On Thursday, Jan. 21, the Center for Community and Civic Engagement (CCCE) hosted “Let’s Taco’bout Political Action,” a panel where four Carleton professors discussed the intersections of their fields of study with political action. Professors Jean Salac from Computer Science, Mitchell Campbell from Psychology, Claire Kelling from Statistics and Jade Hoyer from Art and Art History delivered their talks while students dined on tacos. 

Professor Jean Salac began her talk by providing examples of political action within the technology industry. Some examples were large-scale, such as the 2018 Microsoft employee walkout protesting the company’s $19 million contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Others were less high-profile, such as the “soft resistance” of a software engineer who deliberately created an ineffective product for a project they found unethical. 

“[With] all the systems that you all are using right now, there are people who build these technologies who might be opposed to their tools being used for means that are nefarious,” said Salac. 

The second half of Salac’s talk focused on “phone hacks that I figured out so I can bring down contacting my representatives to two minutes.”

“I was trying to exploit this idea called technological defaults,” said Salac. “This is the idea that when you have your default settings in your phone, [they] influence your choice implicitly. I thought, well, why don’t I take advantage of some of these defaults to make contacting my [representatives] easier?”

Salac then guided her audience through the steps to set up autofill features on their phones streamlining the process for sending electronic letters to representatives.

In the next talk, psychology lecturer Dr. Mitchell Campbell explained what drives people to take political action.

“Voting, protesting, social movement, participation, these kinds of things are behaviors, so we want to understand the factors that motivate those behaviors. And if we want to actually change people’s behavior, if we want to get them to do these things, we can then leverage those factors,” said Campbell. 

Drawing on a paper by psychology researcher Martijn van Zomeren, Campbell described four influential factors that affect whether someone engages in political action.

The first was identity. People ask themselves, “Am I the kind of person who participates in political action?”. According to Campbell, the more people identify with a group —such as the queer community or feminism— the more political action they will engage in. The implication, said Campbell, was that “if you want to get people to act, highlight how people who are similar to them act. Target their desire to belong to a group.”.

The second was agency– “will my action make a difference?” He used the example of voting: if someone defines “making a difference” as whether their vote will decide an election, they will be unlikely to want to vote. However, if someone thinks about it in terms of the success of a larger group, they are more likely to vote. Therefore, “members of that group can deploy messaging that emphasizes how the political action you’re engaging makes a difference,” said Campbell. 

The third was emotion. According to Campbell, the most effective emotion at motivating political action is anger, and one of the worst is guilt. However, without direction, political anger can lead to counterproductive actions or destruction. The implication is that “if you want people to act, make them angry and then provide a clear outlet,” stated Campbell.

Morality was the final influential factor he covered, the question “Is acting the right thing to do?”. If people believe something is immoral or evil, they are more likely to act. 

“If we want to motivate action, we want to emphasize a ‘we’ by leveraging identity, we want to demonstrate why our action matters through agency, rile people up through emotion, and then separate right from wrong,” said Campbell. 

Assistant Professor of Statistics Claire Kelling followed up the talk with an applied example of her “political action through community-engaged statistics research.” 

Kelling described one of the main projects that she and student research assistants produced in collaboration with Confluence Studio, a “neighborhood lab to research, examine, and celebrate the social and material infrastructure of Minneapolis in the 9th ward and beyond.” She used existing data from the Minneapolis Police Department to help the community understand how their neighborhood is being policed. 

She emphasized that the project started with “community-posed questions about policing in [their] community,” and that her team then worked to narrow the questions into ones answerable with the data they had. 

Eventually, Kelling’s team addressed a question about variation in policing within the ward by creating a website where the community could “analyze their own data,” filter by specific demographic and situational factors, and view a map showing where use-of-force incidents clustered. 

“There are lots of things that data can tell you. There are lots of things that data cannot tell you as well as lived experiences in these community members’ neighborhoods. If you’re doing statistical research without the perspective of the people that are represented in your data set, you’re missing a big piece of the picture,” said Kelling. 

The panel concluded with a talk by Assistant Professor of Art Jade Hoyer.

“How do we define what it means to be making art in a political context?” asked Hoyer. “Here’s my working definition as an artist: creative engagement combining authentic community interaction towards a common end goal.”

She outlined questions to ask oneself when creating this type of art from the book “Education for Socially Engaged Art” by Pablo Helguera: “What circumstances am I addressing? What communities are impacted by this work? What is the community’s role in creating this work? How will the effects of the project outlast the project’s ephemeral presentation? Will participants be able to walk away from this experience with some claim to ownership of the experience of their ability to reproduce it?”

Hoyer then described some of her own socially engaged art. A major example was her piece “A Community Effort,” created during her time as the Windgate Artist-in-Residence at Arkansas Tech University. She worked with 360 children to create a mural using 40 pounds of recycled paper, portraying the imagery and crafting culture of the Ozark Mountains. 

Rachel Punter ’ 28 saw posters for the event in Anderson and decided to attend.

“I thought it was helpful when imagining my future, especially as someone interested in computer science, in understanding the smaller ways that you, as an employee for a larger company, can still have a role in trying to ensure that whatever work you’re doing is still ethical and still right,” said Punter. “It’s really hard as a STEM person because it’s so normalized for people to be like, ‘Oh, I would, you know, engineer bombs’.” It’s good to hear about forms of resistance you can do if you don’t want to just demoralize yourself.”

“I’ve heard that for some students it feels like there’s this elephant in a room that we’re not talking about,” said Salac. “To draw upon what [Professor Campbell] was saying about how anger needs to be directed, I think us [professors] sharing ways to direct said anger is useful.”