We support the protesters. Black lives matter. Working at my desk in the past few days, a fairly constant thump of helicopters and aggressive wail of sirens has forced me to parse space in new ways. Here, in the US, the rights of protestors to claim space is contested by presidential rhetoric and...
Tag: inequality
Rethinking Financial Literacy with Design Anthropology
Marietta is 61 years old. She takes care of her adult son (unemployed) and her daughter-in-law (disabled), both of whom live with her in a simple 3-bedroom house on the wrong side of the freeway. Her rent is sky-high, because in Silicon Valley rents are crazy on both sides of the freeway. Marietta...
Announcing the EPIC Equity Council & Cohort Program
Ethnographers are powerful change makers in business, organizations, and communities because we understand people within complex social and cultural contexts. In ethnography, “reflexivity” is the rigorous practice of understanding ourselves in the same way. We know that power and inequities shape...
Exiting the Road to Hell: How We Reclaim Agency & Responsibility in Our Fights for Justice
Panthea Lee is a strategist, organizer, designer, and facilitator, and the Executive Director of Reboot. She is passionate about building transformative coalitions between communities, activists, movements, and institutions to tackle structural inequity—and working with artists to realize...
Ethnography for Equity: Using the Ethnographic Lens to Improve Outcomes for Everyone
Why did Donald Trump get elected? Because of the rage of the “working class”? Why did Brexit happen? Because “working class” Britons were angry at getting left behind? We find these explanations troubling because they whitewash events. We convened the Salon Ethnography and Equality at EPIC2017 to...
Shining a Light on Agency: Examining Responses to Resource Constraints to Uncover Opportunities for Design
People employ creative ways to overcome the challenges of daily life. The construct of agency is a productive area of inquiry when considering how people respond to these challenges. Exploring moments of agency provides an embodied understanding of people’s motivations and helps reveal the...