About Desmond Upton Patton, Ph.D., M.S.W.: Desmond Upton Patton is Brian and Randi Schwartz University Professor and Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn). As University Professor, Dr. Patton holds appointments in the Annenberg School for Communication, the School of Social Policy & Practice, and a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine. He is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Dr. Patton’s research uses novel computational and qualitative methodologies to study the relationship between gang violence and social media, with a particular focus on how young people use social media to process grief and trauma in the wake of violence and the racial politics of digital policing. Dr. Patton is the author of more than 50 publications in journals such as Computers in Human Behavior, New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and the Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work, among many others. His forthcoming book is Facing Gakirah: Lessons on Violence, Loss and Humanity from the Digital Streets of Chicago.
Dr. Patton’s work has been honored by numerous accolades, including the 2018 Deborah K. Padgett Early Career Achievement Award from the Society for Social Work and Research. He was a Fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, and a 2019 Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights. He is also founder and Director of SAFELab, a research group dedicated to improving the well-being of youths of color through community-level violence prevention. Dr. Patton founded SAFELab at the University of Michigan, where he taught prior to joining the faculty at Columbia University, and then transitioning to the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), where SAFELab is now located.
Dr. Patton received his Ph.D. in Social Service Administration from the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice at the University of Chicago, a Master of Social Work (MSW) from the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan, and a B.A. in Anthropology and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Prior to his tenure at UPenn, Dr. Patton was Professor of Social Work and Sociology at Columbia University, where he also served as Senior Associate Dean for Curriculum Innovation and Academic Affairs within the Columbia School of Social Work. In addition, he served as Associate Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the Columbia University’s Data Science Institute.
Interview Questions
[MastersinCommunications.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you become interested in the contact points between social work and social scientific research on digital media and, in particular, come to study the complex ways that young people in gangs and those affected by violence engage with social media?
[Dr. Desmond Upton Patton] My name is Desmond Patton, and I am the Brian and Randi Schwartz University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in social policy, communication, and psychiatry.
I am a social worker. I was trained as a social worker with an MSW [Master of Social Work], and then I got a Ph.D. in Social Service Administration, focused on social welfare policy, from the University of Chicago. This work at the intersection of social media and gun violence was not something that I planned to do at all.
I am a qualitative gun violence researcher. I actually started off in urban education. I was doing work in Chicago trying to understand issues with the transition to high school for Black and Brown young people in Chicago. I was doing qualitative work following young people, and they kept getting shot or killed. It was normal: a regular, routine engagement. I, of course, became very interested in trying to figure out what was, and still is, going on. I did not understand how we could even talk about grades when people were not sure if they would live — when students might be killed if they walked on the wrong side of the street or got caught in the crossfire of neighborhood warfare.
I turned my attention to violence and spent time studying Black boys in the West Side of Chicago. They kept talking about Twitter and what they were doing on Twitter. This was around 2010. They would be talking about things they would see on Twitter, music they would find there. But they would also talk about how they would use Twitter to navigate safety in their communities. People would be talking about a party and who was going to be at the party. These events and their contexts would be described on Twitter, and that would allow them to figure out, “Well, should I go, should I not go? Who’s going to be there?”
Then there was a situation that happened in 2012 between two pretty well-known rappers in the South Side of Chicago. They were beefing on Twitter, and one of them posted their location on Twitter, and that individual was murdered in the exact location that they posted. I was very concerned about social media, but no one was talking about it. Folks were describing it in popular media. It was a topical conversation in news articles, but there really was not any research on the topic of social media and gang violence.
With classmates from the University of Chicago, I helped write the first paper that kind of defined this burgeoning phenomenon called “internet banging” or “cyber banging” [with reference to the term “gang banger” as a descriptor for members of gangs]. Now, this is not a term that I would use anymore for a number of reasons. It individualizes the situation. It does not really speak to the structural conditions that shape why we have the situation that we have in the first place. It does not point toward social media accountability. It does not point toward considerations of structural racism. It was an important beginning, but one that I am trying to be very reflexive about with respect to the mistakes that we made in how we labeled what we were studying.
[MastersinCommunications.com] A major thread of your work deals with the way that young people of color negotiate loss and grief online in the wake of violence. I was wondering if you would perhaps discuss the importance of studying loss, trauma and grief in the context of youth gang violence, perhaps highlighting the work in your forthcoming book, Facing Gakirah: Lessons on Violence, Loss and Humanity from the Digital Streets of Chicago.
[Dr. Desmond Upton Patton] What I have learned is that the endeavor to use social media to study violence and predict violence has been a criminological endeavor, and that is the wrong direction. That is not where I started. I thought it could be done. I was very fresh and new, and I thought the positive intentions were stronger than the negative impacts, and that is not correct. What I learned is that, if you start with the idea that you are going to find all these bad things on social media, the language of that approach is racialized and targets particular communities. It also forces you to pick particular sets of communications to zone in on as opposed to being open-minded.
When I encountered the story of Gakirah Barnes on the news, it forced me to reckon with the possibility that we were not humanizing social media users. It forced me to recognize that, as a Black scholar doing this work, I was often imbibing white toxicity. When I thought about social media users, I had to engage in reflective practices and put myself in communities of folks who could help me get outside of, and to raise awareness of, that kind of thinking.
I had to bring this new way of thinking into the work. That helped me see that lots of young people, particularly young Black folk in neighborhoods with high rates of gun violence, are just living life online. What would it mean to start with the idea that they are living life online? We can see how elements of that life might be violent, but that is not where things are starting. We saw young people being young people: expressing love, joy, happiness, sadness, anger, hope, and despair. All the complexities of the human experience were there.
That was transformative in the work because we then saw the grief, the trauma, the complexity. That is usually where young people were starting. We saw in our Chicago dataset that there was a two-day window between expressions of loss and grief and trauma and expressions of anger. Within two days you would see that, as people interact with that content online, the user would be disrespected and their pattern of communication would change as people were disrespecting them. That felt human. You made fun of someone that I love who is now dead. I am going to be angry, and I might say all types of things. Humanizing those sets of experiences — as opposed to looking for threats, looking for violence, and missing all the other things that make up human beings — I think that has been the important direction that my work has taken.
The book is a memoir. I am trying to layer in that I am also human, and I have made mistakes in this process. People get really excited about my work because they think it is techy and cool. That is true, but, if not done well, it can be as problematic as anything else. I made a lot of mistakes in terms of the type of content that I was reviewing, how I thought about the approach, and overlooking how the insights from my own training as a social worker could help innovate how we do this work.
The book is a reflection of what I have learned from Gakirah Barnes. In death she taught me to not judge a book by the cover. That is an old adage. It feels very cliché, but it is so true. It is remarkable that I had to learn that lesson through Twitter and through someone who has passed away.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Your work on “online stop and frisk” documents how the impacts of the “everyday racism” of police officers lead to biases in digital policing. Would you discuss your scholarship on racism in digital policing and its connections to your work on youth gang violence? In particular, how do issues of institutional or structural racism inform or constrain the types of interventions into youth gang violence that are most ethical or effective?
[Dr. Desmond Upton Patton] All of these developments in my research have happened through the journey of doing this work on the narrative of Gakirah. As I continued to progress from a junior faculty member to a senior faculty member, there was more and more engagement with law enforcement. Law enforcement was really excited about my work and its computational approach. I listened to what they hoped for the work to do, and other people’s goals for the research, and came away feeling really nervous about it and concerned because, again, the goal was always a criminological one and never one that is equally applied throughout society. It is focused on particular types of language, particular types of music, particular ways of being, that are all racialized.
I started to go to lots of conferences and was invited to different spaces that were all law enforcement heavy, and realized that no one was interested in a human story. No one was interested in prevention. It really was, “How do we catch the criminal?” I am not going to suggest that there is not bad stuff that happens on social media. We all, I think, are very well aware of lots of terrible engagement and behavior that perhaps needs to be intervened on immediately.
What I have come to know is that those interventions never seem to capture white people. The approaches we have developed are really good at tracking and finding things in Black and Brown communities, but we always miss the white mass murderer. I talk a lot in my work and in the paper that you mentioned about how digital policing missed two cisgendered white men who left racist manifestos on platforms that were just sitting there, hanging out. They committed mass murders, and then we found them.
Compare that to the tracking and surveillance of Black and Brown boys for months, weeks, years. This surveillance also is not rigorous. It is missing lots of nuance and oftentimes collapses people into tightly-wound networks based on where they live without knowing if they are actually affiliated with gang activity or have involvement with criminological behavior. It is just about where you live, and we know that is a proxy for race.
Again, Gakirha triggered this interest in problematizing how we do this work in a deeper way. Hanging out with communications scholars also helped me realize the unintended uses of these various platforms. That is really how I have been taken along this new path. It has really been two trains heading in the same direction. I think that young people can die based on what they say on social media. I think it is important to figure out what is happening there. I also think that we could have a conversation about how we do that and the best ways to do that that are ethical and that are responsible.
I do not think they have to be at odds with each other, but we treat them like they are. Oftentimes, when I give talks, folks react by saying, “Don’t do that work. It’s Big Brother. It’s bad.” Or, their reaction is, “Yeah! Use all the tools and get everyone!” I think it is more complicated than either of those reactions. I think there is a middle road that requires us to engage in conversation around fairness and accountability and ethics in real ways and to be in communities, working alongside communities, and to think about the best approaches to doing this work. I think all that is possible. I do not think it has to be either/or.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You have made important contributions to research methodologies for studying digital media by synthesizing computational data analysis with qualitative methods. For those of our readers who may be less familiar with these approaches, can you introduce how you bring methods utilizing machine-learning and artificial intelligence into conversation with qualitative and community-engaged research approaches in your work?
[Dr. Desmond Upton Patton] I have to say it has been so fun to be in this space. As I said before, I am a qualitative social scientist. I do not frame myself as a data scientist. I do not suggest that I am a computer scientist by any means. I am a qualitative person that usually is running computational teams or working alongside computational teams. What I realized was that my sweet spot is thinking about the data that we collect.
What I bring to the table is an ethnographic and qualitative approach to how we collect data. I bring a set of social work values that suggests that we need to treat the data with human dignity, that we need to think about who is represented in the data in the current practices in computer science. If those practices are going to be used to make decisions about human behavior, they should be reflective of the complexity of the human experience.
They have not been. Binary classifications should be thrown out the window because we are not binary people by any means and never have been. Viewing people in binary terms misses all the nuance, all the color, all the richness that makes us who we are as human beings. If we actually want to use AI to solve human problems, it has to be more complex. I think that we should be throwing out algorithmic systems that only use binary classifications when we are talking about vulnerable topics.
That has really been the sweet spot for the work: to bring in as much richness to the annotation and labeling of data as possible. What we have been able to do in the lab is to train social workers to bring in lots of context. We created a methodology called CASM, which is the Contextual Analysis of Social Media approach. It forces an annotator to think about context and to also consider the biases that we all bring to looking at data and social media. It aims to make you reckon with those biases before you put a label on a piece of data.
We also recognize the expertise that lives outside of Ph.D.s in academia and that there are lots of people who are experts, in particular folks from communities that we are working with. We have reimagined expertise, and we work with domain experts from communities to help us translate and interpret that data. Most importantly, we give these voices the final say in how we label that data. When you are getting a code [a set of data “coded” into certain categories] from the SAFELab, that data has been looked at, interrogated, problematized, and thought through many times by many people before a label gets assigned to it.
I am not saying that you should trust that algorithm or that the algorithm is accurate, but what we can say is that we have engaged in a thoughtful approach to get as much context as possible. There is always room for error, but we are trying.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You are Founding Director of SAFELab, which you began at the University of Michigan and now lead at UPenn. SAFELab is a research initiative directed at studying the impact of neighborhood and gun violence on the lives of youths of color. Could you tell us a little bit more about this initiative and your experience directing it?
[Dr. Desmond Upton Patton] SAFELab is a research group that I founded at the University of Michigan. It was a hodgepodge of folks from social work, psychiatry, psychology, computer science, data science, anthropology — all the things really — because we understand that this is really difficult stuff and that we need all minds at the table. I was at Michigan for three years, moved to Columbia for seven years, and just transitioned to UPenn this past July. The SAFELab has come with me each step of the way.
At the same time, we are now entering a new phase of the lab. Previously SAFELab had really been about my individual work and bringing people along for individual work. Now, we want to make SAFELab a unit and a broader center focused on helping local, national, and global communities develop ethical technologies and get resources that are hard to get when you are not connected.
One of the things that I hope to do is build the Penn Center for Inclusive Innovation and Technology, which will be focused on helping communities who are interested in innovation, startups, and emerging technologies to get resources and opportunities to build within a supportive ecosystem, and to connect with various tech companies, innovation labs, and accelerators. We want to help folks who are not tapped into elite networks.
I also want to be able to train social workers and other folks who are not traditionally in tech to be a part of tech, because I think you see what happens when it is just folks who are in engineering or in technology. Social workers are by no means absolved from being racist or problematic. However, what I appreciate about social work is that we are equipped to engage in difficult conversations. I think that is the value that I want to bring with this center, and I want to bring it to startups as well. We want to train the social workers and offer support to technologists who want to think from a social justice perspective — who want to become more conscious. That is the new work that I am building here at UPenn.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Do you have advice you might give to students interested in the connections between social work, communication, and data science or in applying social scientific research to address pressing social problems like youth violence who are considering pursuing a graduate degree in communication?
[Dr. Desmond Upton Patton] One of the things that I have learned is that it is so important to get lots of feedback. Put yourself in diverse and inclusive spaces, meet as many diverse voices as possible, think about and problematize your questions, and consider how you want to do this work and why you want to do this work. I think doing that pre-thinking is really important.
Another thing that I think has been really important for me is doubling down on my interests and my passions, as opposed to being driven by topics that are sexy or that other people want to do. That, I think, has taken me really far. This work is really hard. It is hard because we are engaging in very difficult subjects and viewing very difficult things. I think we sometimes forget that these are not just academic endeavors. These are real lives and real people. You have to have the sensibility to understand the implications of the work and to put yourself in spaces where you can get the level of support you need.
I am excited because this is the first time that I have been in a communication school, and it feels like a natural fit. It also feels complementary to my social work identity. Now I get to put the methods and literature from communication in context with social work values and thinking to continue this work in new, innovative ways.
I do not think that I would have gotten to where I am without engaging in communication literature, especially the work of folks like Safiya Noble, André Brock, and Meredith Clark. These are all folks that I have learned immensely from — in terms of how they view the world, and in terms of how they center Blackness in their critiques in a way that advocates for technologies that work for everyone. It is a really exciting time to be doing this work, because now more than ever we have a lot of folks who can hold us accountable in this space. Before, when I was doing this work a decade ago, that support was few and far between. It is a good time to be doing this difficult work.
Thank you, Dr. Patton, for discussing your insightful research on social media and gang violence, how young people grieve through digital media platforms, the racial biases of digital policing, and more!
Please note: Our interview series aims to represent the diverse research being pursued by scholars in the field of communication, which is often socially and politically engaged. As a result, all readers may not agree with the views and opinions expressed in this interview, which are independent of the views of MastersinCommunications.com, its parent company, partners, and affiliates.
