Community Research Co-ordinator (8 months, parttime)

At The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest we are searching for a collaborator to join us for a period of 8 months between 1 September 2024 and 31 June 2025. Your task will be to coordinate, support and contribute to a series of community research commissions within the ongoing work of TITiPI.

Community research commissions are small scale forms of collective investigation, asking questions about the impact of digital infrastructures on collective life. TITiPI's community research means developing tools, methods and words for intervening in Big Tech developments that are often seen as unstoppable. It makes collective resources available for doing research outside of academic structures. Working towards racial and environmental justice and anti-colonial technology, this type of research is dedicated to understanding how digitisation is changing peoples everyday lives and experiences. It is committed to visual, textual and other creative practices as a way to imagine the kind of technologies that we actually need.

Who are we searching for

The person we are searching for has experience in working with the impacts of digitisation on at least some of the following areas: community organising, daily life, activism, climate, borders, creative life, human rights, anti-fascism or eco politics. You have an interest in technological practice, for example related to computational infrastructure and digital transition; digital rights, anti-racist and anti-colonial technologies; ecological grief; community writing; migration experiences. If you are already working with communities and want to use this period to develop research on topics that overlap with TITiPI's concerns, this could also be possible within this role.

In collaboration with community researchers and the TITiPI team, you will be documenting processes, and supporting the delivery of research reports. This could include working on a manual or a small publication, a series of conversations, developing workshops, a creative worksession or a small event series. You will also support the production, communication and administration for those commissions. You will need to be able to work independently, at one of our desks in Brussels or partially remote with monthly meetings in Brussels, Belgium.

TITiPI is interested in artistic and activist research practice, and would like to extend its network beyond those we are already collaborating with. It could help if you speak and write another language apart from English (for example Spanish, French, German or Arabic). For this job, academic research training is not required. We value disobedient methods, imprecision and forms that mix with storying, body practices, poetry, song, and anticolonial chronologies. In short, we are open to nonconventional paths and proposals.

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI)

TITiPI is a trans-practice collaboration between activists, artists, engineers and theorists initiated by Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting. Together with associate member Jara Rocha we convene communities to articulate, activate and re-imagine together what computational technologies in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making. We develop tools from feminisms, queer theory, computation, intersectionality, anti-racism, anti-coloniality, disability studies, historical materialism and artistic practice to generate currently inexistent vocabularies, imaginaries and methodologies. Our activities include: workshops, lectures, bugreporting, consultancy, reading groups, policy analysis, public events, performances, exhibitions, audits, theory making, training, and publishing.

Conditions

Work should take place between 1 September 2024 and 31 June 2025.
The work amounts to an average of ca. 2.5 days a week over an eight-month period.
A fee of 19.000 euros, excl. VAT is available for this job, to be invoiced to TITiPI.
Each community research commission has their own modest production budget.
In case you prefer to work from elsewhere, your travel costs for monthly meetings will be reimbursed (up to 3hrs by train from/to Brussels, Belgium).
Some of the community research commissions happen within the context of the CHANSE funded project SoLiXG.

Process

Send a short motivation letter (max 2 pages) with a few links to projects, publications or actions that you have been involved in by June 13, 2024 to titipi at titipi.org
If you have any questions, please contact us by e-mail or join us on-line: https://meet.greenhost.net/crc

We will let you know about our decision by 28 June latest.