Can VR help us understand layers of oppression? | Courtney Cogburn | Big Think

Can VR help us understand layers of oppression?
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Often thought of first as gaming tech, virtual reality has been increasingly used in research as a tool for mimicking real-life scenarios and experiences in a safe and controlled environment.

Focusing on issues of oppression and the ripple affect it has throughout America's political, educational, and social systems, Dr. Courtney D. Cogburn of Columbia University School of Social Work and her team developed a VR experience that gives users the opportunity to "walk a mile" in the shoes of a black man as he faces racism at three stages in his life: as a child, during adolescence, and as an adult.

Cogburn says that the goal is to show how these "interwoven oppressions" continue to shape the world beyond our individual experiences. "I think the most important and powerful human superpower is critical consciousness," she says. "And that is the ability to think, be aware and think critically about the world and people around you...it's not so much about the interpersonal 'Do I feel bad, do I like you?'—it's more 'Do I see the world as it is? Am I thinking critically about it and engaging it?"
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COURTNEY D. COGBURN:

Dr. Courtney D. Cogburn is an associate professor of social work at Columbia University. Her research explores ways in which understated forms of cultural racism shape ideologies and norms, produce racial inequities in health and, more broadly, restraining social progress. Integrating principles and methodologies across the disciplines of health, psychology, social work and virtual reality, Cogburn aims to influence the thoughts and behaviors of people who are impervious to the ways racism is still being exercised—including by themselves. Prior to Columbia, Dr. Cogburn was a scholar the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. She holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia, an MSW from the University of Michigan School of Social Work, and a PhD in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology from the University of Michigan.
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TRANSCRIPT:

COURTNEY D. COGBURN: It is much bigger than criminal justice reform although that's a critical component and was the catalyst in this particular moment. But we really need to think about this in terms of layers of oppression, interwoven oppressions. That what we observe in terms of police violence, its connections to the legacies of slavery and slave patrols in the United States, the ways in which policing is tied to educational systems and healthcare, patterns that we observe in terms of population health. All of those things are interwoven. And part of what our work is trying to do is leverage VR to think about how we can represent those relationships visually to help people better understand how a housing policy has implications for policing and violence that you might observe in a neighborhood or a community, and how that is also tied to what we're seeing in educational systems. All of these systems are interwoven, and all of them have actively oppressed black people in particular in a way that has made upward mobility nearly impossible. And it's part of what people are fighting against. So, the police are kind of a visual representation of the societal ills that cross many, many sectors, if not all of the sectors of our society.

So in virtual reality we wanted to explore the option to have people walk in someone's digital shoes. We have the adage of being able to walk a mile in my shoes, being able to walk in someone's shoes and so we wanted to create the option to walk in the digital shoes of a black male who's experiencing racism as a child, adolescent, and as an adult in different contexts to convey the complexities of how racism is encountered in one's life. And in addition to that piece we're also thinking about how to use virtual reality to help people understand not just an individual experience and how it intersects with the world and with society, but how do we take virtual reality and create an opportunity to engage with systems and structures and culture in a way that people can start to understand how our policy decisions, the ways that we structure neighborhoods, the ways that we engage in policing in communities, et cetera, have a domino effect and they are all related to each other. And that's really complicated to understand. People get entire degrees in sociology and political science and history to try...

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/future-of-learning/virtual-reality-racism