Elizabeth Borneman

“Coming Together”

Hi! I’m Elizabeth . All are welcome to call me Lizzi or Elizabeth. 

I’m from Florida, I have a background/foreground in music, neurobiology, data vis, creative writing (I think), games for learning, philosophy, design.

I’m broadly interested in transformative collaboration, or the ways and sorts of things that get people to collaborate across difference and conflict, and make people genuinely want to. I think about whether we can replicate or model those factors to fit different situations where conflict resolution and compromise is difficult. Can we turn love into an energy source maybe?

One of the things I am concerned about, and related to a project I am thinking of working at for the class, is the ways that online spaces and our interactions with our personal technologies, are being used to perpetuate historical injustices across the spectrum.  Across law enforcement, hospitals, schools, etc, for things like justifying arrests and not getting loans you might need, or the chance to get something off a criminal record, or your health insurance costs getting raised.

I’m working on a project now in early stages that focuses on biased social media flagging and surveilling of kids of color from marginalized, gang and trauma-impacted communities. Broadly, trying to think of approaches to train attorneys, judges, and educators to interpret social media more fairly and holistically, especially when content is innocuous or just expressive in some non-crime related way – a lot of this requires working with kids to learn about how they use social media to express what’s going on in their communities, how they vent, connect with each other,  etc. What sorts of changes they would like to see in the system. Another goal of the project would be to help train those educators and criminal justice officials to better and more ethically identify and respond to posts that actually might signal someone getting hurt/a crime we’d like to prevent in the future. This project is growing out of my role in the Teaching Systems Lab where I work on K-12 teacher training projects with a focus on ‘equity. ’ 

I’m happy to be here. Looking forward to learning from each other. Nice to meet you all (: