Political computational thinking: policy networks, digital governance and ‘learning to code’

Williamson, B. (2016). Political computational thinking: Policy networks, digital governance and ‘learning to code.’ Critical Policy Studies, 10(1), 39–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2015.1052003

Read as part of my writing on critical race theory for computing education paper.

Notes

“This article provides a ‘policy network analysis’ tracing the governmental, business and civil society actors now operating in policy networks to project learning to code into the reformed programs of study for computing in the National Curriculum in England.” Shut down or restart was the 2012 implementation of new CS curriculum in UK. Key points (from the linked article)

  • The current delivery of Computing education in many UK schools is highly unsatisfactory. Although existing curricula for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are broad and allow scope for teachers to inspire pupils and help them develop interests in Computing, many pupils are not inspired by what they are taught and gain nothing beyond basic digital literacy skills such as how to use a word-processor or a database. This is mainly because:
    • the current national curriculum in ICT can be very broadly interpreted and may be reduced to the lowest level where non specialist teachers have to deliver it
    • there is a shortage of teachers who are able to teach beyond basic digital literacy
    • there is a lack of continuing professional development for teachers of Computing
    • features of school infrastructure inhibit effective teaching of Computing
  • There is a need to improve understanding in schools of the nature and scope of Computing. In particular there needs to be recognition that Computer Science is a rigorous academic discipline of great importance to the future careers of many pupils. The status of Computing in schools needs to be recognised and raised by government and senior management in schools.
  • Every child should have the opportunity to learn Computing at school, including exposure to Computer Science as a rigorous academic discipline.
  • There is a need for qualifications in aspects of Computing that are accessible at school level but are not currently taught. There is also a need for existing inappropriate assessment methods to be updated.
  • There is a need for augmentation and coordination of current Enhancement and Enrichment activities to support the study of Computing.
  • Uptake of Computing A-level is hindered by lack of demand from higher education institutions.

“a form of computa- tional thinking is emerging in relation to contemporary techniques of governance. It assumes many social, scientific, governmental and human problems can be treated as technical problems to be solved or optimized through the application of the right code, algorithms and data, twinned with the necessary expert techniques of programming, algorithm design and software development (Kitchin 2014b)” (p. 40).

“The shift in political ambition toward digital governance is underpinned what I term political computational thinking: a contemporary style of political thought that ‘takes technical change as the model for political invention’ and is preoccupied with the ‘models of social and political order’ technology seems to make available (Barry 2001, 2)” (p. 40).

I have been proposing that a structural account of race and racism, such as that provided by CRT, could allow computing education to productively apply CS disciplinary practices to substantial engagement. However, I think there is a high likelihood of missing the mark with this project. The phenomenon which needs study is racial formation (Omi & Winant, 2001), the process of reifying categories to which subjects are assigned through recognition, not just the accuracy of such assignment (e.g. is that person really Native American?) or the justice or injustice of treatment or outcomes across racial categories. For a computer scientist applying disciplinary vision and modeling/analytical practices to race (in the context of computing education), what’s needed is fundamentally humanistic: reflection on the process of modeling and the application of constructs, not diving into the mathematical or statistical problem with a presumption that the categories and constructs are suitable. For example computational modeling of population, racialized through census categories, could yield vauable analytical results about unjust public policy, but we will miss the mark if we’re not using the modeling (in a Papertian way) to “get to know” the process of racial formation.

“Political computational thinking is a style of thought, then, that aims to translate social phenomena into computational models that can then be solved by being formalized as step-by-step algorithmic procedures that can be computed as proxies for human judgment or action. It is in the context of the emergence of political computational thinking that interest has coalesced around learning to code.” (p. 40)

This quotation follows the direction of my thought above closely.

“At its core, digital governance depends on a compact between government acting as a ‘platform’ and citizen participation in the design and delivery of its services (O’Reilly 2010).” (p. 40)

This perspective strikes me as overly idealistic in a potentially-dangerous way, just as Habermas’s concept of the public sphere has been criticized for idealizing political agency in a way that erases oppression and can be used to blame the oppressed for not helping themselves. So what would be a parallel critical response to the idea of digital participation? Probably theorization of the distinct ways computational media participate in oppressive subject formation (e.g. digital racial formation).

“Learning to code has been translated from a grassroots campaign into a relatively stable and coherent policy agenda in a remarkably concentrated period, yet the actors mobilizing it into education policy, the material practices of coding promoted through its pedagogies and its wider connections to changing techniques of governance remain under-researched” (p. 41).

It would be interesting to do a comparable study for the US. My sense is that many of the same findings would hold. Use the same method of policy network analysis, proposed by Ball and Junemann (2012, 14): “seek to trace how it is possible for techniques of government expressed in one place to become linked with ‘action at another, not through the direct imposition of a form of conduct by force, but through a delicate affiliation of a loose assemblage of agents and agencies into a functioning network’ (Miller and Rose 2008, 35).” (p. 41).

One additional outcome of this study could be consideration of how computing education research might position itself intentionally within this policy network matrix, in order to be wiser about potential impacts of our research. This will of course make people who do not like to think about research as political uncomfortable (anticipating backlask).

“As Kitchin and Dodge (2011, 33) have argued, coding is a ‘disciplinary regime’ with established ‘ways of knowing and doing regarding coding practices’. Code, in other words, projects the ‘rules’ of computer science and its system of computational thinking into the world (Lash 2007).” (p. 49)

Very closely aligned with Scott’s Seeing Like a State analysis of state power as disciplinary, imposing legibility. Returning to my consideration of the practice of applying computational modeling to social problems, it seems like computational imagination (Peppler?), holding open spaces of possibilities, considering alternative ways of framing a problem and the stakes involved in choosing a model, will have importance for criticality. Things could have been organized differently. This is closely-aligned with other writing on education for designing social futures.

I’ve repeatedly come to the idea of imagining a future for Buffalo as an alternative to Toronto’s Sidewalk Labs. This article offers important theory and points to other sites which might be worth studying: for example, Glasgow ‘Future City’ initiative (p. 52), Smart Cities Forum,

“learning to code is part of a political aspiration to govern through techniques of digital governance, where citizens themselves require the digital skills to take part in increasingly people-centered and citizen-led digitized services. In order to achieve this, individuals are to be shaped as governable citizens whose own interests and aspirations align with those of the authorities that seek to govern.” (p. 53).

Bakhtin’s concept of addressibility (both addressing and addressible) is important here. Participation in government (or, really, even passive recognition of the possibility of participation) also means making oneself governable. Concretely, this means, for example, accepting as legitimate systems like vaccine distribution through a website in which more skilled users can definitely get themselves an earlier appointment.