Leveraging Transformative Justice in Organizing Collective Action Towards Community Safety
Ishita Chordia
Abstract
Criminologists and sociologists have documented the ways that technologies for community safety can perpetuate structural racism. Among these include policing technologies that encode Black criminality [4] and surveillance technologies which extends the reach of the carceral state [17]. Fortunately prior work in HCI has also investigated how the design of technologies for community safety can resist structural racism by employing strategies that stand as alternatives to traditional policing activities, including story-telling, community-building, and care practices [10, 11, 25, 27]. This body of work amplifies the practices of community organizations and employs their expertise to build safer community. I contribute to this body of research and ask how technologies can empower a layperson in the goal of building safer communities. This is an area of great potential— just as community policing technologies extend the reach of traditional policing, new technologies can be designed to extend the reach of community organizations aiming to dismantle oppressive social structures. Towards this goal, I leverage Transformative Justice (TJ), a community-based approach to addressing violence which asks us to not only examine the ways in which our current systems, structures, and norms perpetuate harm, but to also dismantle and replace those systems so that the conditions that enabled the harm are transformed. In this paper, I describe the current state of research, the principles of TJ, my goals for the PhD, and where I would benefit from further support.