October 2, 2023
Dr. Aakash Gautam, (assistant professor, Department of Computer Science, Department of Information Culture and Data Stewardship) has been thinking about the importance of communities throughout his life.
As a teenager living in Nepal during the Nepali Civil War, Aakash’s intellectual development was deeply informed by the conditions he saw in his home country. He saw issues stemming from “justification around poverty” and “poor governance policies that affected people, especially in rural areas, who would not receive the support of the government.” Because of the dire conditions he observed in the community around him, “iniquity became a central focus [of mine], and I became interest in thinking about how we challenge these iniquities.”
As a high school student, he led an organization that worked to establish a library because he “thought that formal education would be helpful challenging these inequities and effecting structural changes.” “The library was for a community in Dailekh district in Nepal. It was established within the only school in that area. We collected books that were donated by family and friends, and many local organizations and took them to Dailekh,” he said.
As a college student, Aakash saw that computing “had power and could bring changes that could be leveraged toward greater structural change.”
These reflections on the role of community and ways to bring about structural change at different stages in his life would inform Aakash’s career as a researcher and educator.
In the present, Aakash’s work focuses on how computer scientists can conduct community-based research in an equitable and responsible manner. Aakash is committed to producing research that addresses the structural problems surrounding a community. In his view, the relationship between researchers and the communities that they study has typically been to the benefit of the former.
“Academic research is often extractive or exploitative,” he said. “We go into a community to conduct research with community members, and come back and publish papers, then give talks in venues that are often influential and inform policies. We become experts of these communities and there’s very little for them to gain back.”
Aakash wants to change this dynamic by shifting how academics have typically engaged communities during the process of conducting their research. As he puts it, the central question of his research is “how do we work with communities, such that the systems we collectively design support their vision for the future?”
Aakash’s approach to community-based design stems from a concern for groups “that have been historically marginalized, both in society and in technological design.” He aims to work with communities by exploring approaches that enable them to develop the “agency to shape the technology for themselves.”
He is critical of what he identified as a “technology-first approach” to computing research, in which researchers try to construct novel artifacts without considering the broader practical implications that those artifacts could have when implemented. In contrast, he said that a “community-first approach” means “working with a community and understanding their values, then thinking about what technology can do, if anything at all.”
For Aakash, an important part of the process of conducting this kind of research is asking communities about the assets they already possess. This, he contends, helps to reduce the role of power differences in interactions between the researchers and the community, which is essential in fostering sustainable community-based research.
“In community-based design, to the extent that it’s possible, researchers should not have so much power,” Aakash said. “There is a very valid role for academics to play, which is asking ‘how can we support what is already going on well?’”
His perspective on community-based design is informed by work from the fields of science and technology studies, participatory design, and feminist human-computer interaction theory. “[These theoretical approaches] center power and politics in the design [of a system],” he said. “Computing is a form of power. It’s not apolitical.”
As for how this research impacts SCI students, Aakash is teaching CS 2637: Human-Computing Interaction, a graduate-level course, for the fall 2023 semester. He has also proposed a seminar course on public infrastructures and community-based work for the spring term.
“I bring in my own research interest [to my classes], which is thinking about working with communities and understanding community values,” he said. “We’ll also talk about methods and approaches to do so, as well as develop a more philosophical understanding of what community-based research would look like.”
Aakash noted that many of his SCI colleagues were similarly interested in community-based research. “We all share a common belief around what is important in community-based work and in design work. And so, all of that should be very interesting for students.”
Looking back upon the path that led him to SCI, Aakash said that he sees his own growth as a scholar as “an ongoing journey.” “I hope I have grown over the years, learning and sometimes unlearning from my experiences. I have been lucky in many respects to find mentors and collaborators who have been willing to guide me, and the opportunity to be at SCI with colleagues who care about similar issues as I do is exciting.”
--Daniel Beresheim