Question 1: What technologies are you working with, or have you worked with?

At DUSP, I currently lead Hacking the Archive, a hands-on civic adventure that aims to co-design the next 50 years of equity-driven social action. We crowdsource history-infused solutions to community-defined challenges, expanding the traditional conventions of archival research and disrupting narrow academic conceptions of knowledge creation. The main technology that Hacking the Archive is engaged with is the technology of bringing people together. We’re interested in how you gather people and ideas, and foster exchange. We think beyond the classical notion of technology as being a particular tool or a thing. We see technology as an approach. We cultivate a unique approach to sharing ideas, reviewing the past, thinking about future strategies, and actively co-creating with the community. Truly inclusive futures really begin with how we gather people. 

Reimagining technology as a way of doing things serves as a call for people to rethink what they’re trying to solve, and invite them to consider how they approach problems. How do community organizers and activists think about their current needs? We offer an opportunity for activists and community members to evaluate their own ways of thinking by looking at the past, at social memories and social movements. The archive serves as a way to frame or uncover what we understand about the past, and we’re bringing that forward as a means of bringing people together and imagining new futures.  

Gathering people is so important in a world that is so disconnected. We're also dealing with communities that often have been displaced because of neighborhood clearance, gentrification, and sometimes war. The effects of displacement are significant, so having a way to bring people together across these spatial divisions and displacements becomes really important. 

What we’ve found is that communities that tend to be over-represented in large scale plans of removal, displacement and clearance are underrepresented in the archives. So how do you think about that tension? How does this impact the way that people remember their lived experiences, what they encountered, and how they're trying to pass their stories forward? Over the last few years, we’ve been thinking about the racial wealth gap and economic justice in particular, and how to weave these histories forward. These are not new struggles, nor are they new ideas. The real technology is gathering the people, gathering these kinds of information, and recognizing them as important to people. We recognize social memory and collective memory as a kind of data that is at the center of building really durable and lasting future realities.

Question 2: How do you take account of MIT’s obligation to pursue the public interest in the work that you do? 

I think we are obligated to think about the past and harms that have been experienced by marginalized communities. We use the language of marginalization to describe communities that have been displaced or communities that have been harmed by planning, by policy, and by ideas, some of which are generated by places like MIT or places that are trying to perform in the public interest. Without the public being inside of those conversations and defining what needs to happen and when, and without institutions recognizing the harms that have been caused, it's almost impossible to perform any kind of corrective. 

For me, the notion of equity is as much a value as it is a process and an outcome. It’s really important to make sure that we are entering into a set of interventions and conversations that are corrective of past harms, that are mindful in particular of the tradition of anti-black racism and how that penetrates through particular modes of scholarship and planning traditions. Unless we root out these kinds of intersectional oppressions that are based on gender, race, sex, religion, nationality, etc., and how that influences our decision-making, then we run the risk of perpetuating some of what we know we've gotten wrong before. We also continue to erode the trust with communities that have been historically harmed. 

So the obligation is to think about a much higher level of ethical decision-making that has to do with the processes that our research enables as well as the particular outcomes that our findings anchor. How we bring ethics to bear into our practices, our research, and our relationships is very important.

Question 3: What more could you and others do to help MIT team meet its social obligation to pursue public interest technology?

Technology is just a tool, and it can have any number of uses. Technology itself is not necessarily bad. This is part of what we do. MIT continues to be a leader in the work of understanding new ways of thinking, and of building new tools that can help humanity. If that is what our calling is, then we have to be in a conversation with communities that have often been extracted from, populations that have often been in the path of what we think are good ideas. 

I think often about the interstate highway system and the resulting fights. So much of my scholarship has been rooted there. On the face of it, the creation of the Interstate Highway System seems like it could be good, right? You're connecting people. You can go faster, you can go farther than with a limited access strip of asphalt. But when we think about the communities that have been displaced and bisected by roads, it makes us think differently about planning something as basic as a street or a road or a highway. The technology itself, a highway, could be understood as somewhat beneficial. But whose interests are represented in this technology, in this approach, in this roadway? In whose interest is this being built? Then we have to think a little bit more carefully. What are we building and whom is it for, whose power, whose resources, whose social position is being improved due to this technology? 

In Hacking the Archives’s work, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the ethics of bringing people together–the ethics of research, the ethics of using history as a way to better inform the creation of new plans, of new futures. We’re really mindful of the ways that we’re helping communities step into their own decision-making power, their own collective power. The work itself has at its core this idea of repairing some of these social connections and networks that have been damaged by dispersals and removal. How do you create a technology for information to flow across groups and across generations? Sometimes that can happen digitally, but it can also happen in conversation. There’s a need to bring people into meaningful dialogue and debate and understand that as a crucial knowledge circuit. For me, the sweet spot is bringing those historic circuits of data collection into this contemporary moment of people talking live, and then evaluating how digital formats can further strengthen that. The digital experience that's also grounded in a real life experience is where technology can have its greatest power and impact. It’s what we need, and what we’re striving for in the work that we do at Hacking the Archive. 

I think there is an opportunity for all practitioners, researchers, or technologists to consider these questions. In whose interest? Whose power? Whose capacities are we trying to repair or build from the ground up? How can we make new kinds of technologies, and consider tactics like crowd-sourcing, digital shares, meetups or a hackathon as a way to guide that? When we lose sight of who can be helped and what can be repaired by technology, we lose sight of our ability to get grounded and centered in the work of equity. The work of equity is always reparative, even restorative, and creates new possibilities that we may have never before imagined.

Karilyn Crockett is an Assistant Professor of Urban History, Public Policy & Planning at MIT DUSP. She earned her PhD from the American Studies program at Yale University, a Master of Science in Geography from the London School of Economics, and a Master of Arts and Religion from Yale Divinity School. Her research focuses on large-scale land use changes in twentieth century American cities and examines the social and geographic implications of structural poverty.  Her dissertation, "People Before Highways: Reconsidering Routes to and from the Boston Anti-Highway Movement," investigates a 1960s-era grassroots movement to halt urban extension of the interstate highway system, and forms the basis of her book of the same name. Prior to coming to DUSP, Karilyn served as the Director of Economic Policy and Research, and Director of Small Business Development for the City of Boston. She most recently served as the City of Boston's first Chief of Equity.