Building digital archive through collaborative UX research: Relationship-building with the community or knowledge-building about the community?

Abstract

When digital archives are increasingly becoming a space for knowledge production, construction, consumption, maintenance, dissemination, and amplification, the necessary questions to be interrogated are: Who has access to write, participate, and construct pasts, memories, and collective public imaginations through these digital domains? How can the ones who have access to engage in epistemological performances through digital archives make these domains a space to deconstruct essentialized identity categories forced upon the Other by the (hetero)patriarchal and/or imperial-colonial Self? And how can participatory design frameworks contribute to that? Triggered by these questions, my critical digital archival research project attempts at finding theories-praxes to make dialogic rooms in digital archives to build a relationship with historically, structurally, and/or systematically minoritized communities and their distinctive, transitory, plural, and conjunctural narratives. This paper introduces my ongoing doctoral project of the critical digital archive where I am documenting and theorizing a digital archive of my street photography in Nepal that I am building through participatory design frameworks with South Asian communities. In this paper, I offer a look at how the complexities and obstacles faced during UX research can enable technical communicators to rupture the essentialist foundation of identity constructions of Non-Western communities. My paper aims to communicate the necessity of conducting UX research through participatory-design frameworks not only to find answers to design technology but to see a way of completely subverting epistemic violence of colonial discourses through the "failure"to find answers.