Solidarity as a principle for antisystemic design processes: two cases of alliance with social struggles in Brazil
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay we reflect on the possibility of politicizing participatory design processes by defending the notion of solidarity in Paulo Freires’s thought. We present a critique of empathy as a relational practice in design, considering it to be an anti-dialogical practice that reifies subjects in design processes focused on developing capitalist commodities. As a counterpoint, we defend solidarity as a dialogical ethical principle and practice that is founded on consciousness and the invilieng and transformation of given reality (of oppression). To support our argument, we present two experiences where we live solidarity-in-praxis while promoting design engagements in Brazil. The first is a designer alliance with a collective of peripheral youngsters at the Terra Firme neighbourhood in Belém, Pará, in the northern part of Brazil. The other is an alliance with a national-wide popular education initiative that works with women’s political education in Brazil within the feminist movement. In experiencing these, we borrow Freire’s suggestion and argue for solidarity, as opposed to empathy, to build antisystemic design processes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.022 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".