ABSTRACT
Ethnocomputing makes at least two claims that challenge traditional Western demarcations between what counts as technical knowledge and what counts as cultural knowledge: (1) Indigenous or vernacular cultural systems can be translated into computational terms; (2) computing disciplines and professions are always cultural and value-laden. Ethnocomputing is, therefore, about the co-constituting relationships between culture and computing. What, then, is an ethnocomputing take on computational thinking? To answer this question we first argue that ethnocomputing is made up of domain-specific forms of computational thinking that focus on creating “translations” between computing ideas and Indigenous or vernacular epistemologies, practices, and designs. We then show how ethnocomputing can help to probe the cultural politics of computational thinking generally and its ethnocomputational forms specifically. We show that the cultural politics of computational thinking are in its subsuming of our social worlds and cultural lives into computational terms. When contextualized by ethnocomputing, this risks reproducing colonial logics of assimilation and extraction. Instead of downplaying these colonial logics, this chapter directly addresses them in one ethnocomputing translation process between the African American vernacular knowledge of cornrow braiding and some computational thinking terms that are commonly known by many teachers. We call this domain-specific translation, computational braiding.
