Introducing Sociotechnical Systems

Stephanie Jo “Steph” Kent

Stephanie Jo “Steph” Kent (she/they) is a communication scholar, ASL/English community interpreter, and action researcher of interpreted interaction with the Learning Lab for Resiliency®.

ASL Video: https://youtu.be/GG1tb1DrS0g?si=CdTEY92w91KFOIW-

Introducing Sociotechnical Systems

Yes, this has everything to do with you.

In particular it has to do with your work as an interpreter.

What follows is the first in a series of situated reflections (not a summary) of the #DeafSafeAI Symposium organized by the Advisory Group of AI and Sign Language Interpreting and hosted by Tim Riker at Brown University in April, 2024.

The Symposium Planning Team and the Advisory Group need to process and evaluate our learnings before we provide you with more than a description of the sociotechnical arrangement of the Symposium. To get a sense of the progression of the conversation, take a look at the symposium website, deaf-futures.com.

The Symposium encompassed four languages: ASL, English, Spanish, and Chilean Sign Language (LSCh). This was complicated! The communication structure was in the style of Jon Henner’s “crip linguistics”, when everyone is included under the entire bell curve, including the people at the edges (not only the people in the middle). For instance, Vianney, the deaf lawyer from Chile: she’s way at the edge of the languaging structure. When you have extra languages in use within the overall communication, this is plurilingual. In terms of sociotechnical systems, the environment involves a) technology (laptops, video cameras, audio, the internet, etc.), and b) the social structure, such as the interpreting itself, how turn-taking happens, and the pace of interaction.

The primary activity of the symposium was relational: building connections among experts across different disciplines and fields of action. In other words, the #DeafSafeAI Symposium was a community interpreting event, applying Aaron Brace’s definition (presented pre-pandemic at I think Street Leverage or an international CIT conference). As a label, “community interpreting” establishes a relational motivation in order to balance the dominant (dominating!) emphasis on information transmission. On one hand, choosing the label of community interpreting to describe a gathering composed by interpreted interaction can be understood as a statement of solidarity: “I’m with you.” It can also be understood as a description of the labor of languaging, of doing the best one can, with the language(s) one knows, to foster sensible connection within plurilingual conditions. For this Symposium, the point is to begin sharing knowledge and experiences together, with each other across differences, and build a comprehensive definition and rationale for #DeafSafeAI.