I am at Wiscon online! I posted about the general con experience, including how panels work, at ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alias_sqbr.
I didn't get to see this panel in person, but I watched the recorded stream and read back over the chat.
Panelists: Sarah Guan, K. Tempest Bradford, Claire Light, Rebecca Roanhorse, Nisi Shawl
Some links:
Metis In Space An indigenous geeky podcast
We need more Aboriginal superheroes, so I created Cleverman for my son
Italicizing “foreign” words in English text
Authors I remember being recced: Hiromi Goto, Nisi Shawl, Octavia Butler, Samuel R Delany
They talked about a bunch of interesting things. Something that stood out to me: Two different but equally valid forms of decolonised speculative fiction are stories set a world where we move past colonialism, and ones set in a world where it never happened, or didn't happen the same way. A cool launching point for the latter is all the moments in history where things could have gone better, especially since this is a reminder that the way history played out was not inevitable. One of the panelists mentioned a bunch of interesting US historical moments I hadn't heard of and didn't write down >.>
At one point a panelist made a basically reasonable point in a very unfortunate way. I was sitting there feeling annoyed until an audience question came in pointing out the issue, and the panelist and chat participants ended up having a fairly civil and productive conversation about it. (EDIT: a commenter had a very different experience, and looking back I think the fact I was skimming through the chat to get the basic gist, and started by reading the end, means I didn't get a sense of how frustrating it was in real time. Also...ok I am about to go to bed and too sleepy to articulate it but there's other stuff affecting how I interpreted things)
As far as I am able to judge, the chat was overall pretty good for such a complex topic, though sometimes white chat participants would try to be Openly Supportive of POC in ways that seemed counterproductively empty to me. Like instead of saying "YES I AGREE, IT'S SO IMPORTANT FOR WHITE PEOPLE NOT TO DOMINATE THE CONVERSATION ON RACE" maybe just...stay quiet and let the POC talk until you have something useful to add? But hey, what do I know.
Something I always notice in US based discussions of social justice is how central racism ends up being as a topic and point of focus. I mean obviously it was the topic of THIS panel, but there's just generally this air of everyone Thinking About Race you don't get in Australian social justice focussed fandom spaces (which are generally SUPER DUPER white)
Like, the PAX Australia safer space thing had like 5 queer groups and a bunch of panels about gender and sexuality, a little to do with disability, and basically NOTHING to do with race. Everyone is assumed to be generally anti-racist, and it comes up a topic sometimes, but it's just...really not a focus beyond obvious Big Topics like refugee rights. Kinda get the feeling this sucks for Australian geeky POC!
On the other hand...being an American geeky POC in (still very white) social justice focussed fandom spaces like Wiscon seems like it would be exhausting, with all these white people thinking I MUST PROVE MYSELF NOT RACIST at you all the time. I watched the start of "THE NOT HUGO AWARD-WINNING BUT VERY IMPORTANT NOT ANOTHER F*CKING RACE PANEL" which is a group of POC panelists doing fun audience participation stuff that is very pointedly NOT ABOUT RACE, and afaict was created in response to always and only being invited to be on Serious Panels About Race. And yeah, I can see why they need that and their dedicated safe space.
I mean white Australian fans (myself included) can still be Earnestly Aware Of Race, and white American fans can be oblivious, this is just my impression of the trends as an Earnest White Australian.
Anyway! I also have some thoughts on the "Learning Social Justice While Disabled" panel but those are being trickier to articulate so may take a while.
alias_sqbr.I didn't get to see this panel in person, but I watched the recorded stream and read back over the chat.
Panelists: Sarah Guan, K. Tempest Bradford, Claire Light, Rebecca Roanhorse, Nisi Shawl
Some links:
Metis In Space An indigenous geeky podcast
We need more Aboriginal superheroes, so I created Cleverman for my son
Italicizing “foreign” words in English text
Authors I remember being recced: Hiromi Goto, Nisi Shawl, Octavia Butler, Samuel R Delany
They talked about a bunch of interesting things. Something that stood out to me: Two different but equally valid forms of decolonised speculative fiction are stories set a world where we move past colonialism, and ones set in a world where it never happened, or didn't happen the same way. A cool launching point for the latter is all the moments in history where things could have gone better, especially since this is a reminder that the way history played out was not inevitable. One of the panelists mentioned a bunch of interesting US historical moments I hadn't heard of and didn't write down >.>
At one point a panelist made a basically reasonable point in a very unfortunate way. I was sitting there feeling annoyed until an audience question came in pointing out the issue, and the panelist and chat participants ended up having a fairly civil and productive conversation about it. (EDIT: a commenter had a very different experience, and looking back I think the fact I was skimming through the chat to get the basic gist, and started by reading the end, means I didn't get a sense of how frustrating it was in real time. Also...ok I am about to go to bed and too sleepy to articulate it but there's other stuff affecting how I interpreted things)
As far as I am able to judge, the chat was overall pretty good for such a complex topic, though sometimes white chat participants would try to be Openly Supportive of POC in ways that seemed counterproductively empty to me. Like instead of saying "YES I AGREE, IT'S SO IMPORTANT FOR WHITE PEOPLE NOT TO DOMINATE THE CONVERSATION ON RACE" maybe just...stay quiet and let the POC talk until you have something useful to add? But hey, what do I know.
Something I always notice in US based discussions of social justice is how central racism ends up being as a topic and point of focus. I mean obviously it was the topic of THIS panel, but there's just generally this air of everyone Thinking About Race you don't get in Australian social justice focussed fandom spaces (which are generally SUPER DUPER white)
Like, the PAX Australia safer space thing had like 5 queer groups and a bunch of panels about gender and sexuality, a little to do with disability, and basically NOTHING to do with race. Everyone is assumed to be generally anti-racist, and it comes up a topic sometimes, but it's just...really not a focus beyond obvious Big Topics like refugee rights. Kinda get the feeling this sucks for Australian geeky POC!
On the other hand...being an American geeky POC in (still very white) social justice focussed fandom spaces like Wiscon seems like it would be exhausting, with all these white people thinking I MUST PROVE MYSELF NOT RACIST at you all the time. I watched the start of "THE NOT HUGO AWARD-WINNING BUT VERY IMPORTANT NOT ANOTHER F*CKING RACE PANEL" which is a group of POC panelists doing fun audience participation stuff that is very pointedly NOT ABOUT RACE, and afaict was created in response to always and only being invited to be on Serious Panels About Race. And yeah, I can see why they need that and their dedicated safe space.
I mean white Australian fans (myself included) can still be Earnestly Aware Of Race, and white American fans can be oblivious, this is just my impression of the trends as an Earnest White Australian.
Anyway! I also have some thoughts on the "Learning Social Justice While Disabled" panel but those are being trickier to articulate so may take a while.
Tags:
- colonialism,
- cons,
- fandom,
- links,
- panels,
- race,
- social justice,
- wiscon
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nods Your comment made me think back over the chat, and I realised that skimming through it to get the basic gist of what people were saying meant I didn't have the same experience as those of you dealing with it in real time, and once I imagined that I could see how frustrating it would have been.
Also I guess I was setting the bar for "productive discussion" based on how I'd expect that kind of argument to go at a regular Australian scifi con/online space, which is lower than Wiscon should and does aim for (because it's a progressive space, and because afaict progressive Americans are generally less aggressively terrible about Judaism than progressive Australians) Like...I've never been at a con with safety staff who do anything more than offer someone to go to if you're being actively harassed, and even that is very new. So it didn't even occur to me that they could have intervened.
Anyway, as a sort-of-Jew I did find a lot of it pretty upsetting, and was glad people spoke up about it. Though it's kinda confronting to realise that "at least some people spoke up about it and the person eventually apologised" is apparently the best possible outcome I can imagine for someone being criticised for anti-Semetism :/
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At an in person con, the panel moderator would be expected to handle anything like that actually at the panel, and the safety staff would be around to deal with harassment, but at an actual in person con, the dynamics are really different than an online con, which can and I think should, have some kind of moderation of the chat space for the safety of the members. Now I'm going to call NOT IT on that, because I think I just demonstrated that I'm a terrible moderator, but I do think that's a reasonable expectation.
Anyway, there's a feedback survey, and I've suggested that the con needs to work on both anti-Semitism AND clarifying the role of the safety staff in online spaces.
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nods Online spaces definitely need very careful moderation that doesn't work the same as offline moderation, so if Wiscon keeps doing online stuff they'll need to work out a new system, and then make sure everyone understands how to navigate it if they feel unsafe/upset.