Community Safety Together: How Reflection and Radical Imagination Can Help Us Build the Worlds We Need

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore human-centered design approaches to support community-driven projects that aim to reinforce self-determination and grow networks of support and care. The context in which I approach this work is a collaborative project with a community of legal practitioners working to improve interventions in intimate partner violence. I outline what I consider to be some of the core commitments required for human-centeredness in the context of community-driven projects, and I articulate a framework for community-driven technical practice that situates design of novel artifacts as only one of many pathways to address community needs. In the context of interventions in cases of intimate partner violence, I examine the question “What opportunities and challenges emerge for community-driven technical practice through ongoing reflection on the following four commitments: self-determination; community as locus of power; mutual aid and care; and collective participation in world-building?”. The opportunities that emerged throughout this work have implications for: honoring situated knowledges and invisible work; imagination and emergent infrastructures for safety; “seeing the pluriverse,” or different pathways toward the world(s) we need; integrity and conscious choices; and reflection in prefigurative design.