 Hello and welcome to this panel. It's an honor to be here. My name is Katina Michael. I'm from the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University and I head up the Society Policy Engineering Collective, SPEC. I'm a joint hire not just in the School for the Future of Innovation but also the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering and I have with me today a wonderful group of people who are all interested in social environmental justice. That's Kirk Jarber, Darshan Cowart, Tracy Morris and Magalie McDuffie. Now people who know me well know that I absolutely love nature. I love the oceans and I love forests and give me any excuse to go outside and see the sunrise or the sunset. And for the majority of my life I've lived in Australia, the driest continent in the world and about two years ago I moved probably to the hottest place on earth almost, Arizona. And I'm fortunate that I've traveled widely only when I could afford to do so as an adult through my work and I came to many opportunities and it raised a lot of awareness in me just by things that I saw. I saw poverty, I saw inequity, I saw access to clean drinking water issues, sanitation issues, I saw hunger, I saw homelessness, I saw access to education issues particularly for females, I saw workers wanting better working conditions and protesting in train stations. I've seen the destruction of arable land, irrigation problems because of river systems dying due to climate change. I've seen deforestation and soil salinity, even the forced takeover of aboriginal land. All of these things are trying to be addressed in the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 and this group today is going to talk about these issues in this context as they relate to public interest technology. But the crazy thing is we're not here to talk about justice so much as the injustice. We're here because of social and environmental injustices. These are the things we're working towards today and the challenges, those global challenges with local repercussions, consequences. Social justice issues are preoccupied with the distribution of wealth opportunities and privileges within a society. We might identify healthcare as a particular issue or access to education. Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, colour, national origin or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws and policies and regulations. But these two things don't stand alone, they're intertwined and communities are not homogeneous, not even from within. Some of our speakers talk about the politics of sameness here today. So social justice aims to give individuals and groups fair treatment and an impartial share of social, environmental and economic benefits. The concept promotes the fair distribution of advantages and disadvantages within a society regardless of someone's background and status. And what we are seeing throughout the world is that status plays a huge role, affordability plays a huge role, the colour of your skin plays a big role on how you receive these benefits from the environment or from society at large, perhaps. So with Darshan, I introduce him as a leader who heads up the reengineered.org lab an interdisciplinary group that embeds peace, social justice and environmental protection in engineering. Kirk Jalber leads the Civic Science for Environmental Futures Collaborative, a research space exploring participatory action research projects driven by communities, working to create a more equitable future. Tracy Morris directs the American Indian Policy Institute, ASPE, or sorry I should say AP, the Native American media and the digital divide is focused on internet use, digital inclusion, network neutrality and so much more that Tracy is overseeing through AP and Magali McDuffie, last but not least an internationally recognised filmmaker currently working in the film department as a coordinator at SAE Creative. So welcome you all and introduce you now one by one to the speakers to open their remarks on this panel. Darshan Coward. Hey good morning afternoon evening night wherever you are it's great to be with you. As Katina said my work focuses on reimagining what engineering can be by centering ideas of environmental protection, social justice and peace in engineering and my work is motivated by the the notion that the world that we want to live in a socially just, verdant, peaceful world needs to be built. If in 20, 30, 40 years we have the same kinds of infrastructure, the same kinds of technologies that we interact with then we will still be incredibly far away from reaching the social justice and environmental justice goals that we set for ourselves dealing with climate change, dealing with issues of hunger, poverty and so on. And so my work is around getting engineers more integrally involved in dealing with these issues of social justice, environmental protection and peace. One of the things that we've been working on for the past couple years is a project called Project Confluence which is essentially a project to create a movement of engineers and scientists across the United States to collaborate with community groups fighting for environmental climate and energy justice. As part of that we are thinking about how collaboration can be used as a tool to get engineers and scientists thinking more creatively about how how to embed questions of social justice in the work that they do. We've also started to build online platforms to facilitate interactions between community groups and engineers and scientists. And then lastly as part of Project Confluence we're really trying to think about the ways in which we need to be creating financial models that support engineers and scientists who do this kind of work. A lot of work that tends to focus on environmental justice and social justice from the engineering and scientific professions tends to be done on a volunteer or pro bono basis when in fact we know that engineers and scientists across the board a large number of them would rather be doing this kind of work than the work that they're currently doing. And the question is why are they not doing this? Turns out that the financial incentives the structures that support engineering and science tend to promote work that a lot of engineers and scientists don't want to be doing and so they have to fill their their desires to address social and environmental challenges in the spaces that they're afforded right which are nights and weekends. And if we take seriously the idea of addressing social justice and environmental concerns it behoves us to think creatively about how we support that work such that it unfolds at large and larger scales which is where this question of actually supporting people to do this kind of work comes into play. If we you know that the scale of social and environmental injustices is vast not only in the United States but globally and if we take that the scale of those problems seriously then it can't that that work cannot be relegated to underpaid work or volunteer work. That work actually needs to be financially economically valued in a way that more and more people are involved in those efforts. Some other work that we're doing relates to getting engineers to think more creatively also about energy justice transitions but and also thinking about the the impact that engineering work has on non-human life. So one example of that work has to do with thinking about how engineers consider the impacts of border barriers on wildlife and of course border barriers are a huge question not only in the United States but globally and it's important that we deeply consider animal rights and animal justice and the work that we do. So I'm looking forward to the conversation to come. Thank you so very much for having me here. We'll move now to Kirksha for opening comments. Hello it's a real pleasure to be joining everybody here at the Pitt UN conference. I think that many of the ideas that Darshan just communicated are ones that will resonate in my work as well perhaps engaging with different publics. Just as a quick introduction, like Katina I have a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation and Society here at ASU as well as in computing, informatics and decision system engineering and I'm also a senior sustainability scholar with the Wrigley Institute of Sustainability here and I think that for what it's worth those titles they're actually representative of the spaces in which my work exists and some of the intersections of those concerns. So if we think about public interest technology as a space that needs to generate new affordances at the intersection of sectors and different communities of practice, one is certainly the community in which Darshan's work engages and that is engineers and scientists who are looking for different pathways, alternative pathways for their careers as well as to be able to exercise their skills and my research over the last 10 plus years has really been trying to understand and build capacity for public engagements in science and technology particularly in spaces of environmental justice, environmental justice and energy justice communities in particular. So what exactly does that mean? Well our lab is the Civic Science for Environmental Futures Lab and that's unpacked that a little bit. Civic Science is defined by me and my colleagues as a science that is done by public interest groups to be able to answer questions that are not necessarily being addressed by normative scientific frameworks and institutions or by government institutions and environment to futures is pretty straightforward. I mean the reason why they do this is because they're trying to identify and make real futures that would provide a healthier and safe environment, a public health environment, an ecological environment such that we can think about sustainable and resilient communities. So if we think about this conceptually, I've written a lot about the idea of civic techno science and civic informatics to unpack what exactly this kind of labor is and so many of you are probably aware of citizen science efforts but also the sort of deep commitments that environmental justice movements have to data transparency projects in order to provide government accountability and participatory mapping platforms, the deployment of surveillance technologies like drones for instance to be able to provide better observation and monitoring of industrial development projects and in many respects the reason why these kinds of projects are mobilized within environmental justice movements is not necessarily because they love technology but because they have a need to produce alternate narratives to what we see in heavily science dominated environmental impact statements, environmental impact assessment processes to be able to make regulatory institutions accountable to cultural concerns, issues of social impact, disruptions of social fabric, reasons why places have historical significance to communities particularly indigenous communities and other things that I think are very important when we think about what the impacts and unintended consequences are of technology in a particular just instance is oil and gas production pipeline infrastructure and that is where my work is centered right now. So just a few quick examples over the past two years we've been following 750 organizations that are you know that roughly amassed to a national movement here in the United States related to oil and gas pipeline development and that's tracking across 60 major pipelines and trying to understand how they build capacity to be able to do this kind of work and how they interact with one another to build knowledge infrastructures that run parallel to the physical infrastructures that they critique right and right here in Arizona we've been studying the reemergence of helium extraction which because of government privatization plans here in the United States is promoting the development of a large private sector that's now exploring helium all across the west because it's highly valued critical mineral or critical gas that is you know important to lots of scientific research and so you know it's it's another wave of extraction that's happening in a region that has many histories of extraction from coal mining to uranium mining and all these other heavy metals and whatnot and so how do these reiterate harms how do these reinforce harms and how how do institutions that allow this sort of thing to happen not acknowledge those historical harms when they then open the doors to additional kinds of resource extraction these are important questions for our work thank you so much kirk over to tracy morris chukma hashi chukmata so hote foat elici tracy morris and choka chafa foat and koni homa chikasha seah hi everyone i'm tracy morris and i am from the chikasa nation of oklahoma but i would like to acknowledge that where i sit right now in phoenix arizona is on autumn land and we acknowledge their sovereignty as indigenous peoples and i'm the executive director of the american indian policy institute also at arizona state university and i i'm really excited to be here i'm kind of overwhelmed at how large the audience is i thought it was just another zoom meeting but uh i do a lot of talking like this so i'm happy to be here so my area of specialty and the way i lead american indian policy institute is in broadband access use and availability on tribal lands so the digital divide new media technology digital inclusion and such for the 574 american indian tribes in the united states and obviously this year's this year's story of beyond covet is the story of digital access or lack thereof the divide and so we literally the policy institute just in august or september of last year put out the first baseline study of access availability and use and use on tribal lands and user tribal folks who live on reservations and so we thought oh well broadband's probably over for 2020 of course then that changed everything so this year we've been solely focused really on the digital divide and access especially for our students because we're at a university and we're at the largest university in the united states and we have the largest population of native students with over 3000 native students here at asu either in the in-person or online classes and um it's funny because it really started this year with a meeting and uh we were talking about our tribal students and somebody and in a in a group of leadership said oh well we emailed all of our native students to make sure they had connectivity and i know people are out there laughing i know they're laughing because you email people to see if they have connectivity really um so we were tapped with writing a brief for the president's office which ended up being a set of policy recommendations that um president crow put forth to um our state legislature our state um legislators in congress to for um the most recent the last crunch of the cares act monies but the reality is it's not just tribes and it's not just native students it's not just rural students it's not just urban students we have this lack of availability that is unbelievable in a good year 18 percent of tribal lands um on of tribal lands reservation lands have no internet access at all not wired not wireless not land-based 33 of us rely on internet service through a smartphone at home that's the only access we are early adopters of smartphones but that's necessity 31 of respondents say they to our study in the fall which extrapolated out to our brief this spring indicated that the connection was spotty and they had or they had no connection at home this came like I said from our tribal technology assessment but the impact on students was difficult because of the transition online to academic coursework of course we initially in the spring transitioned like everybody to online and there was a very incorrect assumption that native students had constant access to affordable and reliable internet indeed there was an assumption everybody did and we did find that many of our our all of our students didn't have um access because the internet's ubiquitous everywhere why would you pay for it at your home if you can go anywhere or on campus it's there so it wasn't just our native students and it wasn't just our rural students it was our urban students it was our city students it was our regular students but indigenous students face an even more compound issue that this lack of internet is compounded by social distancing policies as well of course digital divide is more than just one divide it's availability it's lack of availability lack of access lack of affordability it's the types of access it's the quality of access location of access and the speeds it and then it was also compounded by the closure of anchor institutions that have access and we it led to students withdrawing really completely in some cases the other thing that it's impacting that now we're really starting to talk about and is the access of course to healthcare and telehealth as we move to telehealth because folks can't get to a doctor and some of our lands if you've if you've not seen the stories here in the US I think you have and I think they've been in international papers from what I've seen we've been disproportionately hit in tribal communities with the COVID the Navajo Nation which is north of us by about four hours has been one of the worst affected populations in the United States now right now it's the Choctaw Nation per capita is the worst tribal community in the United States and it's it's pretty staggering because then you compound that with our cultural practices we've got you know we're multi found generational family households we're small homes that we're living in we don't and believe it or not in Navajo Nation we don't have running water in many of our homes and so you add all of those to lack of broadband access folks can't talk to a doctor they can't we can't order groceries in like those of us who are fortunate when when we shut down and such so we've been able to really play a part here at the Policy Institute in because we're the only native or led organization working in this arena even though we're a university institute I see us as serving Indian country that's what we do and that's what the work we do can do is serve Indian country by getting this information out there by talking like this to people and making folks aware so we have been a part of them the dissent at the forefront really we've had a very very busy summer some of the other areas we work in include work with the United States FCC Federal Communications Commission we over the summer had a rural tribal priority window which is was a window open to give tribes spectrum access to the spectrum over their tribal lands if it wasn't already licensed in the 2.5 gigahertz band having this seat at the table with a national policy making body like this is a huge huge deal 400 tribes applied for their spectrum and as of this week 100 and I think was 157 have been awarded the licensure over their tribal lands they have two years to build out some sort of infrastructure or lease out infrastructure and of course we're involved at the Institute in some of the heavy lifting and research to support the folks that are putting it forth advocacy wise we cannot be advocate advocates we're not we're not we're not lobbyists but we can do the research that provides our congressional folks with the information they need to service currently right now there is significant congressional action on broadband and that includes seven seven bills related to tribal broadband and 37 related to broadband in the United States and we do know that the Biden transition team is aware of this and will have significant input on this so we have a we have a part to play in making sure at AI PI that tribes have a seat at the table in the development of a new a new utility even though nobody calls it that here because of the way the regulatory system is set up we have a part to play in building the pipeline of students and professionals that work in this arena so that it's not just the same folks talking although it feels like it it's just there's a handful of us that work in this arena but we are actively striving to build the pipeline of of native and indigenous people that work in this arena from installing you know from putting in towers to going to Capitol Hill and talking about it we need the whole gamut and we're making sure that we can do that and down those are just some of the areas we work in there we're sure dabbling a lot of other stuff but this is my passion this is where I've been and the work we do this will always be the center of the work we do because broadband really is the center of our lives now it is the underpinning to health education civic engagement education I probably already said that and pretty much anything else we do so we will be able to we will be able to make sure that tribes are aware of these opportunities and that's what I seek to do is is give tribes a seat at the table representation is everything we need to see ourselves in these spaces and more will follow so I look forward to hearing from the other panel panelists and having a lively discussion thank you thank you so much Tracy and over to Magalie McDuffie for her introductory comments thanks for Tina thank you everyone for having me on this panel it's a great opportunity so my name is Magalie as you've heard I'm French originally but I live in Australia I've been here for 20 years now I'm at the moment the head of the film department at the SAE creative institute and also the national film program chair for SAE and in my other life I'm also a researcher and documentary filmmaker with Aboriginal communities in Australia so I thought I'd give you a little bit of context about Australia before we start so at the time of colonisation there were more than 500 Aboriginal nations and languages in Australia today Aboriginal people make up three percent of the total Australian population but they make up 29 percent of the prison population in Australia in the juvenile justice system it gets worse Aboriginal youths make up 53 percent of the carceral population and in Western Australia and the northern territory now this goes up to 100 percent in some places bearing in mind that the age of criminal responsibility is 10 years old in Australia we have a lot of Aboriginal children in prison in Australia police violence is endemic there have been 432 deaths in custody since 1991 since the Royal Commission into death in custody you know Tracy was mentioning just now there's a lot of poverty some of the remote Aboriginal communities are routinely described as being forced world so you know in the work that I do and in the research that I do I'm always careful to say that Aboriginal people are still being colonised we do not believe in a post-colonial world or in a post-colonial paradigm we are still very much in a colonial paradigm as other settler countries settler colonial countries Australia was very much developed through the same productivity lens every tree that they saw was a piece of furniture every drop of water that went out to sea was wasted because it could be used for irrigation and every blade of grass was good for a capital or sheep forget about kangaroos they're not you know very useful animals so obviously the settlers failed to see the complexity of Aboriginal cultures of their economies because they didn't have economies of their spirituality their careful regime of land maintenance and their languages and today 200 years later nothing much has changed you know the new colonizers other multinational companies wanting to frack wanting to mine for coal for you know precious metals wanting to dam rivers wanting to put cotton plantations in a narrow climate and all these processes as you know Kirk was talking about before are done very much without any consultation or very little consultation with indigenous people and they're often hurried through you know institutionalised processes and very unfair to the people of this land I should add that I'm talking tonight from Wajak-Munga country and I wanted to also pay my respect to the traditional owners the Wajak-Munga people of the Perse area of Australia and to their traditional to the traditional owners their elders past present and future and also acknowledging the fact that Aboriginal people never see their land in Australia so what does film have to do with this you may ask so I've been working as a documentary filmmaker for the past 15 years with Aboriginal communities across Australia both in urban areas and in very remote areas as well most of our work is done through a principle that we call Kallara now Kallara is a Negina word from the Kimberley region of the north west Australia Kallara means to reveal to make scene and that's very much what we try to do with film what does this mean this means that we work in a participatory collaborative and indigenous approach it is centred on country country is the premise of all our work we work in place on country I think Darshan mentioned you know the non-humans you know the the humans and non-humans and Aboriginal people often say country teaches you country knows you so I'm being taught by people we very much have also a multi-species collaboration with the place that we work in the river the birds and the environment that we work in our central premise is deep listening it's called Nigarigara in Negina which means you've got to listen and Jimbin gobble from the inside to the outside so this means trust and long-term collaborations as a lot of people say in Australia a lot of Aboriginal people say nothing about us without us and I love this so we're filming with and for not about films must always benefit the communities that they are made with the people Aboriginal people are cultural advisors and they are the producers of their own stories they retain their rights over the stories and they retain their right of veto at any point which is very important at the start of the process there is no script there is no expectations so it's just a dialogue and a conversation on country the filmmaker is led by what the community wants to do and the story they want to tell not by the idea of what the film should be about there's a saying that we have which we made up with one of the communities I worked with up in the Kimberly which is leave your ego at the gate it's not about you there's a constant feedback cycle as well very very much consultative process all the way through and what we find is that there is a lot of power in being listened to there is a lot of power in being able to reaffirm your identity to reaffirm your knowledge to reaffirm that you actually exist you know which you know sometimes has been denied to Aboriginal people in Australia there's a lot of power in bringing force past and present injustices so a lot of our films are very political they're not popular films they're certainly not going to make us famous we're not Hollywood movie filmmakers in any way but you know and for us you know filmmakers I think for me in particular there is a lot to learn in listening and that's very very important there's one sentence the first sentence that I learned on Niggina country was Marlon Nillangayu which means I don't know anything and it's very much you know starting from there so in making these films we create a counter discourse we make those marginalised voices heard you know and they reveal new truths for some people but you know for others those groups have been there for a long time they also create new connections so one of the things that we do with our films depending on you know where they're distributed and everything but they go to conferences with Aboriginal activities you know they take them wisdom to different conferences around the world you know nationally in Australia internationally they give a lot of new partnerships you know and people you know listen to these films one of the things that people say is that they're love listening to the elders and to take the elders wisdom with those films you know to other places and for people to meet them so in turn these new connections that are created often come back to the country they come back to the place where it all originated and they create new partnerships new connections and that's how we talk about this rhizomatic network that's been created so 13 years ago when I went to the Kimberley just as an example we you know we there were a few women that were talking about the need to protect the Fitzroy River now the Fitzroy River is one of the biggest rivers in Australia and in the world it's second to the Amazon in the monsoon season in terms of you know the amount of water that comes out of the river and so the talk was around you know those women were very visionary in the way that they were saying look they are coming and we need to protect the river meaning the nuclearisers are coming we know that and we need to protect the river and you know at the time there were probably three or four voices out there in the wilderness and you know in the 13 years that we've been working there what we've seen now is a whole seven Aboriginal nations coming together all the nations from along the river forming a council to act as one voice for the river to protect the river we've seen collaborations with crumbs with three universities with scientists from all around the world with New Zealand with American universities so you know those films you know are part of that they're part of you know creating that network and you know hopefully creating that understanding and bringing you know new people to these to this space and the last thing I wanted to say was that we have to think of film as a process not an outcome so as filmmakers we often train to think about you know the accolades that we get you know the number of screenings or the number of festivals that we you know will get our films in and we are told that this is the measure of our success and I think that we forget in that that the process of film itself is actually very powerful it is a process of construction of reconstruction of transformation of reaffirmation it can bring about change and it's also about reconciliation it's also about people working together and and there's one elder that always says it's about you know working together shoulder to shoulder that's the most important thing so that's a little bit about my work thank you so much Magalie and I might bring everybody together now spotlighted in one panel and I'm going to do 30 seconds of silence in the deep listening of what each of the speakers spoke about so if we could have them all on the panel together side by side that would be wonderful and the moment starts now thank you to each of you for that expression of love and dedication I must say you're not observers as our audience understands your actionists in their side by side with the communities I'd like you to open up the floor now to each other I want you to comment on what you've heard from one another and I'm going to remain silent who would like to go first Kirk you're nodding your head wasn't necessarily nodding but I'll take the prompt okay Magalie I really appreciate it some of the comments that you had around using film as process and as an engagement tool we have a project that's running out of our space predominantly driven by one of my research assistants in which we're using participatory film processes to be able to make sense of healing extraction by going and doing filmed interviews with stakeholders in regulatory institutions in industry in concerns you know community groups and and research scientists as well to be able to there's very little information about this industry and very little information about their processes and potential impacts and then and then developing a series of modules that address different aspects of those concerns but in generating the scripts and determining what content would be in there there's a negotiation process that happens by going and interacting with the different stakeholders to say what what do you think should be included in conversations around impacts and then having them review the script and then somewhat coming to some common terms or common understanding about what that script should involve and so shopping it in that way and then our sort of future plans with us is to actually use those as staging modules to then start doing um basically do a little bit of dialogue sessions where we would use as a starting points to start brokering conversations and so you know they can't I like the idea of a procedural component to this right night I also um just want to say I'm very much in solidarity with your idea that post-colonialism doesn't exist and I think that what we see certainly within extraction you know industries in particular is that colonialism is something that is is is enforced in many different spaces um and not necessarily in the historically colonialized spaces and that's not necessarily to to parse out or diminish the importance between those differences but I think that we need to come to this understanding that first we need to decolonize before we can actually post-colonize right and decolonize means thinking about the applications of science and technology and what kinds of harms they have done historically and thinking about different ways in which we can invest in those through you know educating engineers differently to think about ethics and applications to being able to assert the importance of of community voice as you just said Magali and in terms of thinking about alternative ways in which we need to deploy these in communities so that we can amplify access and amplify the justice opportunities as Tracy was just saying with things like broadband infrastructure and what kinds of you know pathways that creates for additional education and access to information so that's a nice thread that I just wanted to identify across a lot of our work I want to pose something and you may all you all may not like it I propose that we cannot decolonize any more than we can remove bias just going to say I don't believe that decolonization is attainable I don't any more than post post colonialism is attainable it's like bias you can't remove it you can acknowledge it you can learn to work around it you can acknowledge your own bias or and such but I think decolonization is too bandied about like oh well just decolonize it'll be fine not I'm not saying that on you Kirk I think of that in terms of in a broader context I see it with our indigenous students as well I'll probably get called out on Twitter about it but the reality is like I think it's like bias I don't think we can remove it even as indigenous people from ourselves so just a thought I appreciate how do we cut through it then Tracy what are you what are you sort of a different framework I think acknowledging it like like you acknowledge bias in research and such but I and I think like you're talking about we acknowledge it we incorporate it into our work and such but at the same time recognizing that it's it's it's an ongoing constant process and I think decolonization is not a process not an end goal either you know it's it's a process we need to engage in that as opposed to saying oh we did it it's done we're moving on maybe just my thoughts just my opinion yeah too often I think what we see in Australia is a tokenistic process you know it's the tick the box exercise we talk about ticking the box you know so oh let's do this you know like this week we have a native week which recognizes you know Aboriginal people in Australia and you know one of the you know there'll be a tick the box exercise of you know showing an Aboriginal film or you know in the workplace or you know having someone come and talk and you know do a talk and and that's it now that's that's one day or one week of the year and then everybody goes back to you know their normal lives and and the process it's it's not you know the process is not there you know we've sort of tick the box we've you know decolonize the workplace for a week it's okay you know so I totally agree with that yeah it needs to be more than this it needs to be you know in I think every every individual you know in in you know trying to understand our bias and and you know and trying to you know I think for me the main thing that I see saying in young people you know my my daughter for instance she went and lived in Aboriginal communities since she was three years old so for her it's perfectly normal to live in an Aboriginal community and then when we moved to Canberra the capital of Australia one day a teacher asked you know in comfortable studies you know how many Aboriginal people the kids knew in the class or you know if they knew anyone who was Aboriginal and she was the only one that raised their hand and she thought that was she saw that was crazy you know so she thought oh my god you know like this is I can't believe like people don't know Aboriginal people and I think that just having this in young people you know just just having you know it's a big part of reconciliation I think in Australia to have young people working together we do a lot of work with with young people I do a lot of work with young people in terms of training I've been a community media trainer for a long time as well being out to communities so that young people can tell their own stories through film you know and that it's not just up to non-indigenous people to tell stories of this things like that okay it's very very important. I'd love to hear from you next. I have a bit of a different question here and it's something that I have a hard time wrapping my head around as Tracy and Magali and Kirk all of you have alluded to the the legacies of social and environmental injustice are long and and it's you know they're hundreds of years long and we're dealing with the repercussions of that right now and as we continue to evolve technologically scientifically there are newer and newer kinds of injustices that are being revealed as well and I just have a hard time wrapping my head around that reality that you have legacies of injustice that are compounded by newer kinds of injustices that unfold based off of the ways in which we build continue to build the world and I don't know what that means for the work that we do like it's just I don't know how to think about that and I don't know if that's even a legitimate question or something but it's like like the injustices seem to be always shape-shifting and growing and and so what does that mean for how we approach the work that we do? So let me jump in I immediately thought of something when you were talking about the border wall there is huge activism happening I don't know where you're located are you in Arizona too? I generally am. So in southern Arizona with the Ta'anatam people down there there is a huge action going on on the border wall there's been active legislative actions there's been demonstrations and a number of things just engaging in that process I think would broaden that concept for you I really do engaging with the tribe understanding what's done tribes often get stereotypically put in the place of the original earth protector or whatever that's really it's a misnomer it's a stereotype but it also we are also tied to the our lands but there's also legal and regulatory things that tribal folks have so you know understanding in an area when you go into at least in the U.S. you know what are the NEPA regulations and the you know historic preservation NAGPRA you know human remains preserved you know those sorts of things we do know those stories we do have that information and we do have historical when you talk about engineering we have our own historical engineering thing so I think just involving yourself and seeing whenever land place you do something what is the original what are the original inhabitants what did they do they're often still around doesn't matter where you are in the world we're still here as an indigenous people wherever you are it's you know whatever country you're in so seek out those that and then I think that would broaden that for you it might help you answer the the idea of cycles of injustice it's like cycles of poverty it's like cycles of policy it's cyclical it's it it's always going to be ongoing but there are strategies and peoples who have understandings my thought happy to introduce you sorry Tracey to bring this back around the idea of of of science and technology and the development of such within the framework of public interest you know it creates this complicated tension between not boxing indigenous knowledge or or trying to historicize it or capture it in that that time space right but honoring it and creating space for it within the ways in which we think about science and technology but at the same time not assuming that just including indigenous knowledge systems into western scientific traditions is somehow going to solve the problem because then you end up in the situation where you're just asking people from indigenous communities to somehow adopt what a technological frameworks without actually breaking that apart and thinking about what exactly does you know historical science and technology applications reinforce in terms of those kinds of harms right so it's about it's about using opportunities to broker different kinds of knowledge exchanges to be able to find different futures and not necessarily just saying well it's going to be solved by having x number of you know people of indigenous you know origin as faculty and university and it's like but you're still just doing the same kind of science and engineering that has produced the problems and that's I think darshan a very strong thread of your work right and working with those organizations on campus so you're training those next generations in not only their methods bring your methods complimenting their own because we have a sit on the board of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society it's the longest established scientific organization for for tribal folks and so there's active chapters at every major university in the country so there's a lot of ways to go about that you're exactly right Kurt lots of opportunities but it's learning to seek out the folks who can help connect you that's what we do the institute we like to connect and I don't mean for this to sound sort of pessimistic but you know the enterprise that produces injustice is vast right and and and so and and actually the motives the incentives the ways in which you know engineers and scientists might even think of the world and think about projects that they work on is very different than the process that Magali describes and and so you know it's like there are different kinds of people who approach the world in different ways and the way in which they think about addressing injustice is really different too and um and so in my work I'm trying to think through that I certainly don't have any answers to that but it just seems like um like the scale of the the processes the technological enterprises that cause these injustices is so vast and I wonder how we think about that scale in the work that we do as we build the public interest technology how is that going to change Magali go ahead I think one one project at a time one one fight at a time I think um for us um you know I I can't believe in the last 15 years you know um the people that I've been working with you know the um elders that have run the campaigns against some of the um invasive development that they were striking with um how much pressure they're under all the time um from every side you know when it's not when it's not one thing then another comes in and then of course there's you know obviously the intergenerational trauma still very present of colonization you know um a lot of a lot of crises in some of the communities as well as dealing with those external threats um at the same time it's it's a lot of work um but I think um what I think that the campaigns that we've been part of in Australia um you know they've all had one thing in common which was uh no anger you know let's do this with love in our hearts you know not not anger um that's what the elders said when they tried to stop a gas hub north of brim in the in northern Australia um you know they and they they invented so many um amazing campaign um um you know um techniques that I had I would never have thought of of that but you know they had people dressed up as billies you know chaining themselves you know to trucks you know so that you know the the trucks couldn't go through um but you know what they said all the time was do not be don't be angry don't be angry and even when the police came even when police started arresting people even when the police started getting violent with people they were still saying let's not get angry let's do this with love we love our country not you know we want we want you out um but the scale is enormous you right darshan it's it's um absolutely enormous this the scale of what we face all the time what indigenous people have to face in terms of the threats um to their country um but I think it's yeah it's it's one fight at a time and and educating people you know like um um one of the things that I love is um uh one what one of the elders said you've got to learn to um see with your ears and and listen with your eyes um which was a really lovely comment but it took me a while to understand what she meant and and what she meant was you know as a filmmaker you come in and you see you know this country and and the um you know I I climbed up on top of a water tower in one of the communities to get a shot of the country and one of the 12 year old kids who was there said oh you're going up the tower you know that's really fantastic my dad takes me up there and I said what can you see from up there and so you can see the whole world and me you know I'll trudge up to the you know top of the tower with my tripods and cameras and everything and I get there and all I can see is nothing I can't see it I can't see the whole world I can just see just bush and some trees and you know just slap ground you know as far as I can see and um uh but she explained to me she said but I can see you know I can see my dream time I can see camping grounds I can see where we went fishing last week I can see the stories in the land you know so all of this um you know that education I think is one person at a time it's very very you know it's very very slow but it's one person at a time where you can start seeing the country like indigenous people see it and then you understand what's at stake um and it you know it's it's a long process but I believe that it is possible to achieve that then film is one of the means it's not the means obviously but I feel that it's one of the means that you can do this with in in closing uh to the all of you um a short comment perhaps Tracy Morris perhaps uh I was just uh in closing I think I think the thing we come to is it is it is one person at a time I have to agree don't we often think we've got to change it all and we can't we can't change it all it's that one person that you impact every person who works for me every student worker I have if I can impact them so that they impact somebody else that's where I've made the difference um trust in that process I think that that's how we do this whether it's um what we're talking about here in the broader in terms of public interest technology sustainability it's it's one person at a time we have to um not take on the world but take on what we can do Dushan um I just want to say that I'm super inspired by just being a part of this conversation and there's just new terms and phrases and ways of thinking about things that I've been exposed to in the last 50 minutes um that uh I hope to reflect on over the coming days and if anybody is interested in collaborating I would love to hear from you and visit also re-engineered.org in your case yes uh cook well make sure you visit civicfeatures.org too but no you know I think I would like to sort of end on a charge and that is for people who were in and were not able to join us today as we think about what is the bigger scope of public interest technology that we're trying to define here at the conference and across the initiative that goes beyond this conference why is it that we need to have a panel on social and environmental justice here should this not be a given when we think about public interest technology right um should this not already be folded into the core mission as to why we've chosen or decided that there's a need for a new initiative around public interest technology and if you know if folks you know felt as though this was somewhat superfluous to the bigger mission then I think that people should really do some soul searching as to why that's the case right this isn't just about directing money from Silicon Valley to different kinds of technologies that might be used in different places it's about fundamentally rearranging the kinds of social and political relationships that we have in our society to science and technology in ways that will have the kinds of transformational change that we're talking about and that may be abandoning entire ways in which we've thought about our commitment to science and technology and maybe even entire career paths or entire kinds of science and technology and engineering that we think is important to the world presently right um like these are the big kinds of of of new paradigms that we need to start thinking about otherwise um we're heading off a cliff you know I just want to build off of that really quick I mean the fact that we have to characterize something as technology in the public interest or public interest technology means that there is technology that is not in the public interest and what does that mean and what does that mean for how we're actually educating and training people and the opportunities that we present to them Yes Josh and yes and Magalie um I think for me you know in this conversation I think what it always comes back to is individual ethics as well and and people wanting to grow and learn you know and and having enough humility to you know sit down and listen and to conceive of science and technology um also with other lives you know there is indigenous science you know there were indigenous astronomers you know they're you know it's it's not just science as we speak of it in the western way of conceiving of science thank you Magalie thank you and sorry to cut you off I just wanted to say thank you to each and every one of you for inspiring us today to New America to ASU for the representation and for those who stayed up from across the world thank you so much to the listeners may we continue to listen bye for now