Gender, Race, and Disability

1
Gender, Race, and Disability

• Group Information Rights
• Mathiesen
• Spring 2007

2
Review

• Information Rights The information prerequisites
  for living a minimally good life.
• These prerequisites may include
• Rights related to flow from--opportunities to
  speak or express ones (or ones groups) point
  of view and to control access to this expression.
  
• Rights related to flow to--access to
  information relevant to individuals (or groups)
  needs.
• Rights related to flow about--ability to have
  at least some control over access to information
  about the individual (or group).
• This may include a right that accurate
  information about the group be available to
  outsiders.

3
Why Groups are Important

• Some groups have their own lives, i.e.,
  cultures which may be have information
  prerequisites.
• Indigenous peoples
• Ethnic/cultural groups
• People may have information needs based on their
  shared positions within society (i.e., due to
  past or current oppression or discrimination.)
• Women
• Racial groups, e.g., African-Americans, Hispanics
• Gay, bisexual, transgenderd
• Persons may have various similarities in their
  information needs based on shared
  characteristics.
• Persons with Disabilities
• Children and Teens

4
Overview

• Lessons from the Conference
• Attribution Groups
• Feminism as a Social Movement and Paradigm
• Institutional and Unconscious Racism
• Social Construction
• People with Disabilities

5
All I need to know I learned at the Roundtable

• Listening
• Listen to others with an open mind and heart.
• You dont have to agree with someone to learn
  from them.
• Language
• Be aware of how your language privileges certain
  perspectives and values.
• Learn others language and interpret their
  statements charitably.
• Multiple Points of View
• Invite those who disagree to speak and be o.k.
  with some conflict.
• Overlapping Consensus
• Dont try to force agreement.
• Seek for shared values and principles.

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From Cultural Groups to Attribution Groups

• In the first part of the course we mostly focused
  on cultural groups.
• Cultural groups--those people that form a
  community around a shared language, set of
  values, traditions, etc.
• The last part of the course we will focus on
  Attribution groups.
• Attribution group--those persons who share a
  common socially significant designation.
• These persons may or may not form a shared
  culture on the basis of this designation.

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Feminism as a Paradigm

• A social movement
• Feminism is a belief that women and men are
  inherently of equal worth. Because most societies
  privilege men as a group, social movements are
  necessary to achieve equality between women and
  men, with the understanding that gender always
  intersects with other social hierarchies
  (Estelle Freedman 2002, p. 7)

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From Oppression of Women to Oppression of Anyone

• "Feminism is
• (a) a belief that women universally face some
  form of oppression or exploitation
• (b) a commitment to uncover and understand what
  causes and sustains oppression, in all its forms
  
• (c) a commitment to work individually and
  collectively in everyday life to end all forms of
  oppression" (Maguire, 1987, p. 79).

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Feminism as a research methodology

• As a critique
• As feminism challenges traditional social
  science research, it supports its arguments by
  recognizing that patriarchal values and beliefs
  in our social world shape both the construction
  and definition of how research is done and how
  knowledge is determined (Brayton, Jennifer
  1997).
• "The overt ideological goal of feminist research
  in the human sciences is to correct both the
  invisibility and distortion of female experience"
  (Lather, 1988, p. 571)

10
Feminist Research Method

• As a positive perspective
• Feminist research
• actively seeks to remove the power imbalance
  between research and subject
• it is be politically motivated and has a major
  role in changing social inequality
• it begins with the standpoints and experiences of
  women(Brayton 1997).
• May include 1 and 2, without specifically
  focusing on 3, e.g., George Nicholas approach
  to archaeology.

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Epistemological Principles of Feminist Research

• 5 Epistemological Principles of Feminist
  Research
• taking women and gender as the focus of analysis
• consciousness raising (feminist researcher
  inhabits a double world of women/researcher and
  brings feminist knowledge into process).
• rejecting the distinction between subject and
  object (valuing the knowledge held by the
  participant as being expert knowledge notes how
  research valued as objective is still biased)
• a concern with ethics (e.g., how research is
  used)
• an intention to empower women and change power
  relations and inequality
• (Cook and Fonow, 1986, cited in Brayton).

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Unconscious and Institutionalized Racism

• I assume that we all think it is wrong to be
  prejudiced against someone based on their race.
• This isnt enough
• Institutional Racism
• Unconscious Racism

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Institutional Racism

• In a lecture on Race and Law, Curran and Takate
  define Institutional Racism as follows
• Institutional discrimination is that
  discrimination that occurs simply because the
  rules and expectations were set when some
  privileged group was in control. Those not
  belonging to the privileged group find that they
  are harmed by the rules and expectations, but
  that it is "not personal," in the sense that no
  person is discriminating against them as
  individuals. The discrimination of the past
  simply led to rules that now do the same
  discriminating, but without a perpetrator.
  (Institutional racism is institutional
  discrimination based on race.)
• Examples of institutional racism standardized
  tests, standards of speech, dress, hairstyles,
  old boy (or girl) networks.

14
Unconscious Racism

• Numerous studies conducted by Greenwald and
  Banjali show that most people have unconscious
  racial (and other) prejudices.
• To see how these studies work, take the Implicit
  Association Test.
• The results of these studies are very robust see
  e.g., http//www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/10
  /981012074004.htm

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Project Implicit Reports the Following Results

• Findings observed in seven years of operation of
  the Project Implicit web site
• Implicit biases are pervasive.
• They appear as statistically "large" effects that
  are often shown by majorities of samples of
  Americans. Over 80 of web respondents show
  implicit negativity toward the elderly compared
  to the young 75-80 of self-identified Whites
  and Asians show an implicit preference for racial
  White relative to Black.

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People are often unaware of their implicit biases.

• Ordinary people, including the researchers who
  direct this project, are found to harbor negative
  associations in relation to various social groups
  (i.e., implicit biases) even while honestly (the
  researchers believe) reporting that they regard
  themselves as lacking these biases.

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Implicit biases predict behavior

• From simple acts of friendliness and inclusion to
  more consequential acts such as the evaluation of
  work quality, those who are higher in implicit
  bias have been shown to display greater
  discrimination. The published scientific evidence
  is rapidly accumulating. Over 200 published
  scientific investigations have made use of one or
  another version of the IAT.

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People differ in levels of implicit bias

• Implicit biases vary from person to person - for
  example as a function of the persons group
  memberships, the dominance of a persons
  membership group in society, consciously held
  attitudes, and the level of bias existing in the
  immediate environment. This last observation
  makes clear that implicit attitudes are modified
  by experience.

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Social Construction

• What does it mean to say that social identities
  such as gender, race, disability, etc. are
  social constructions?
• Social identities are
• (1) ways that others see us and, thus, shape the
  expectations and interpretations of others,
• (2) ways we see ourselves, and. Thus, shape our
  expectations and interpretations of ourselves.
• How do they work?
• We are not good at accurately reporting our own
  or others reasons for acting. We choose from the
  array of socially current scripts--based on
  social identities.

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The Power of Labels, Stories, Framework, etc.

• Delgado notes how categorization schemes can
  blind us to real problems/issues (p. 219-220).
• This shows the power of knowledge and stories and
  the power of how knowledge is structured and
  presented.
• Points out the importance of libraries and other
  information resources and the crucial role of
  information professionals

21
Disabilities

• It may seem like a disability just is. How could
  it be a social construction?
• Like other social identities, it structures a set
  of expectations and interpretations.
• What counts as a disability depends on context.
• In some contexts a disability may be linked to an
  ability that others dont have
• E.g., at a loud concert being deaf and able to
  use sign language is an ability that the hearing
  dont have.
• A features counts as a disability because of how
  the environment as been designed.
• E.g., if all books were on shelves above 6 feet
  high with no ladders or step-stools, then people
  shorter than 6 feet would have a disability.

22
Justice and Group Information Rights

• Why should we spend funds to make our library
  more accessible?
• Rawlss (1971) second principle of justice is
  that we ought to distribute resources so as to
  make the least well off better.
• Our infrastructure is shaped in ways that work
  for normal people, but not so well disabled
  persons.
• Thus, arguably disabled persons are some of the
  least well off persons.

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References

• Brayton, Jennifer. 1997. What makes Feminist
  Research Feminist? ?The Structure of Feminist
  Research ?within the Social Sciences
  
• Cook, J. and Fonow, M. M. (1986). "Knowledge and
  Women's Interests Issues of Epistemology and
  Methodology in Feminist Sociological Research".
  Sociological Inquiry, 56 (4) 2-29.
• Curran, Jeane Takata, Susan. Summary Lecture on
  Race, Black Men, and the Law. Dear Habermas.
  
  
• Freedman, Estelle B. 2002. No Turning Back The
  History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New
  York Ballantine Books.
• Lather, P. (1988). "Feminist Perspective on
  Empowering Research Methodologies". Womens
  Studies International Forum, 11 (6) 569-581.
• Maguire, P. 1987. Doing Feminist Participatory
  Research. Amherst, Massachusetts Centre for
  International Education.
• Project Implicit. index.php Accessed 4/5/07