences into the jam session to construct a complete soundscape of the music being produced. This generates an even more "complete" mbira gestalt that takes into account the place where the mbira is recorded, how the musicians inhabit that space, and their intersubjective relationships with instrument, with sound, with the bodies of co-participants, and with the omnipresence of their local community. Again, in this case study, participants are flashing from self to group in their modes of attending to the jam session. The final case study focuses on a prototyping session during which six Zimbabwean medical professionals design a prosthetic device. Prototyping helps the team determine which features must be built into the prosthetic while also amplifying social tensions between team members. The low fidelity prototype is a rough tool, a goal and a motive for the team's activity. It helps the team to determine what concrete features must be built into the prosthetic. The prototype not only choreographs what the team members are doing; it also makes different future uses of the device imaginable. I use the state of disrepair of the team's prototyping materials to tease out the distinct layers of perceptual reasoning that are instilled into cultural artifacts. My methodological approach is design-based research: the participants are prompted to create a prototype which will allow them to think about their invention in a structured way while also revealing the processes and conceptual blocks they encounter. I analyse the talk shaped around the prototype: the bids, scaffolds and content of the discussion. This approach reveals how the team's patterns of reasoning are loaded onto the prototype. It also exposes how social relations between the participants, and their user are also encoded into the technology being constructed. In this team, gendered assertions that are not directly related to the prototyping task but are happening around and outside of the actual prototyping session, exert, from afar, influence over the dynamics of the team. The team members flash from seeing the prototype through these gendered social conceptions to seeing the object for the new social encounters it could create for its users. In all three case studies, the combination of ethnography, design thinking (needfinding and prototyping), and design-based research, with visual and audio analysis is especially useful for zooming in on the how noise artifacts are compounding or mediating the way my informants relate to technologies. My findings support the notion that clever work-arounds are the result of cognitive shifts, not simply economic rationale. The notion of perceptual agency used to describe how musicians attend to different elements of an ensemble applies to all kinds of interactions with technology. In each case study, perceptual agency is a critical part of how informants flash back and forth between multiple subjective stances. Being disinherited is an awareness of the noise or interferences in mediation that finds strategic ways of opening up new possibilities. The framework allows us to think about how government policy, international development, colonial histories, and sovereignty ("social structure") intersect with the experiences and personal styles of engagement of the individuals who live in the material conditions those structures produce ("subjectivity"). It is also a question of a "blind spot" that relegates informal activity as underground or unseen, where in reality it is the very fibre of the urban experience in global cities. Disinheritance accounts for the cunning of subjects without using spatial metaphors. It ass ... .