Update on Project Activities
Oral Histories Team
What We Observed and Learned The oral histories team had its first week of transcribing and translating full interviews that were recorded prior to our start date with AEMP. This experience gave us insight into the importance of adaptation in the face of the unexpected. Since our interview outreach efforts have been generally unsuccessful, Cindy has provided us with alternative methods of contribution that still feel meaningful, even if they don’t exactly match the deliverables that we agreed upon at the beginning of the quarter. We recognize the importance of adaptation within an organization that relies on the responses of many potential interviewees who may be very busy or lose interest in being interviewed. Therefore, it has been an unexpected but valuable lesson to envision a plurality of ways to contribute to this organization. Having switched gears to focus our efforts on post-production, we have gained new insights this week. For example, Nate recognized the importance of translating English into Spanish in a way that would generally make jargon/terminology more accessible. Additionally, Nate and Shania worked on translating idioms and phrases that captured the full context of what the interviewers and interviewees were discussing. For Sarah, she observed the seemingly easy yet actually intense work of transitioning raw interview audio into a presentable format. The process requires so many steps--from audio editing, translating, transcribing, double-checking the AI transcription provided by Otter.AI, and shortening the interviews into digestible formats--it has become evident that there is so much work that goes into both pre-interview outreach and post-interview production. From the sound visualizer team, we got the chance to hear some more about the work happening on AEMP’s side, particularly with refactoring the codebase into React. Although this project has been going on since March, it sounds like there hasn’t been much movement on the tech end of things. Especially since AEMP is a horizontal collective and entirely volunteer-run, Chris wondered how they remain accountable to the people being impacted, namely those being displaced. Since working on tech can be very removed from people’s lived realities and experiences of harm, even as those of us in tech benefit materially from our proximity to it, it seems like there is a need to be more direct mechanisms for those of us in tech to interrupt the violence we are complicit in perpetrating, and to repair harms. Chris will continue to think about ways to flatten hierarchy and what accountability to those marginalized truly looks like. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Preston and Joyce’s presentation, as well as the material covered in Week 7 as a whole, felt very relevant to AEMP’s line of work. Since AEMP hears primarily from tenants, it was interesting to hear the perspective of stakeholders who build affordable housing. Something that our group noticed was the dissonance between the visions of AEMP interviewees and people involved in public-private partnerships for affordable housing. AEMP generally emphasizes the need to remove profit from housing in order to create a just system in which everyone has a roof over their shoulders. On the other hand, public-private partnerships have a much more moderate approach toward housing justice solutions. When Sarah posed the question of whether abolishing extractive housing systems would be possible and may even be better than public-private partnerships, Preston mentioned how large of an industry real estate is, and how difficult it would be to dismantle it. As we continue to study different schools of thought around housing justice, we grapple with the balance between being both radically imaginative and also tethered to the reality of deeply ingrained housing injustice practices. We also wonder how AEMP interviewees would respond to the public-private housing model. Certainly, it has benefitted many residents in ways that purely public housing often has failed to do. That being said, taking a small percentage of money from investors who still enjoy a disproportionate amount of wealth and privilege seems similar to the controversial practice of colleges receiving funding from investors of polluting, racist, and/or unethical corporations. Is it more effective to utilize these investments to push forward equitable agendas like sustaining housing security, or can we take more bold action by challenging the entire model of how housing is managed and distributed? The issue becomes even more complicated when taking into account that every city is very different, thus calling for locally-informed and locally-made responses to housing reform. Housing is a massive web of complex stakeholders and histories, and it can feel overwhelming to try to find solutions as students who have limited experience in housing practices. However, Week 7 certainly challenged us to think critically about newer solutions that have been implemented to address the housing crisis in the Bay Area. Comments are closed.
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