About This Project
Throughout this process, we remained committed to social justice, sustainability, accessibility, and design justice principles in order to incorporate this knowledge into our culminating project for the summer, Examining Sustainability at Barnard.
Project Goals
We hope to ensure that this project and website are easy to navigate, read, access, and understand. We also seek to incorporate the Design Justice Network's Principles. Some of the major priorities for this project were principles 3, 7, and 10:- We prioritize design's impact on the community over the intentions of the designer.
- We share design knowledge and tools with our communities.
- Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level. We honor and uplift traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.1
Examining Sustainability at Barnard will raise awareness about where our technology and materials that we use on campus are coming from by tracing two objects’ “lifespan.” We will follow the path of the book, Race After Technology, and the 2020 Macbook Air on its path from production and design, to their use at Barnard College, and their “life” after Barnard. We chose Race After Technology because it was one of the first readings we engaged with as a group, and we felt it was crucial to our work this summer and wanted to find a way to incorporate it into our final project. The 2020 Macbook Air is the model of the laptops that the DHC recently purchased. Both objects have a direct connection to the work we are doing as a cohort, and the work of the DHC at large.
We will examine the environmental impact and labor conditions of the products at each stage in order to gain a better understanding of how race, gender, class, colonialism, and other identities and systems play a role in getting products in our hands. Lastly, we will imagine how circular campus and circular economy models can be implemented to create a more sustainable campus at Barnard.
How to Read the Book
We recommend starting with "What is a circular campus?" Then, readers have a choice between learning about the Macbook Air or Race After Technology. From that point, readers can return to the other object. After that, we recommend ending with "Implementing a circular campus at Barnard." With Scalar's platform, anyone has the option of navigating the book however they choose, but we would recommend following the paths in the book in order to have the best understanding of our work.Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Alicia Peaker and Taylor Faires for teaching us about digital pedagogy and digital humanities technology, as well as for their constant support and encouragement. We would also like to thank Leslie Raucher and Sandra Goldmark for their knowledge about sustainability and Barnard’s circular economy initiative, Kristen Hogan for her help regarding library efforts with sustainability, and Gonzalo Cervantes and Johnny Rodriguez for their help regarding BCIT’s computer policies.Citing this project
Examining Sustainability at Barnard will be shared publicly online for others to access. When citing our work, please see the following citation as an example:We also want it to be clear that our project and work this summer was sponsored and funded by the Digital Humanities Center and not initiated or funded by Barnard Sustainability or administration. Any code produced will be released under an open source license and datasets will be openly accessible.Arredondo, G., Burton, E., & Jones-Davidis, M. Examining Sustainability at Barnard. Peaker, Alicia, and Faires, Taylor, editors, 30 June 2020, http://dhcbarnard.org/scalar/dhclifecycle/.
*Due to COVID-19, Barnard did not provide financial support for this program for the entirety of summer 2020. This cohort hopes Barnard will continue to fund and support this program in the future for the entire summer.
