Browsing by Author "Paré, Dylan"

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    Queering Computing and Computing Education
    (Oxford University Press, 2021-01) Paré, Dylan
    Technological imaginaries underpinning computing and technoscientific practices and pedagogies are predominantly entrenched in masculine, imperialist, and militaristic ideologies. A critical, intersectional queer and trans phenomenological analysis of computing education can offer an essential epistemological and axiological reimagining by centering the analysis of gender and sexuality through the lens of marginalized people’s experiences (queer, trans, and intersecting marginalities). It analyzes how systems of domination and liberation occur through relationships between objects, people, and their environments and how these systems of power multiply in effect when people are situated at multiple axes of oppression (such as gender, sexuality, race, and disability). Complexity, heterogeneity, and fluidity are at the core of queer and trans imaginaries and are essential for challenging the assumed naturalness of biological categories that underpin much of the cisheteronormative harm and violence in K-16 education, STEM disciplinary practices, and technological innovations. This chapter illustrates how foregrounding complexity, heterogeneity, and fluidity can help us critique, construct and transform computational objects, worlds, and learning environments so that queer and trans perspectives, narratives, and experiences are centered and valued. In doing so, ambiguity, fluidity, and body becoming are centered in virtual spaces, thereby offering emancipatory possibilities for supporting critical literacies of gender and sexuality. From a methodological perspective, this chapter argues for adopting methodological approaches rooted in active solidarity with queer and trans people and a commitment to listening to intersectional experiences of gender and sexuality-based marginalization and resilience. Diving deeper into computational worlds and practices, this chapter argues that researchers must pay immediate attention to the area of carceral technologies, including algorithmic bias, from queer and trans intersectional perspectives. This focus of research attention is necessary because computing scholars and educators have identified data science (more broadly) and algorithmic bias (in particular) as an essential domain for furthering education research and practice. Histories of erasure, exclusion, and violence on queer and trans people, both by technologies and as part of the computing profession, are enacted on individual people and reflected in societal biases that inform and shape public experiences of computing and technologies. Overall, this chapter argues that queering computing education and computing education research requires a deep, critical awareness of a multifaceted problem: the historical and ongoing hegemonic, masculine control over programming; the limitations to representation by code that a computer can recognize; the possibilities to queer code and computer architectures; the technological regulation of identity and bodies; and the limits and affordances of technological representation of gender and sexual identity. It is not enough to teach all kids to code if we are not addressing the societal context of coding, the dominant cultures of the technology workforce they might join, and the everyday disciplining interactions with technology that shape who we can become.
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    Queering Virtual Reality: A Prolegomenon
    (Springer, 2019-01) Paré, Dylan; Sengupta, Pratim; Windsor, Scout; Craig, John; Thompson, Matthew
    In this chapter, we investigate how innovations in STEM, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and 3D Sculpting, can support the development of critical literacies about gender and sexuality. Our work arises from the concern that the assumed \naturalness" of male/female binary categories in biol- ogy is often at the center of the queer, trans, and intersex panics in public education. Echoing sociologists and critical scholars of gender and sexu- ality, we posit that transgender and queer identities should be positioned as realms of playful, active inquiry. Further, we investigate how new forms of computational representational infrastructures can be leveraged to support productive and playful experiences of inquiry about gender and sexuality. We present a retrospective analysis of a design group meeting of a small group of friends in their early thirties with gender nonconforming and queer identities and life histories. The group interacted in VR-based environments, where they engaged in two di erent forms of construction- ist learning experiences: creating 3D sculptures of personally meaningful objects, and re-creating their VR avatars in VR social media. Our analysis illustrates how such experiences can be productively analyzed using so- cial constructivist perspectives that situate knowing as boundary play and gured worlds, and the roles that play and friendship have in supporting deep and critical engagement with complex narratives and marginalized
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    Reorienting Toward Queerness: Learning with Virtual Reality and Multi-Agent Simulations of Gender and Sexuality
    (2023-07) Paré, Dylan; Shanahan, Marie-Claire; Takeuchi, Miwa Aoki; Nelson, Fiona A.
    In the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and STEM education, the predominant body of technoscientific scholarship is largely cisheteronormative, leaving queer and trans perspectives underrepresented. The new technology designs presented in this dissertation, across virtual reality and multi-agent simulations, offer productive ways to reorient technology design toward queer and trans perspectives while developing public understanding of critical perspectives in gender and sexuality. This manuscript-based dissertation explores the design and research of technologies that aim to reorient computing education from its roots in cisheteronormative ideologies and toward addressing LGBTQ+ marginalization. First, in a critical review of the literature, I highlight the historical cisheteronormativity in computer science, queer and trans theories of computing, queer game studies, the technological regulation of LGBTQ+ bodies and identities, and possibilities for queering computing and computing education. I offer ways forward by proposing queer coding and computing architectures, working in active solidarity with LGBTQ+ people in designing computational artifacts, and foregrounding LGBTQ+ embodiments, epistemologies, and axiologies in designing virtual reality and computational simulations. Next, I investigate how participants engage with a VR experience designed to deepen their understanding of gender and sexuality-based marginalization in STEM learning environments. The findings reveal how participants, in interaction with the VR experience, produced ideological stances and emotional configurations that reoriented them to marginalized perspectives grounded in critical queer and trans perspectives. Finally, I analyze how the design of a multi-agent simulation of gender and sexuality-based marginalization and resilience can support conversations about the complex, emergent nature of marginalization. The findings demonstrate how the simulation supported multi-level, emotional, and embodied sense-making about emergent experiences of harm and support. I also show how Flocking QT Stories is an essential departure from previous work on multi-agent systems by analyzing how stories in the simulation served as scaffolds to help participants make sense of the simulation and encourage personal storytelling to make deeper, personal connections. Across these papers, this dissertation offers insights into how we can design and research queer technologies that foreground queer and trans embodiments, epistemologies, and axiologies and better support learning about gender and sexuality and encourage learners to challenge cisheteronormativity.