Mentor Areas
Lingel’s research focuses on three key areas:
- Alterity and appropriation, and investigations of how information and technology is altered, tinkered with, subverted, and articulated by marginalized groups.
- Politics of infrastructure, where systems of categorization, organization, and design can reveal underlying ideologies and logics.
- Technological activism as a way of exploring how socio-technical practices can contribute to projects of social justice.
Description:
Just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S., a study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that just 53% of Black residents and 44% of Latinx residents in Philadelphia have broadband connections (Alvaro 2020), compared to 77% of the general U.S. population (Pew Research, 2021). The pandemic has demonstrated the implications of this digital divide, exacerbating existing inequalities for students, business owners, job seekers, and others. This project brings together academics, community organizers and technologists to collaborate on a grassroots effort at increasing internet access in under-served communities in Philadelphia. We use mesh networks to provide no-cost internet access, controlled by community stakeholders rather than commercial service providers. Our goal is to empower the people who have been most exposed to technology’s harms through surveillance (Zuboff, 2019) and algorithmic bias (Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018) with critical digital literacies. Beyond simply getting people online, we offer training on basic principles of network engineering so that users can be stewards of the technology, rather than merely recipients.
Our efforts center on mesh networks, a distributed system of network routers which allow a single source of bandwidth to be shared among a broader group of users, with very little cost or infrastructure required for connection. Traditional internet service providers rely on a one-way, centralized hub that transmits network traffic to all users on the receiving end. But with mesh networks, every router both receives and transmits network traffic simultaneously, enabling the network to remain operational even when individual nodes go out of service. The technical shape of mesh networks (interconnected, resilient) thus reflect the social connections that we seek to amplify (democratic, participatory, decentralized).
Preferred Qualifications
Skills/Requirements: Most important is a shared interest in digital technology and social justice. This project can accommodate people with technical skills (hardware and software) as well as research skills (writing, editing and critical reading).
Tasks: Attending research meetings, writing literature reviews, editing documents, and contributing to community-engagement work.
Details:
Preferred Student Year
Junior, Senior
Academic Term
Fall, Spring, Summer
I prefer to have students start during the above term(s).Volunteer
No
Yes indicates that faculty are open to volunteers.Paid
Yes
Yes indicates that faculty are open to paying students they engage in their research, regardless of their work-study eligibility.Work Study
Yes
Yes indicates that faculty are open to hiring work-study-eligible students.