In-fra Processing
This focus group is to reflect on In-grid's collective organisational methods through a framing of critical access. The focus will be accessible to member's reorientation but it will be a time for us to look back and reflect on how we have started to configure our own infrastructure and background away from big tech institutions and towards feminist and intersectional community infrastructures. In this reflection I hope for us to articulate together through processing our inquiry, a few figures (metaphors) of our own to make accessible these situated relations. To do this we will think through how we have found frictions, or inflexibility when working socially and technically. These will form contours for us to reflect on how we have enabled our collaboration to be Configure-able together. This interplay being the place we form figures and narratives of access from, and where we as a collaboration have flexed towards accessible futures and away from institutional inflexibility .
What are the systematic and institutional relations that hold/held us in place? From Ahmed - lines holding norms of relations in place. + Aimi Hamraie Flexibile users and soft bodies being conformed to hard machines.
Systemic issues around CAPITALISM aside. University structure, jobs/working relationships hold some elements in place, and enable certain actions.
Institutions, these come with some privileges but academia/large institutions can be ableist, smaller grass roots organisations that are not driven by the logics of capitalism can enable alt spaces.
How we stay attached to these institutions or stay with the difficulties of systemic issues, but find wiggle room, how we make wiggle room.
All the other things, like race, class, gender etc etc etc
Social and also contractual relationships
Time = money under the jobbing job world. And collectivising means we can pool time or labour in a time-poor world.
The Catch 22 of being able to prioritise art/research/things that matter for early career researchers/artists/makers is that you already have to have done these things to get the jobs/roles where you are given time for that.
Time, space, funding, prestige, brain space, emotional capacity
Dumb systems that's difficult to work with (Ex: No bank options for non- profitable small collective)
Right to work, visas etc
wage labour slavery & and chronic health un-diagnosis that both disable/enable my capacity to do anything whether for work or socially, or towrds organising/meeting/ etc
What restrains/ed our capacities relationally and materially?
What does this friction contour?
How do/did we process and feel out that restraint?
How did we (want to) flex and wiggle towards our desires?
What did we do to enable us to get close to the space/relation possible that we needed?
How would we have changed or approached this differently?
These don't have to be mutually exclusive, maybe more starting points?
takes a lot of labor
inflexibility
in-flex
too flex for insti - but a form that fits our needs
three kids in a long coat pretending to be what they expect.
These are very quickly written sum ups, but hope it helps. Do add or edit if you feel they misrepresent or you have q's or other opinions. . .
(Hamraie, 2017) - https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt79d.6.
Writes about the formation of the figure of the user within industrial design and how this was formed from the understanding that human bodies are soft and malleable unlike machines, which are hard, determined and static things humans have to be shaped around. This pulls from a eugenics histories, and also orient ergonomics as a place to shape people as much as it is machines to humans. With critical access here Hamraie questions how we can make room for machines to flex to users instead of this normalising and violent history.
(Cowan & Rault, 2024) - https://punctumbooks.com/titles/heavy-processing/
Talks about bringing queer practices of heavy processing social relations as a way to re-approach the heavy processing needed to start to imagine ethical, de-colonial and anti-abelist technologies. Thinking with it to how In-grid has our own sorts of processing, ones sedimented through relations of trust, in-stability and care.
(Maier et al., 2020) - https://cfshrc.org/article/get-the-frac-in-or-the-fractal-many-festo-a-transcript/
A crip manifesto looking into fractals and repeated patterns as ways to move us beyond the known and into a crip infinite. Here I am highlighting their focus on repetition or a tic we might have, recursively forming actions and relations. . .
(Sarah Ahmed, 2014) - https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/09/28/wiggle-room/
(Pritchard, 2025) - https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/Wiggleroom
Here thinking about how to reform roles that are pre-figured or sedimented into relations, whether gender, user, disabled, etc. In these thinking how we can collectively wiggle into these spaces, making capacity for the practices we bring with us and desire to be there as well.
(Mingus, 2017) - https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/
Talking about the need for intimacy in understanding the nuance and care need in access. Here thinking through our expansive intimacies in relation and forming infrastructural access, how we take time, know who might need what, and care for each other to be in that space together.
(Gearty & Marshall, 2021) - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11213-020-09539-4
This text looks into a reflection on first person action research as a methodology. It looks into how through situated inquiry and one that takes on internal and external arcs of enquiry through both personnel and systemic relations. Here thinking about how we can reflect through these methods to inquire into our own practices internally and externally.