Research

After one Portal session, 90% of participants had their assumptions about people different from themselves change. 95% had their perspective on the theme of the connection (e.g. climate, migration, etc.) change. 97% felt their could comfortably share their views with others. 98% had their perspective on global culture change. And 99% feel a greater sense of connection to those different from themselves.

New communication technologies have undoubtedly altered the ways in which persons interact and have had a profound impact on public life. Engaging this impact, much of the scholarly literature has focused on how these interfaces mediate interaction however, less is known about technology's modulating effects. The current project moves beyond mediation, underscoring how social relations are not only activated by technology, but are actuated by these interfaces. Through an extended case study of Portals, gold shipping containers equipped with audio-visual technology that put persons in digital face-to-face interaction with others around the globe, the current project engages such actuation, highlighting how the co-mingling of affect and technology generate new ways of noticing, living and thinking through the complex relationships of public life. The human/technology relations mediated/modulated by the Portal produce unique atmospheres that activate/actuate public space and blur the boundaries between public and private. Additionally, the atmospheres of the Portal generate a digital copresence that allows for user/participants to feel with their interlocutors. This “feeling with” suspends user/participants in atmospheres of human connection through the emergence of an imaginative dialogue, and the curating of such atmospheres leads to dialogic transformation. As such, the Portal operates as an atmospheric interface. Engaging the concept of atmosphere attunes those interested in new communication technologies to the complex gatherings these technologies create, and the potentialities and pitfalls of these emerging interfaces on public life.

The imminent contact between people from different ideologies, cultures, and political perspectives brings the need for innovative strategies of connection, or ways for individuals and groups to build and sustain meaningful connections with each other. Accordingly, this research explores the concept of “connection” through a grounded theory methodology, which includes an instrumental case study on Shared Studios’ Portals. “Portals” refers to a network of media that connect people from different parts of the world through live digital interaction. Through the repurposing of old shipping containers, which are painted gold and outfitted with specialized audiovisual equipment, each “Portal site” contributes to a global network of interconnected environments that feel spatially continuous, offering life-size engagement between individuals who otherwise would likely not meet – individuals from Mexico, Afghanistan, the United States, Iran, Rwanda, Sweden, and so forth. This research situates the exploration of connection in the field of public diplomacy and provides scaffolding with concepts from two bodies of scholarship. From public diplomacy, issues of nonstate actors, relationship-centric paradigms, and new media and technology are emphasized. From 21st century media, affordances of involvement, immersion, and presence are elucidated, and relevant trends of Impact Storytelling and PeaceTech are highlighted. These concepts lead to a case study on Portals, an emblematic example of new media that could be positioned as a vehicle for fostering intergroup and intercultural connections The major finding of this research – a working theory, or more appropriately, a framework for connection – suggests that connection is malleable, determined by an alchemy of agency, emotion, and imagination. Awareness of this idea can aid in diagnosing the strength, or quality, of a connection between actors, and serve as a map for improving the quality of a connection between actors. While the framework itself emerges from the study and observation of one case, and is therefore in need of further experimentation, the overall research findings reveal 1) the value of Portals itself as a potential tool for public diplomacy, and 2) concrete lessons that can be applied to the general practice of public diplomacy.

This article uses a new technology, “Portals,” to initiate conversations about policing between individuals in communities where this form of state action is concentrated. Based on more than 800 recorded and transcribed conversations across 12 neighborhoods in five cities, the largest collection of policing narratives to date, we analyze patterns in discourse around policing. Our goal in closely analyzing these conversations is to uncover how people who experience state authority through policing characterize democratic governance by mapping citizens’ experiences with and views of the state, how they judge the responsiveness of authorities, and their experience-informed critiques of democracy. Methodologically, we argue that observing through Portals real conversations of ordinary people largely unmediated by the researcher allows us to transcend certain limitations of traditional, survey-based techniques and to study politics in beneficially recursive ways. Theoretically, we demonstrate that Portals participants characterize police as contradictory—everywhere when surveilling people’s everyday activity and nowhere if called upon to respond to serious harm. We call this Janus-faced interaction with the state “distorted responsiveness,” and we demonstrate the organic connection of this characterization of police to our participants’ theorization of their broader relationship with the state. We argue that their understandings of their own relationships with the key state institutions in their lives are foundational to developing a fuller understanding of democracy in action. In short, by focusing on how individuals experience citizenship in the city through ordinary experiences with municipal bureaucrats who figure prominently in their lives, we can develop a theory of the state from below.

Portals enhance politics by transforming the capacity of disparate people and communities to define their narratives, engage one another politically, and, therefore, to be more efficacious citizens. Portals are the first large-scale public arts initiative to connect residents of highly policed communities to one another and to allow them to speak, unscripted, about their experiences and to convey their narrative. Traditional survey approaches come at a cost. They constrain subversive forms of expression by avoiding the articulation of ideas that the researcher does not ask. Moreover, survey research can sacrifice dynamic interactions for replicability and generalization. By placing PORTALS in several neighborhoods around the country that are sites of concentrated policing, including Milwaukee’s 53206 zip code, which endures the highest rate of incarceration in the nation, PORTALS have enabled a fuller understanding of the thoughts, beliefs, experiences, and resistance of urban poor citizens. To date, community residents in Newark, Chicago, and Milwaukee have participated in hundreds of conversations, and many hundred more will occur over the next few months in these locations as well as in Baltimore and Los Angeles. While our current focus is connecting highly policed neighborhoods with one another, we plan to connect such neighborhoods with dissimilar communities without high police contact.

The goal of the Portal was to bring people to Downtown Tempe who otherwise wouldn’t be here and create unique and lasting memories for visitors. 30% of those surveyed came to Downtown Tempe because of the Portal. The economic impact of approx. $46,000 for the month exceeded its cost to bring it here. With a longer installation, and word spreading, we believe this number would increase. Gold book entries from participants show that they were both surprised and amazed with their experiences. 89% stated that they would come back to the Portal if it were to remain longer.

Studies regularly conclude that ordinary Americans lack the knowledge they need to form meaningful political preferences, leading to inefficient or counterproductive policy making. Our study of conversations about policing among black residents of highly policed neighborhoods challenges this prevailing account. We find that people possess dual, contradictory knowledge about how the state should operate based on written law and how it actually operates as a lived experience; that their knowledge is attained through involuntary encounters with the state rather than through civics education; and that this knowledge, rather than functioning to improve preferences to be communicated to an elected official, serves to help individuals distance themselves from the antidemocratic face of the state. Our findings point to a rethinking of political knowledge and its role in contemporary American democracy.

A growing body of literature explores the ways in which direct or vicarious contact with forms of state surveillance affects political behavior and perceptions of government legitimacy. We develop a new method, Portals, to collect conversations between residents from highly policed areas in five different US cities collected between 2016 and 2018. While existing research emphasizes the ways in which interactions with the carceral state are alienating and demobilizing, our analysis of these conversations illuminates productive ways in which civic discourse can respond to oppressive encounters with police. Citizens respond to interactions with policing, that is, not only as victims but as resisters: they construct and act upon civic sensibilities in the face of state oppression. These civic sensibilities, we argue, are centered on a logic of “collective autonomy” – given police ignorance, abuses of police authority, and the little political power that residents of race-class subjugated communities have to demand change, many conclude that power is best achieved by receding from state institutions in the short term while building community in the long term.

New communication technologies have created new spaces for the exchange of feelings and ideas with diverse others. The following essay takes up one such technology, Portals, goldshipping containers equipped with audio/visual technology connecting people around the globe. Using a participatory rhetorical analysis of Portal’s press and participant reflections, participant observation, and interviewing, I argue that new communication technologies such as the Portal create unique affective elsewheres that foster human connection across geographic locations. Further, I argue that the use of everyday conversation is an especially effective form of communication for fostering human connection especially when mediated by new communication technologies.

Combining the sophistication of modern communication technology with the simplicity of an unadorned mobile room, Portals are making it possible for people around the world to connect and recognize their shared humanity.

Unfreedom is expanding around the world — even in democratic societies. The population passing through prisons and detention centers today in the U.S. eclipses the number of historically enslaved people in North America and those confined under white rule during apartheid. Within America’s poorest and most historically oppressed communities, even people who are physically free characterize their relationship to government as one marked by surveillance, extraction, and expendability. Our vision is to link subjugated communities around the U.S. through Portals, immersive, live, interconnected environments that give people the sense of sharing the same room, to create a global undercommons democracy. By networking these communities through staffed Portals, we intend to create a digital-physical meeting place for the most marginalized, impoverished, and unfree across America, and, eventually, across the world. This 21st century public square will provide a space where people can tell their stories and bear witness, collaborate to transform the status quo, and ignite liberation projects.