Keywords

My Background

I grew up in the predominantly Islamic-oriented Northern part of Nigeria where the culture of the Islamic religion influenced everyday interaction in our communities. I attended an all-boys boarding secondary school where before dawn we learn to recite (and memorize) the Qur’an, enrol in the usual science subjects during the day, and then end the day by studying Islamic scriptures (the Holy Qur’an, the Hadith, and other scholarly texts). During the daily three-hour Islamic lessons, we freely spoke our native mother tongue language as the Arabic language wasn’t prescribed to us. Even when the text of the Islamic religion is mostly in Arabic, we were not subject to the pedagogical conditioning that we must learn the Arabic language. We continually recited the verses of the Qur’an until we could memorize them, while other scriptures were translated and their practical implication to everyday life were discussed to aid further assimilation. At other times in college, we were, however, strictly prohibited from interacting in our mother tongue. To be Black English-like gentlemen, the orientation was that we must interact with peers in the colonizing language. As a Nigerian and a Muslim Northerner, the socially engineered mode of interaction between the British and the locals has created and cemented an Anglo-Muslim worldview for the locality. This assemblage was seeded before, grew during, and persists after the colonial era. But that’s part of our collective history and we are encouraged to move past those unfortunate episodes. Haven’t we?

To provide a bit of context, in postcolonial Nigerian history, it is evident that the British feared individuals who were both Western-educated but also Islamic trained. This is evident in structures that were established to ensure that English aristocratic in-direct rules prevailed. Part of this is the practice of restricting access to literary texts in English and Arabic in elementary and secondary schools. This way, any form of scholarly insurgence is curtailed as the locals are instructed in the native Hausa language. The effect of such pedagogical practices is that the administrative government determines what text is translated but also how they are made available and used.

The orientation I learned from childhood was not to be an African, or a ‘Blackman’. Being black was somehow regarded as wicked, inferior. I was not a Fulani Northerner and an individual with Sudanese ancestry. Sudanese were the Black ones. Having Sudanese blood was even worse. I was to be a sponsored ‘black boy’, mimicking the image of the ‘Man’, a baby boy that mirrored the ideals of the aristocratic English gentleman. I was to be an obedient boy that adopted/adapted foreign thoughts, manners, and expressions. I was somehow, despite my skin, to be ‘white’. The orientation required of me now was to be nothing but a whitened black. Put simply, developing an identity which was neither ‘othered’ nor ‘subaltern’ was challenging, to say the least. It still is. My imaginary persona suggests I either whiten and pass the brown bag test or disappear into the darkness.

The assumption is that to be an acceptable human being in the academic world, we ought to demonstrate that we are culturally and socially mature as agential human beings. The background assumption is that we are to be members of a culturally progressive Western elite. With the imposition of the ethnocentric worldview, I contend that the phenomenon of language provides a steppingstone for understanding the subtle dimensions of being-for-others; and particularly one that suggests how the more we assimilate the colonizing language, the closer we can get to unleashing our full potential. Notice that the preceding paragraphs refer to the experience and how to represent it.

As noted by Frantz Fanon, ‘a man who possesses a language possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this language…there is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language…. all colonized people position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture’ (Fanon, 2008, p. 2). The effect of defining one’s regional identity in terms of colonizing language (e.g., English-speaking African countries, or francophone Africans) is that communities develop a persona of the self that resemble the colonizer’s image. This conscious reaction of seeking recognition and affirmation from the other has inevitably asserted colour and class as a manifestation of the expression of existence, but also the dialectic of white/black as a repository for model traits, values, and characteristics. Fanon was, of course, one of the early proponents of the idea of the ‘postcolonial’ as an Africana scholarly theme. Presumably, receiving training in colonizing languages solidifies, as Fanon argues, the need to overcome the native inferiority complex by ‘using bombastic phrases in speaking and writing European language; all these contribute to a feeling of equality with the European and his achievement’ (Fanon, 2008, p. 9). As much as what is said, the problem is how it is said.

The field of human–computer interaction (HCI), for that is the discourse I’m concerned with, is maturing in its interdisciplinarity, although it has come very late to the table. It slowly widens its horizon to a range of other positionalities, epistemologies, and methodologies. These include arguments about ‘feminist’ studies in a design context; arguments about what it is to be human, our relations with the animal and non-human world, and—my interest—the postcolonial and the decolonial. My chapter, however, concentrates on the use of language rather than the analysis of structures found in the above writings. The practices of HCI can be seen as largely discursive. Michel Foucault famously, in his work on knowledge/power, showed how language itself works to create a ‘normal’ or ‘hegemonic’ set of practices. Discourses are systems of thought that condition and define our experience of the world. If we control the discourse, we control the world (or at least aspects of it). When researchers, then, practice within the established parameters of scientific knowledge production, they risk perpetuating (and reproducing) the same dynamics they wish to denounce.

In this chapter, I reflect on the subtle tensions prevalent in the domestication of diversity-sensitive approaches to HCI research when important issues such as language and power relations are taken for granted. I try to show below how attempts to write the self into HCI practice as a matter of significant political concern founder on the invisible, normalized, exercise of power in HCI discourse. The intersections of language, power, and knowledge (LPK) are embedded in everyday understandings of what we are talking about when we talk about technology. And why should we play this language game, as Wittgenstein calls it?

In defying the knowledge practices of the ‘scientific’ community, we can, in principle, provide an alternative mode of expression, one where the reader is encouraged to become more aware of the implicit danger of reading and writing in a colonizing language, one where the reader might be charged with questioning the knowledge production process of writing in HCI. Paradoxically, this remains true even when one is engaging in a ‘critical’ discourse, since even then the ‘authorities’ have to be invoked. I have no problem with the idea that some writers are viewed as ‘authoritative’ but the question remains, who decides that they are? Who decides what form critique should take, what rhetoric’s are acceptable, and why the experiences, beliefs, traditions, emotions, and feelings of someone who has actually been through it can be ignored? Why is the ‘subjective’ so discounted?

My Complaint

The English Language: In HCI, Non-US or European speakers will have frequently got reviews urging them that their work should be proofread by a native English speaker, a common phrase in CHI reviews—the flagship ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing. It is worth asking why. Are there not enough Spanish speakers? Chinese speakers? Indian subcontinent speakers? In the days of Google Translate, are mistakes so common that we cannot trust work in other languages? It must be difficult for people who are ‘native’ speakers of the English language, born and brought up in the USA or Western Europe to understand English as an imposition.

In primary school, I was shamed for not pronouncing words correctly. We were trained to snitch on each other by taking note of vernacular speakers and noise makers. The first humiliating experience in primary school was when I had to stand in front of the class and be called a fool for writing the English alphabet from the right side of the booklet and not the left. My training from the Islamic school was that we write right to left, and I thought I was doing as was taught in the Madrasa, but no, this is not the Madrasa, and this is a Western institution. The punishment for interacting with peers in the vernacular was at least six lashes of hard-core electric wire on the body. Wa Thiong'o (1992) reported the same in Kenya—in his words: ‘We carry a metal plate around the neck with the inscriptions such as I AM STUPID, or I AM A DONKEY’ (Wa Thiong'o, 1992, p. 11). I’m not suggesting that we should not be writing in English, only that some understanding of the processes through which a Nigerian Hausa speaker learns the language might help others understand why his feelings about that language and its usages might be ambivalent. Is it wrong to express feelings concerning how we’re meant to glorify the superiority of the colonial language as a fast-track path for getting admitted into its culture?

Intellectual Resources: Here is a review the author received for ideas leading to this chapter: ‘Author argues that Western discourse and the English language are inherently exploitative of other cultures and their knowledge. Author makes this argument using the work of Foucault (French philosopher), Fairclough (British linguist), and Heidegger (German philosopher, a known Nazi—https://stanford.io/2T7vMg0). In other words, author’s construction of “authentic African self” is a Western discursive subject wielding French post-modernist theory, British linguistics, and German phenomenology to argue that Western discourse can only be shallow and exploitative. It is not clear why authors’ argument is an exception to the otherwise universally oppressive and shallow Western discourse. At its best, the methodology is an ad-hoc hodgepodge of different Western theories without much logical consistency or epistemic validity’.

As it happens, the paper in question referenced Edward Said, Ngugi Wa Thiong‘o’, and Amitash Gosh, none of whom appeared to catch the attention of the reviewer. Nonetheless, there is something bizarre, not to say ridiculous, about the idea that a critique of the Western canon that emanates from Western thought is thereby disallowed. It’s rather like arguing that Karl Marx had no right to critique capitalist society because he lived in one (and occasionally bought shares). We can decide to be a Western discursive subject. And, indeed, Edward Said’s Orientalist discourse did exactly that as a way of deconstructing the binaries of the Orient/Occident from within Western discourses.

In ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, Fanon also noted how ‘whitening’ is the basis upon which the black intellectual gains recognition and acceptance into the bourgeois academy (Fanon, 2008). Is it wrong to have, and express, some qualms about this? We can draw on Foucault again here. The later Foucault did not argue that there was a single, overarching, discourse, but that discursive formations arose out of bodies of knowledge. It is reasonable, in my opinion, to argue that there is an ‘HCI discourse’ which governs what is to be said and how it is to be said. That discourse emphasizes certain features of acceptability over others. It is a discourse that celebrates the primacy of certain methodological formulations over others.

Neutrality and Distance: Here are some more reviews: ‘The paper is a bit unusual in structure and aims for the CHI genre, but is nevertheless an instructive reading, especially because it is written in first person by an African/Nigerian scholar working and studying in Europe and delves deeply into the dilemmas on sharing and identifying with both the Nigerian and European experience, though in very different ways. I also appreciated the lack of “political correctness” although at points I wondered how deserved some attacks really were’?

It also makes the whole paper feel as a rant against the USA/Eurocentrism of the CHI community and conference and ignores the many scholars working from the ‘global South’, organising local SIGCHI chapters.

Author makes unfair and almost cartoonish characterisations of existing HCI discourses without providing any concrete evidence…. It is, ironically, very Western to think that it is more important to be able to understand yourself than to be understood.

On reflection, one reviewer seemed to think we didn’t go far enough in making our case, while another accuses us of ‘ranting’. My initial response to the review was ‘This is a complaint. This is defiance. This is disobedience. This is a rant’. The paper was intended as a polemic and precisely traded on some frustrating experiences. The other reviewer, though apparently sympathetic, thought we didn’t go far enough in making our case. How does one do that? Perhaps I could be even less politically correct and break from academic writing traditions entirely to foreground lived experience even more vividly. But the chances of getting it published are even more remote…. How, then, are we to determine whether or not a position is ‘deserved’? Clearly, arguments about positionality, biography, etc., do not cut it here. Some form of discursive ‘neutrality’, whatever that might mean, is needed. One reviewer of an AfriCHI submission suggested I read Harold Bloom’s ‘Anxiety of Influence’, which references the struggle of scholars seeking to overcome the weight of tradition, break from the norm, and write, think, or act differently. Difficult to do when any such attempt is rejected as ‘cartoonish’.

The point here is my problem in understanding what might be wrong with a ‘rant’. Critical literatures are, after all, full of complaint—about gender inequality, about racial inequality, disability, and so on. If something can be dismissed as a ‘rant’, then, it is not because it is a complaint, but because it is a complaint delivered in a particular rhetorical style. I had ideas about defiance, disobedience, and rejection of the epistemic traditions shaping knowledge production in HCI. An important part of this, for me, meant expressing what it felt like to be an obedient subject under the academy’s gaze.

The Position of the Self in Academic (HCI) Discourse

What work does the African HCI researcher do? We’re not some rhetorically angry ethnographers, we are merely postcolonialized subjects returning to the disciplinary gaze. And as an affiliate of a ‘very white’ institution, we are merely participating in the free market we found ourselves in. To maximize our gains, we recognize that we must navigate different intellectual terrains before beginning to develop a sense of ownership, a voice, and a style. One of the motives for writing this piece is that by reflecting on specific episodes of the journey towards becoming an African HCI researcher, we might be better positioned, provisionally, to the politicization of knowledge claims within the global HCI community.

The core of the problem is this: there are many discourses in play in academic life, and some of them are manifest in HCI and African HCI. There is no single, universal voice governing how the world is represented. However, the existence of many discourses does not mean they carry equal weight. I want to argue that the arguments of writers like Fanon, Spivak, Foucault, and many others remain marginal to the central concerns of CHI and CSCW. Why might this be? There are arguably two countervailing tendencies in the Western academy at present. One celebrates ethics, drawing attention to the responsibilities of researchers, in and through specific bureaucratic constructions such as internal review board’s (IRB) and the like. The other concerns ‘science’ and what that might mean. Qualitative research strategies are increasingly tied to, made more ‘scientific’, in HCI and CSCW through constructions such as grounded theory and thematic analysis, and consensus, achieved through something like ‘interrater reliability’, or ‘coding’ consistency, or the shared evolution of themes is a guarantor of research quality. These are the gatekeepers of academic rigour in HCI. Note that, if this argument is even remotely true, there is no room for anything that looks like an individual voice, or individual ethical choice. My point is that this flies in the face of other, perfectly respectable traditions which emanate from more marginal discourses. I suggest there are three such discourses, which relate closely to each other. They are feminist studies; postcolonial thinking, and the poststructuralist concern with the ‘self’ in ethnographic work.

Feminist Complaint: Feminist/decolonial writers such as Linda Smith have noted how this oppositional gazing entails ‘frequently having to orient myself to a text world in which the centre of academic knowledge is either in Britain, the United States or Western Europe; in which words such as we us, our, I actually exclude me. It is a text world in which (if what I am interested in rates a mention) I have learned that I belong partly in the Third World, partly in the ‘woman of colour’ world, partly in the black and African world. I read myself into these labels partly because I have also learned that, although there may be communalities, they still do not entirely account for the experience of indigenous people. So, reading and interpretation present problems when we do not see ourselves in the text. There are problems, too, when we do see ourselves but can barely recognise ourselves through the representation. One problem of being trained to read this way, or more correctly, of learning to read this way over many tears of academic style, is that we can adopt uncritically similar patterns of writing…… If we write without thinking critically about our writing it can be dangerous. Writing can also be dangerous because we reinforce and maintain a style of discourse which is never innocent. Writing can be dangerous because sometimes we reveal ourselves in ways which get misappropriated and used against us. Writing can be dangerous because, by building on previous texts written about indigenous peoples, we continue to legitimate views about ourselves which are hostile to us’ (Smith, 2021, p. 37).

Ahmed (2017) has also shown how the act of complaining denotes a prior agency of knowing how subjects are forcefully inaugurated into global thought systems. To complain is to demarcate a spatial site for building a new beginning, to identify new counterpoints outside Western categories of knowledge. She argues forcefully for the legitimacy of complaint in academic discourse. Reviewers above clearly do not agree. The activity of complaining is not merely embracing a common language of argumentation, but one of explicitly inserting one’s intentionality, positionality, and subjectivity into a discourse which is otherwise theoretical. It is an expression of feelings, emotions, and affects. It is noticing, attending, shaming, punishing, promoting, labouring, and showing. It is politics, a protest, a problematization, a personalization.

In ‘Feminist theory’, Donna Haraway made an epistemological claim to the effect that accounting for the social world from a subjugated standpoint positioned (situated) specific groups to produce strong ‘objective’, knowledge (Haraway, 1988). The kind of experiential knowledge that I am advocating for is perceived as below the conventional level of ‘scientific validity’ and demoted to the ‘rant’. Ann Cunliffe has similarly pointed out how ‘good’ theory is inherently masculinized, she asks ‘must I grow a pair of balls to theorize?’ (Cunliffe, 2022). This is less an argument about what it is OK to talk about than an argument about how one talks. If we extend the logic here, either I need to become white, or the reviewers above need to become black, for my ‘rant’ to be valid.

Postcolonial Complaint: Well-known postcolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatraya Spivak have, in different ways, exposed colonialism and its effects. They are even, sometimes (occasionally), cited in the HCI literature. Spivak, with her ideas concerning the ‘subaltern’ has argued, in a controversial essay which on the face of it concerns the role of Indian women, that the term ‘subaltern’ refers to ‘the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society’ (Spivak, 2003). For her, this was mainly visible through structures such as caste and gender. Her main point, though, is that White practices during the Raj, practices which included the abolition of so-called Sati, are usually seen as examples of the way in which white men save brown women from brown men. Put another way, the general ‘superiority’ of white culture is made evident in colonial interventions. The emphasis here is on white practices and I want to say more about the way in which those practices impose themselves in HCI below.

In a similar way, Edward Said is well-known for his analysis of ‘Orientalism’, in which he talks about an Orientalist gaze, whereby Western scholars impose a picture of oriental cultures by viewing them through a particular lens, that of ‘othering’ (Said, 1979). Though quite often criticized for not embedding its argument in real practices but instead arguing only through particular kinds of imagery (see, e.g., Richardson, 1990), the concept of ‘othering’ has become very powerful. Again, I want to pursue that specifically through the notion of practice, here the practices of academic writing and the dominance of certain kinds of discourse.

Thinkers like Fanon, Spivak, and Said all published some time ago, and it may be thought that their arguments no longer hold so much sway. Maybe this is why the ‘decolonial’ literature has become more prevalent. Decolonial thinkers based mainly in Latin America, such as Mignolo (2007), Quijano (2007), and Grosfoguel (2009). Grosfoguel et al. (2015) have analysed how Western imperialism continues to exert a powerful influence over Latin American economies and cultures. It is important to understand that these processes of colonialism are ongoing, and not ‘post-’anything (see, e.g. Adamu 2022; Ali, 2016; Irani et al., 2010; Lazem et al., 2021). The continued and continuing hegemony of the West structure’s life everywhere through a ‘colonial matrix of power’ [see Leal et al.’s (2019, 2021a, b, c) for a rare examination of these issues in HCI]. The structures, such as gender, race, geopolitics, the production of knowledge, concepts of economic relations, thereby create coloniality—a fundamental element of modernity (Quijano, 2007). These ideas are a fundamental challenge to Western conceptions of ‘development’ and are all too seldom discussed in HCI at all. I argue that HCI is an example of the coloniality I want to challenge in its assumptions. The issue, though, is where that ‘coloniality’ is to be found. It is not in the topic, because HCI4D and its concern for the global south is unarguable. It is, I argue, in the rhetoric.

Poststructuralist Complaint: Michel Foucault’s archaeological approach challenges traditional understandings of knowledge and power by illustrating how they are shaped by fragmented historical and contemporary discourses. His thesis attempts to destabilize what might seem natural (Western) categories for describing social relations by presenting them as social constructs articulated through various discursive practices (Foucault, 1980). When the orders of society are approached as social constructions, one might articulate how emerging power relations impact how society knows a range of things. The more common of which shows the formats to which a phenomenon is formulated and established through a collection of ways that determines the meaning one can attach to a conceptual thought. This discursive mode of analysis suggests that what we see and accept as knowledge is the working of power to the proposition of truth, the political relations and status of truth, and the determining orders of ‘rationality’, ‘subjectivity’, and ‘objectivity’ of right and wrong discoveries.

For Foucault, the important features of a discursive formation include ‘surfaces of emergence’, ‘authorities of delimitation’, and ‘grids of specification’. ‘Surfaces of emergence’ for example, point to specific discursive and institutional sites—HCI waves, themes, and communities for example—where arguments about political economy, expertise and labour, and technology use are configured and operationalized. ‘Authorities of delimitation’ points to the perspectives that define and shape certain narratives, whereas ‘Grids of specification’ considers how discursive formation relates to other more subtle ideas such as human civilizations, experiences, and identities. These features of the discourse direct how a topic, such as HCI’s knowledge production and diversification practices are approached and discussed, but also how other ideas are advanced or neglected in discursive locations such as universities, think tanks, and conferences.

As Foucault’s oeuvre suggests, ‘the essential political problem for the intellectual is not to criticize the ideological contents supposedly linked to science or ensure that his own scientific practice is accompanied by a correct ideology, but that of ascertaining the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth. The problem is not changing people’s consciousness—or what is in their head—but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 133). This is making a case for a closer analysis of the political character of discourses and not the epistemic character of its claims—which in effect would account for the power relations enabling the inclusion/exclusion of specific perspectives from the ‘science’ of modern discourses.

By approaching the self as a subjugated body of work, one is expected to be reflexive and accountable in one’s reporting. This is a form of self-care that entails considering how specific ethical values adopted to understand and transform oneself and others affect ways of knowing. This can take the form of critical reflection on our practices of knowledge production—at some point privileging/subjugating our veiled perspectives, while also acknowledging the embodiment of the other’s endogenous perspective in the constitution of the self.

As subjugated bodies of work, we are not embracing the idea that as Africans, we have double consciousness, an ontological second insight or an epistemological twoness that allows for remembering the composition of the ‘single-minded self’ within the veil of Westernization (in W.E. Du Bois’ terms). Instead, the pedagogical practice of embracing the subjugated self as matters of significant political concern is meant to show that there is no immediate double vision of some objective world out there to be interpreted. The social world is messy and writing about one’s experience in it necessitates adopting a reflexive approach to unveiling the invisible affect endured as one attempts to think/write against established vocabularies of knowledge production.

Considering the above, we adopted the ideas of an African standpoint as a situated approach to imagination and knowledge in our work to signal a radical break with previous postcolonial HCI perspectives and attempts to establish something rather different in African HCI, or what Foucault calls a new ‘episteme’ or ‘regime’ of knowledge. As adopted in HCI4D, the idea of the African standpoint is not one that advocates for an alternative epistemic tradition where subjugated perspectives are rendered from below the dominant structures of knowledge, but rather bring to the fore liberal interaction design (disciplinary) narratives designed to aid the native (Adamu, 2020, 2021).

To put this into context, on 7 September 2019, we came across a thread of conversation started by Ihudiya Finda Williams:

As we grow as a community, we are becoming increasingly diverse. Which is SUPER amazing, but I don’t think as a community we have reflected on what does that look like…I am starting this thread to pose the question: What does the future of CHI look like? What do we need to do to be more INCLUSIVE for everyone? Also, it is possible to think of the future where we all can freely perform our research and be ourselves. Or is that too idealistic? As individuals are posting I would like to push the conversation a bit and also ask as you to please also share how can we begin working towards a better future?

For days, the thread raised a range of interesting questions concerning the diversity-sensitive approaches and practices of HCI; but also, how the community, through the everyday ideation and exchange of practitioners and researchers, might work towards developing a community of practices that accommodate diverse perspectives and experiences. From my perspective, however, the dialogue did very little to answer the question of how we become more inclusive but instead quickly became a process of legitimization. Certain perspectives were privileged over others (in the sense of discursive privileging and censorship), and conversations about CHI’s interdisciplinarity appeal as the premier venue for HCI’s discussions became conversations about theory and method.

A Complaint about ‘Theory’—How to Work: As argued by Christine Halverson, there are four key attributes of a theory in HCI and CSCW research: descriptive, rhetorical, inferential, and application power (Halverson, 2002). From this preview, a theory is meant to enable the ‘description’ of the social world, possess the ‘rhetorical’ capacity to identify important aspects of social events, provide utilities that can be ‘applicable’ in analysing and representing social relations, and be made useful in inferring to interesting insight about people perspectives as subjects among other objects that populate the social world. Taking the four attributes of a theory as outlined above, my initial concern was with how postcolonial theories could furnish the design and deployment of educational technologies that can be adopted within the Nigerian education and software development industry. The plausible direction then was to consider the sort of narratives rendered in the postcolonial computing discourses of HCI4D. Put very simply, the issue of theory (and for that matter, ethics, politics, methods, and all the other discursive insertions) is what is it for?

Do we need a theory of any sort to describe or infer interesting things in the communities we can design with? Do we need a theory of language, culture, or education in HCI to be able to effectively design and deploy educational technologies that can be adopted and used in Nigeria? What would the continental, the Latin American, or the African/Africana school of postcolonial thought offer to the design and deployment of educational technologies? Or rather, should we embrace the concepts of decoloniality and pluriversality since that’s the trendy conceptual thing in the community?

I referred above to various postcolonial thinkers, and my thinking led me to consideration of what Edward Said in postcolonial studies or Gayatri Spivak in subaltern studies did for me. I pondered on whether the attempt at reconstructing the African HCI narrative of design innovation from within/without modernist epistemic orders might give rise to new modalities of identity, geopolitics, power, and knowledge. An attempt was made to engage with Spivak’s work (the concept of the subaltern was a high point), but I struggled to see how it could better inform the design and deployment of technologies for African conditions. We recognized that we’re better positioned, epistemologically, to approach the issue of the geopolitics of technological innovation as a discursive element of power and knowledge relations via Achille Mbembe and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o'.

I came to the view that we do not need a theory to engage in a creative endeavour like design. What we need is an understanding of the organizing principles directing the interaction between things that populate the social world. What we need is the description of culture as perceived and practised within the locale of design. I concluded, however, that we do need theories to illuminate why it is that we think the way we do about problems. Postcolonial theories, along with poststructuralist work, still rare in HCI discourse, at least serve the purpose of telling us something about why we frame problems the way we do and why we represent them in particular ways as well. Much of the debate in HCI (and elsewhere) decentres such considerations and instead takes the form of contests about what kind of epistemology is appropriate, what kind of method is or is not adequate, what ethical position an IRB demands one to take, and what kinds of theory are best deployed to serve an argument.

Consequently, HCI has largely imported these issues from the more traditional disciplines, be they sociology, psychology, engineering, or computer science. Faced with the chaos of multiplicity that these eclectic imports produce, HCI can be accused of engaging in ‘Viking-like academic pillaging and plundering raids, pulling exhibits from distant disciplines which, torn from discursive context, change or lose their meaning in the process’ (Penny, 2009, p. 35). Simon Penny quotes Barthes as saying, ‘In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a ‘subject’ (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists of creating a new object, which belongs to no one’ (Barthes, 1986, p. 72). There is an important question of ownership raised here. To maintain a conception of interdisciplinarity in which one’s discipline occupies a central position while others are arrayed on the periphery is a form of hubris, which robs interdisciplinary inquiry of its potential. All the more so when disciplinary integrity is maintained by the various methodological choices which dominate the arena and—my explicit concern—how these choices serve to marginalize individual (other) voices, subjugated as they are by the tyranny of rhetorical/representational convention. There is a tendency to retreat into the safe world of one’s discipline and assert the sufficiency of its expertise rather than seeking ‘to engage with others whose expertise is different from, often incompatible with or even incommensurable with one’s own. When such a realization is carried forward, one confronts an ontological chasm, which, when considered, can throw light upon not only the differences between disciplines but on uninterrogated assumptions within one’s own discipline. These ontological differences can concern, for instance, fundamental motivations and justifications for working, methodologies and research processes and, ultimately, question assertions regarding knowledge and truth. Such realizations relativize discipline-based realities’ (Penny, 2009, p. 36).

What’s of relevance here is how the HCI community has approached the issue of diversity and inclusivity as if it’s something given to A by B, or as a design problem to be solved. In HCI, the paired terms ‘diversity-inclusivity’ have been euphemistically used (and misused) in the banalization of certain concepts, perspectives, and experiences over others. Efforts such as the #CHIversity have pushed for the critical analysis of the histories, realities, and aspirations of a range of user groups in design thinking as a way of promoting social equality and justice in technological discourses. There is however the misconception that merely talking about diversity-inclusivity (as in doing the documentation without making significant changes to the discursive feature of the community) will deliver the much needed, and long-term, politicization of its knowledge production/consumption processes. As the interdisciplinary appeal of HCI is dominated by largely Western philosophical orientations and methodological sensitivities, we argue that such efforts are a ‘hypothetical’ pursuit that amount in practice to few, if any, changes to our descriptive and representational practices. To put it another way, much of what goes on in the pursuit of diversity/inclusion is a process of domestication. There remains little or no place for biography, emotion, feeling, or anger. No place for the ‘rant’.

The major issue with the sort of diversity work rendered within HCI and CSCW is that it’s a slippery social practice. As it stands, and as a member of the community of the global south:

We do not know who it is for, what it is, where is it or is not.

We don’t know where it is from and where is it going. How does it look, sound like, feel like, or taste like?

We don’t know how we can identify it, be identified by it, and identify with it.

We don’t know who gets to decide, how we can decide, where and when to decide what it is about or not.

We don’t know who decides on the inclusion, who does the inclusion, and where the inclusion is situated ontologically and epistemologically.

We don’t know who would benefit or lose from knowing whose diversity it is.

We don’t know!

A Complaint about Method—How to Write: If postcolonial thinking fired my imagination, which it did, then addressing the coloniality of language use in HCI may fire yours. Kwame Appiah, a philosopher, has written extensively about the role of identity in modern life. And stresses the way in which identities are cultural constructs. Famously, he argued that race is one such construct. In sum, he argues,

identities come, first, with labels and ideas about why and to whom they should be applied. Second, your identity shapes your thoughts about how you should behave; and third, it affects the way other people treat you. Finally, all these dimensions of identity are contestable, always up for dispute: who’s in, what they’re like, how they should behave and be treated. (Appiah, 2018, p. 12).

Although Appiah has, unsurprisingly, nothing to say about HCI, his treatment of identity can be applied equally well to that of the ‘HCI scholar’. I have tried to show that this identity is constructed out of distinctive discursive practices, and Appiah cites Bourdieu approvingly in his description of habitus, ‘a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without much thought. Your habitus is trained into you starting from childhood…grounded in the distinctive way in which a person used his or her body…a ‘bodily hexis’, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking’ (Appiah, 2018, p. 21). This, I contend, applies to ways of speaking (and writing) in HCI. There are alternatives. For example, Su (2020) in a consideration of what the ‘rural’ might mean, provides an alternative to the normal mode of writing ethnography in HCI where he presents collections of loosely tangled vignettes that invite multiple readings and interpretations of culture, and which actively engage experiences and emotions. This leads, in my view, to active production and not passive consumption of ethnographic text.

In ‘On the Postcolony’, Mbembe (2001) attempts to ‘write Africa’ beyond essentialism and outside reductivism. The emphasis was to invent a different form of writing in Africa that could capture the complex textures of everyday social life in Africa—thus signalling a radical departure from the postcolonial textual paradigm that relies solely on European sources and the literary text of Western academies. The relevance of Mbembe’s work is that by approaching the lived experiences of coloniality/modernity as a by-product of convivial power relations, one can identify the moment of ambiguity in postcolonial commandments and use those fluid bodily practices involved in affirming the power to invert the otherwise invisible power over the body of postcolonized subjects. The initial engagement with the postcolony as a political project for theorizing differentiated historical experiences of coloniality was to furnish our understanding of how power operates in the substance of textuality. Again, in simple terms, the way we write frames acceptable academic practice.

In ‘Decolonising the Mind’ Wa Thiong'o's (1992), thesis focuses on the epistemic consequences of language. Wa Thiong'o' makes a political case that European languages are not neutral nor socially unifying, they embody with them an abysmal way of thinking about the social world. In its simplistic form, language as the basis of human social relations provides a means for the production and consumption of knowledge. We can see how this pans out in how the English language figures as an instrument of power across two lived spaces—England and Nigeria. Language can be a site for power and a struggle for change as those who exercise power through linguistic instruments must constantly engage in the struggle to maintain (or lose) their power. In such spaces, decolonizing the mind entails explicating the roles language plays in the establishment of ideologies, hierarchies, and mechanisms that shape everyday social (read, HCI) relations.

We identify with Chinua Achebe (1965) who has this to say about the language of the African writer. Achebe pointed to the inability of writers at the gathering to determine the boundaries of African literature, which he contended might ‘have given the impression of not knowing what we were doing, or worse, not daring to look too closely at it…. those of us who have inherited the English language may not be in a position to appreciate the value of the inheritance. Or we may go on resenting it because it came as part of a package deal which included many other items of doubtful value and the positive atrocity of racial arrogance and prejudice, which may yet set the world on fire. But let us not in rejecting the evil throw out the good with it … perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test’ (Achebe, 1965, pp. 27–28). The scientism that dominates even qualitative research in HCI now demands that every term is defined, every concept related in some way to a ‘theory’ or a ‘method’ for generating a theory. Our experiences may not be so easily boxed, but this doesn’t make them less valuable. It is as though ordinary language no longer has a place in academic discourse.

This is further complicated by Wa Thiong'o's proposition that: ‘the choice of language and the use to which is put is central to people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe. Hence, language has always been at the heart of the two contending social forces in the Africa of the twentieth century. …..What seems to worry us more was this: after all the literacy gymnastic of preying on our language to add life and vigor to English and other foreign languages, would the result be acceptable as good English and good French? Will the owner of the language criticize our usage? Here we were more assertive of our rights!’ (Wa Thiong'o', 1992, pp. 4–8).

While some have argued that the adopted languages can be localized or Africanized (e.g., pidgin English in Nigeria as a locally owned model of expression that is rid of its imperialistic connotations), the point is that this form of linguistic expression is considered as below the radar of acceptable mode of communication—to be blunt, it’s the language of the working class. The gatekeepers of the language are those with colonial power. Now, who are the gatekeepers of scholarly thought in HCI? The reviewers who insist on their own methodological superiority, their preferred mode of writing, and their ownership of the textual canon. We can choose to oppose the coloniality of knowledge. We can insist on the relevance of our lived experiences, our biography. We can insist that we know as much as anyone else about how design matters in our own community. We can insist that our language is as good as theirs.

My ‘Rant’

Being an early career researcher working in the field of HCI is daunting and dangerous. I have tried to explain some of the reasons why in this chapter. I hope that the world can be different and that the affect I have experienced (and have shared) can be understood and responded to in a productive manner. If that turns out to be possible, then it legitimizes this ‘rant’. I strive for a world where I am a problematic scholar, where you are an engaged reader, and where we can be a stronger community. I would prefer that academic life was less about the competition for dominance in discourse and more about support for emerging scholars and their desire to learn. I don’t want to compete. Instead, I want to, as the saying goes, ‘write back to empire’. This purposive act of doing as-in-writing (in this case the language of communication) might influence the knowledge producers and their subject of scrutiny.