An important discussion arose during our check-in around why industry partners are not present.
Lizzie from EWB-Oz indicated that she felt that industry partners were missing from the conversation and not just practitioners. Donna talked about a previous conference where a Proctor & Gamble rep at a Social Justice and Engineering conference gave them a marketing pitch. Dean indicated that some of us have critiques of capitalism.
Juan added that not having people from industry not interested in social justice in a meaningful manner allows us to have more advanced conversations.
Dean replied that industry/corporate types are invited to ESJP if they are meaningfully interested in social justice as long as they are not threatened with the anti-capitalist (or at least capitalism not the best) boundary of ESJP.
Caroline brought up a discussion around intellectual property and anonymity. She argued that anonymization robs people of their voices and that their intellectual property must belong not to the researcher but the subject. Juan replied back that anonymization actually protects people from repercussions by creating a safe space to talk about anything. Donna added that the ESJP group could’ve been seen as collaborators as opposed to subjects in the study conducted yesterday by Jen, Juan, and Jon.