National Science Foundation

UCI Community Credit partners with non-profit Abrazar and PhotovoiceWorldwide to capture community stories of financial struggle, resilience in photographs at an exhibit featured at a community event.

Photovoice is a community-based participatory research approach in which participants tell stories about their lived experience through photography. UCI’s Community Credit research project is using photovoice as one method to explore people’s financial lives and identify ways for financial institutions to better understand their community’s actual needs. The UCI photovoice research team included Dr. Bill Maurer, Community Credit’s Principal Investigator, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion (IMTFI); Dr. Melissa Wrapp, anthropologist and Community Credit’s postdoctoral project manager; and Jenny Fan, IMTFI manager.

In Spring 2022, Community Credit piloted the use of photovoice as a method for understanding people’s financial stories. This pilot included public listening sessions and discussions of the methodology, which were attended by local nonprofits, credit unions, and community members. Among the attendees was Abrazar (“to embrace” in Spanish), a non-profit serving residents in Orange County. Abrazar offers a range of services, including a 12–18-month financial empowerment program for low-income residents known as SparkPoint OC. After participating in Community Credit’s public listening sessions, Abrazar was interested in exploring the use of photovoice within this program, both as a beneficial experience for clients and as a program evaluation tool. So, following on their first pilot, in Fall 2022 the UCI team partnered with Abrazar to run an online photovoice training for SparkPoint clients and coaches: “Embrace, Educate, Empower: An Abrazar-UCI Photovoice Project on Financial Security with PhotovoiceWorldwide.”

This second photovoice project included seventeen participants made up of Abrazar clients, financial coaches, and nonprofit leadership. Participants met for four two-hour sessions, simultaneously interpreted in Spanish and English, in which they learned about the ethics and practical elements of using photography as a research tool. Over the period of several weeks, participants took photos to explore the concept of financial security: what it looks like, how it’s created, and how does one feel when thinking about money. The questions used to guide participant-researchers also focused on understanding their hopes for the financial future and lessons they have learned from participating in the SparkPoint OC program.

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.

Smartphones and other mobile platforms are increasingly being used to access financial services. This is especially the case for the underbanked population who rely on prepaid cards and mobile applications to send and receive funds. In this process, financial service platforms are also becoming content platforms, while banks and credit unions continue to lose ground to financial technology (fintech) services and apps, and to other fringe services. Unfortunately, this shift is also contributing to the spread of disinformation about finance. This project seeks to address a particular harm to minoritized communities arising as a result of disinformation, viz, the harm of being excluded from financial services.

Almost all extant research on disinformation has focused on political communications. Most studies have also focused on the white population in particular, younger white men as producers of disinformation and the older white population as consumers and spreaders of political disinformation. New research suggests that there are racial asymmetries in the circulation of disinformation. Recognizing that humans are social creatures who learn in social groupings and epistemic communities, modeling the spread of disinformation in networks of varying structures provides insight into which social structures best provide resilience against bad information. Social learning models can also help explain how groups can place trust in other group members on widely divergent topics or domains of knowledge or belief. Such models can inform the design of new epistemic communities. This project focuses on disinformation and misinformation about money, banking, and finance among racialized and marginalized communities in the United States. It seeks to address such dis- and misinformation through a convergence science approach.

New forms of cooperative organizational structures will be explored to address the issue, proceeding from the notion that disinformation is a social problem requiring a societal response, including new institutions to track and confront disinformation and new forms of inclusive democratic participation in the process. The project will partner with the U.S. credit union system as a laboratory for cooperative democracy and will pilot a community-driven forum for a) monitoring misinformation and disinformation and developing appropriate approaches to counter it; and b) empowering people to deal with the rapid rise of digital credit scoring and other algorithmic processes in financial services. In doing so, the cooperative model of the credit union system will be harnessed for modeling trustworthy and authentic information sharing as part of democratic practice.

Project partners include community organizations focused on racial economic equity who will provide their expertise and assist in the development of new models for understanding and addressing disinformation. A model infrastructure for digital inclusion will be piloted, that will ensure that it does not itself become a form of predatory inclusion. Trusted information flows will be developed that deal with issues of mistrust. In addition to the credit union network, the project partnership also includes PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity, and the Filene Research Institute for enhancing the financial capabilities of minoritized households.

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 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 and IMTFI Director Bill Maurer.

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

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.

Bitcoin is the most famous of several new online, cryptographic currency or electronic payment system experiments based on an open-source database protocol referred to as a blockchain. The blockchain permits transactions to take place without a central authority, relying instead on a decentralized network of peers verifying and authorizing them. It permits "trust" without trusted third-parties or mediators. In addition, Bitcoin and systems like it are membership-based means of value transfer and only work if people actively join them. This project examines new forms of private digital currency, exploring shifts in blockchain-based systems, and how innovators and regulators have participated in, advanced, and challenged them. The research examines how a new cadre of corporate and regulatory professionals are creating, understanding, monitoring, and regulating blockchain-based experiments in payment and in legal services. Studying the interface between law and technology, this research is important not just for what it will reveal about law and regulation in the context of rapid technological change. It is also important because innovations with the bitcoin protocol raise broad questions about the changing nature of money, property, and law, and throw open for debate questions lawmakers thought settled at the end of the 19th century about the state's role in issuing money and the nature of contract. Broader impacts include training of graduate students and the creation and opening of a public-facing portal to a database and archive of compiled regulatory, policy, and industry documents.As bitcoin-like systems move into the domain of law to create law-like substitutes, this research is designed to answer several questions. Do new digital currencies create new social and economic exclusions? What do these innovations say about changing understandings of money and law? What happens when new corporate entrants into payment imagine they are innovating in money, not just its transmission, and seek to "disrupt" not just payment, but professions like notaries and escrow agents? How do regulators respond to concomitant challenges to the public interest in payment and in law itself? The principal research activities are interviews with lawyers, regulators, and payments industry professionals, participant-observation at industry conferences, and code walkthroughs during which the researcher will follow programmers as they build new functionality into the blockchain.