National Science Foundation

Encouraging critical multidisciplinary collaboration, learning, and mentorship duly grounded in community engagement, this National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Experience (NSF-REU) brought together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers in anthropology, computer science, and informatics to understand how organizations that serve minoritized communities conceptualize and utilize data in pursuing justice across various domains. The research aimed to uncover assumptions built into data infrastructures and how they shape the relationships between community organizations, the communities they serve, and the issues they engage with.

Five undergraduate students participated in this 25-week learning, mentorship, and research experience aimed to critically expose them to methods and issues surrounding data and computing practices. They read and discussed literature across disciplines, designed and populated a database of case studies, interviewed and engaged with community organizers, and wrote & presented scholarly output, all the while critically reflecting on their experiences as students, researchers, and future computing professionals.

This online presentation shares the findings and deliverables of the undergraduates together with their experiences and reflections on their research, the program, and more broadly, the role of ethics in computing education and practice.

Presented by:

Undergraduate researchers: Sion Avakian, Stuti Rana, Manasi Shingane, Kevin Vasques; Graduate Student Researchers: Benedict (Bono) Salazar Olgado and Lucy Pei. Principal Investigators for the 2019-2020 NSF REU: Professor Roderic Crooks, Dean Bill Maurer

Community Credit is a collaborative research project at UC Irvine that seeks to connectminoritized and financially underserved communities with credit unions for the purpose of building trust and developing more equitable financial products that address the specific needs of the community.

The UCI photovoice research team included Melissa Wrapp, UCI anthropology Ph.D. ’21 and postdoctoral project manager; Ellen Garnett Kladky, anthropology graduate student; Bryan Truitt, visual studies graduate student; and Jenny Fan, Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion manager. Photovoice is one method being used within this larger project, which also includes: listening sessions, ethnographic interviews, surveying, financial landscaping, decision modeling, deep data marketing analysis, and more. PhotovoiceWorldwide has been a vital partner to Community Credit, offering consulting, training, and facilitation throughout 2021-22.The following report, by Ellen Garnett Kladky, Ph.D. candidate, University of California, Irvine, details the team’s efforts. Original source: PhotovoiceWorldwide.

This Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) was an interdisciplinary collaborative research exercise, bringing together the technical expertise in Computer Science withapplication, grounding, and methodologies used in Anthropology. The student researchers were given training in Anthropoloy research framings and techniques, which they utilized in their reserch and cataloguing.