Reflexive Data Walks: Cultivating Feminist Ethos through Place-Based Inquiry

Reflexivity, as conceived by feminist epistemologies, is essential to advancing social justice design practice. Reflexivity is thus critical for CSCW and HCI scholars and practitioners who seek to build equitable technological futures, as it allows for a critical examination of explicit and implicit values and politics in design and research processes. In this paper, we put forth a participatory walking method grounded in feminist ethos for cultivating reflexivity by engaging with the theme of boundaries in space. We outline this method through three integrated place-based strategies, including an activity in the home, a data walk in the city, and making and sharing visualizations for collaborative understandings of place. We argue that engaging with place is critical to foregrounding positionality and cultivating reflexivity in research. We share our findings from two workshops where we examined the efficacy of this method. We outline how the method deepens the understandings of the built environment, self, and others; welcomes vulnerability and fosters openness to change; scaffolds practices of critical self questioning. In doing so, it leads to a recognition of the entanglement of socio-political values in design and data creation, revealing uncertainties and ambiguities that can open up new areas for inquiry and design.