May 29, 2024

Dr. Sará King has developed a framework — and with it, a liberatory technology — for studying how systemic oppression has a combined physiological, emotional, and psychological impact on individuals and communities. King and her collaborators posit that contemplative practices (specifically, attention to love’s presence and absence) are a key site for tech-mediated research on the multifaceted relationships that determine our experiences of health and well-being. This insight aligns with what King refers to as “the science of social justice” — that is, the study of the intersectional impact of the psychological (mental), embodied (physiological), and relational (relationship-based) trauma on marginalized populations, the result of centuries of systemic and institutionalized oppression. In centering the science of social justice, scientists and well-being practitioners see potential to heal intergenerational trauma. 

King is a neuroscientist, political and learning scientist, education philosopher, entrepreneur, public speaker, and certified yoga and mindfulness meditation instructor. She is a post-doctoral fellow in public health at the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion in Human Health and Social Justice at University of California San Diego, and a codirector of Mobius, a home for the development of liberatory technology. She is also the founder of MindHeart Collective, a contemplative technology company that develops AI-integrated platforms, applications, and courses grounded in neuroscience. We spoke about the importance of ethical data practices, what she means by “social justice,” and what it looks like to incorporate technology into well-being. 

Iretiolu Akinrinade: How does your science of social justice framework relate to traditional modes of research and knowledge production?

Dr. Sará King: Typically, many research methodologies that center the relationship between well-being and human behavior require self-reflection, dictation, and third-party analysis. This often involves using qualitative surveys, or quantitative psychophysiological or physiological measurements, which is then used by a practitioner to assess mental health and well-being. Notably, a traditional approach does not guide the person involved in the research study to develop their own skills exploring their internal embodied and somatic landscape. That is what is so unique about well-being studies and interventions that utilize mindfulness, yoga, or other contemplative practices: the person engaging in these interventions is gaining somatic-based skills for recognizing what is arising in their experience, which they can use throughout their life. Systemic oppression is a feeling of disenfranchisement that is often emotionally, psychologically, and even physically painful. That is why contemplative practices, when taught with a social justice frame of mind — one that creates the space to explore how we feel through, and heal from the impact of systemic oppression — can be such powerful well-being supports.

When I am using this term “social justice,” I am being very specific in how I am defining it. By “social” I mean “the relational field of our interbeing,” as Thich Nat Hahn might describe our fundamental interdependence as humans. By “justice,” I mean “loving-awareness-in-action.” Defining justice in this way grounds the experience of it in the experience of the body, and in our capacity to develop awareness of ourselves in a way that is fundamentally oriented towards love and can lead to collective healing. But what I am describing, for me, is a North Star — I don’t believe we have ever experienced collective healing on our planet, otherwise we would not be facing the polycrisis of climate change, war, pandemics, and technologically-exacerbated structural violence that we confront today. I am also exploring the development of what I call “contemplative technology” to track our relationship to individual and collective well-being. I see certain forms of AI as a technology that can really aid humans in identifying, communicating, and addressing our experiences of systemic oppression.

Akinrinade: You’ve described an extremely human-centered approach to working toward individual and collective well-being, one that seems to exist outside mainstream health care and well-being institutions. What nudged you to incorporate technology in this well-being work? And how does this relate to your training as a neuroscientist? 

King: Technology is increasingly important to every aspect of how humans live their lives, and how we connect to an experience of “aliveness” and holistic well-being. I also want to acknowledge the existence of an ever-widening digital divide between those with easy access to technology (either in its development, production or in its use) and those who remain without. My research on the science of social justice was actually fostered and developed as a part of an NIH-sponsored post-doctoral fellowship in neurology at Oregon Health Science University, which is a hospital and a medical school — so my very unconventional research was in some ways sponsored by a conventional, government entity. 

Earlier, I developed a two-dimensional “Systems-Based Awareness Map” (SBAM) to give a visual representation of the science of social justice. The SBAM technology is meant for anybody with a body who is interested in the intersection of their identity and their well-being, or who is interested in understanding how their awareness of “self” changes over time. It is also for those interested in visualizing their individual relationship to collective well-being, who may want support in understanding what kinds of social action they can partake in that would support well-being in digital and real world communities. I am currently developing a three-dimensional, AI-integrated version of the SBAM, which is intended to be a very personalized platform for digital and IRL well-being support. I am doing this through my company, MindHeart Collective, with support of the Mobius Collective, a non-profit that is stewarding the development of what we term “liberatory technology.” This work is deliberately being done outside of academia, because it allows me greater latitude to be conscientious about applying ethical data sovereignty practices and building liberatory tech principles and foundations (authored by my colleague Davion “Zi” Ziere) into every stage of the product design, as well as into how we are seeking to influence the tech ecosystem overall. 

Akinrinade: When we first met, we talked about how cognitive-behavioral assessment technologies conflate providing care with robust data collection, and the issues that accompany this practice. What scale does this work operate at, both in terms of providing care and conducting research?

King: The SBAM is meant to provide care for anyone interested in this kind of interface. I also like to say that this a lifetime technology, so I am really looking at what it would mean for a person to be able to track the development of their awareness over a lifetime, and then, if they choose, to be able to share this information with their loved ones or others who they think would benefit from having access. I have even thought about what it would mean if people decided to share an artifact of the history of the development of their awareness over a lifetime, as a sort of time capsule of awareness with family members who are descendants. So, what would it mean for ancestors to be able to share this kind of information as an archive if they so choose, and how would it change the way we relate to our ancestors if we could get to know them on that level? The research component could only be conducted with the data that people voluntarily decide they would like to share for the betterment of the platform as well as for the betterment of our understanding of the relationship between loving-awareness and individual and collective well-being. 

Data sovereignty is extraordinarily important to how I am conceptualizing ways to empower users who contribute their data to the platform. We would store all user data on the blockchain, so that each user has full ownership of their data of awareness. The SBAM could be considered to be a digital phenotyping technology, at least in part, so having the capacity to decide what is done with that data is of great importance — especially for marginalized communities who have historically not been asked permission, have been experimented upon, or who have been extracted from for profits by others in the tech industry.

Akinrinade: What is the difference between working to build technology and working to build liberatory technologies?

King: Peter Thiel has called technology a new and better way of doing things. But many of the things that make life more convenient for some are experienced as extractive, harmful, and even violent to others. That is a powerful distinction to keep in mind. The need and desire for technology that supports aliveness, ecosystems of trust, holistic well-being, wholeness, and loving-awareness motivates us to create liberatory technology, and shapes its development. It is important that the people developing liberatory technology are themselves seeking to understand how liberation feels, individually and collectively. I don’t think technology is somehow separate from us; it is us. The consciousness of the technologist is fundamentally imbued in the technology they create. So building liberatory technology has to do with how we are embodying liberation, and it involves asking how technology can support and elevate social, cultural, and environmental resources and healing practices, and make them more accessible.

Akinrinade: AI-based mental health care and research often seems like an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable experience of human subjectivity. How does quantification fit into your praxis, and where have you chosen to exclude or restrict it?

King: Quantification can be involved in the psychophysiological measurement of health and well-being (blood pressure, cortisol, HRV or more brain-focused technologies such as EEG, fMRI, etc.) as well as in methods of quantifying subjective experiences through surveys and self-reported data. AI is increasingly playing a role in how analyses of these types of data are performed and how we are interpreting and acting on predictions about human behavior. As a function of mapping awareness on my platform, quantification is one of the primary ways I have of visualizing the data of awareness and well-being as they fluctuate temporally. However, I am also interested in the ways that the unquantifiable, more mystical, transpersonal aspects of human subjectivity can be communicated and visualized on the platform through non-traditional means, and this calls into question different ways of conceptualizing data collection and analysis. 

Akinrinade: How can other researchers and technologists use this framework?

King: Technology is developing with greater complexity at an exponential rate, much faster than human biology, psychology, or even relationships have had time to catch up with. It makes sense to me that both science and technology should be helping us to better understand ourselves, and to evolve our most positive traits and behaviors, rather than inspiring further disconnection, confusion, pain and suffering. 

We are at an incredible inflection point right now as a species, and all of our actions, or inactions, to heal ourselves and the planet will have immense repercussions for all of our children and grandchildren. I hope that researchers and technologists who are interested in supporting healing — and in understanding the relationship between social justice, as I have defined it, and well-being — will find that my framework helps them to better understand the extraordinary complexity of human health, identity, and our capacity to transform our collective intergenerational trauma into post-traumatic growth. Because it lies at the intersection of so many fields of practice and inquiry, I hope that my framework encourages greater interdisciplinary scientific work. 

Read Akinrinade’s earlier interviews with clinical social worker and public health researcher Kikelomo Ogunfowora, and therapist Marcus Fleming.

Photo by Transly Translation Agency on Unsplash