Disclosure without Engagement: An Empirical Review of Positionality Statements at FAccT
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3715275.3732079.pdf
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1.99 MB
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34d0c30707a428406d4aec3901f70b85
Author(s)
Schroeder, Hope
Pareek, Akshansh
Barocas, Solon
Date Issued
June 23, 2025
Publisher
ACM|The 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
Citation
Hope Schroeder, Akshansh Pareek, and Solon Barocas. 2025. Disclosure without Engagement: An Empirical Review of Positionality Statements at FAccT. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1195–1210.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Positionality statements have become more common in engineering fields in recent years, despite ongoing debates across many fields about the merits of the practice. In 2024, the Program Chairs of FAccT recommended that authors include positionality statements with their paper submissions, dramatically increasing their use at the conference. In this paper, we analyze all positionality statements at FAccT from 2018 to 2024, highlighting the different aspects of identity commonly disclosed by authors and the degree to which authors explore the potential impact of these aspects of their positionality on their research. While we encountered and highlight a number of thoughtful positionality statements, we also identified and describe several concerning trends, including patterns of identity disclosure without discussion of corresponding impacts, a notable lack of reflection on the potential impacts of industry affiliation, and cases where identity is invoked to excuse what are really methodological choices, among others. We raise particular concerns about the possibility that disclosure without engagement may cause readers to rely on stereotypes to make guesses about the perspectives that individuals from certain groups bring to their work. We conclude by considering potential mechanisms for encouraging reflexivity in the FAccT community, with a focus on setting policies that protect researchers from risks, supporting researchers from backgrounds without existing traditions of reflexive practice, and empirically evaluating the efficacy of interventions designed to foster reflexivity.
Description
FAccT ’25, Athens, Greece
MIT Department
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3715275.3732079
