Browsing by Subject "Knowledge production"

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Making it work : three case studies on the epistemology of everyday knowledge
(2022-03-15) Azar, Riad, Ph. D.; Pettit, Becky, 1970-; Auyero, Javier; Brayne, Sarah; McQuarrie, Michael
The three case studies that make up this dissertation center on the role of social epistemology – the ways in which people construct lay knowledge in their social networks – to solve everyday problems, and how people know what they think they know. First, I present a case study of legal knowledge within municipal and county-level courts in three large cities in Texas. I ask, where do people receive legal knowledge? How do they think and feel about the legal knowledge they have received? How is knowledge they received deemed legitimate? I find that the sources of legal knowledge shape legal knowledge legitimacy and have implications for people’s views about and experiences with the criminal justice system. Second, I present a case study of a lead-in-water contaminated community in West Texas. I ask, how do residents understand the town’s water contamination, who (or what) do they blame for its condition, and why? How do those understandings of culpability shape people’s ability to collectively solve problems? I find that resident’s beliefs about the water crisis are shaped by their opinions of their neighbors and their opinions of their town. These two categories of opinions, private and public culpability, are talked about as the problem with the pipes on the one hand, and the problem with the pool on the other. These opinions and beliefs go on to shape how residents organize to save public infrastructure and how the town responds to their claims. Third, I present a case study of a cattle ranching community in the Texas Panhandle that suffered from devastating wildfires. I ask, how do community politics shape experiences and perceptions of disaster recovery? I find that the way residents narrated how they came together after the fires serves to reproduce everyday understandings of politics. Rather than talking about public expenditure in the form of millions of dollars of disaster aid funding that has historically buttressed the community against catastrophe, residents chose to highlight the role of their local community in helping each other. Together, these three case studies outline how knowledge production is a social endeavor.
Throwing keywords at the internet : emerging practices and challenges in human rights open source investigations
(2019-08-13) Banchik, Anna Veronica; Rose, Mary R. (Mary Ruth), 1966-; Auyero, Javier
Human rights researchers are increasingly turning to the internet to discover, collect, and preserve user-generated content (UGC) documenting human rights abuses. The proliferation of UGC and other kinds of “open source” (publicly accessible) information online make available more information than ever before about abuses. Only—UGC may be incapable of verification, buried online, or in peril of deletion by platform content moderation, state coordinated flagging campaigns, or users themselves. Some contexts might produce a scarcity of information while others generate a deluge of data, complicating already lengthy ad hoc verification procedures. Moreover, UGC collection, recirculation, and preservation may endanger or go against the wishes of witnesses and their families. Drawing on interviews with open source practitioners and experts as well as a year of ethnographic fieldwork at the Human Rights Investigations Lab at U.C. Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, this dissertation examines the practices, logics, and narratives by which a growing number of researchers are applying open source investigative techniques to human rights advocacy and fact-finding. First, amidst increased scrutiny of platforms content moderation, this study highlights the more nuanced roles of platform design elements including algorithms and search functionality in shaping both UGC’s discoverability and investigators’ workarounds—underscoring the ephemerality of UGC itself and of the informational infrastructures through which UGC is sought. Second, this dissertation offers a typology to synthesize how an array of broader social and structural factors impinge on the verifiability of UGC from varied conflicts and contexts, building on prior research pointing to factors impacting the volume of content available about a given conflict as well as scholarship suggesting that the inclusion of “verification subsidies” (McPherson 2015a) into photos or video footage heightens content’s verifiability. Third, this study examines the emergence of human rights advocates and researchers as self-ascribed content stewards and safeguards. In addition to describing investigators’ affective and ethical commitments to UGC, I point to how pervasive “consent-cutting” discourses combine with decisions to refrain from contacting uploaders in ways that effectively normalize the sustenance of communication and consent gaps with content uploaders, raising ethical questions about responsible data collection and usage.