What Are Cryptoparties?

Cryptoparties are hands-on events focused on teaching participants about basic cryptography tools and strategies to protect their digital data and privacy better (The Cryptoparty Handbook, 2013). At our institution, cryptoparties are typically hosted by our digital learning organization and invite students, faculty, and staff from all areas of our institution to participate. Our cryptoparties were also inspired by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition’s DiscoTechs, which focus on teaching digital literacies within communities, particularly BIPOC communities, that face exclusion from technological infrastructure and disproportionate levels of surveillance (Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, 2012). Both the cryptoparty movement and DiscoTechs centre collaborative efforts on communities and local leaders, and both initiatives were designed to be remixed across different geographies and communities.

Our cryptoparty gatherings include recommendations for tools and practices to get started with personal cryptography and facilitate conversations and breakout spaces that help participants to explore the contours of digital privacy as a human right. Because our digital learning organization is an administrative unit and not an academic unit, our cryptoparties have been situated outside the formal curriculum at our institution. This has afforded us a great deal of autonomy and responsiveness to students and student groups. We have been able to attract participants from communities most connected to or affected by those issues and to identify local leaders within those communities who might co-design and co-facilitate the events. We follow the cryptoparty movement and DiscoTechs in centring collaborative effort and local leadership, including leadership by students and student groups at our institution.

Theoretical Frameworks

Critical pedagogy and feminist theories help us to shape the why and how of cryptoparties. Conscientização, or the development of critical consciousness and engagement with the world (Freire, 2018; hooks, 1994), is the focus of these events since they “increase [students’] awareness of relations between self and the world through sharing experiences, feelings and ideas about the needs for and possibilities of liberatory action” (Fisher, 2001, p. 33). According to Fisher (2001), feminist teaching that aims to raise critical consciousness in students requires a shift in attention regarding the topic of study, such as a shift in attention to the predatory data practices of digital platforms and an emphasis on relations of unequal power, such as the prejudicial practices adopted by digital platforms toward marginalized populations (Benjamin, 2019; Gilliard, 2016). Cryptoparties encourage participants to make these connections to their digital worlds through activities that encourage collective and cooperative reflections (Fisher, 2001).

“Consciousness-raising also entails action” (Fisher, 2001, p. 40), and both critical and feminist pedagogy emphasize giving students opportunities to transform their worlds and their knowledge to address social problems (Giroux, 2007; Shrewsbury, 1987). Action and agency are key components of cryptoparties. They embody Bond’s (2019) description of feminist pedagogy as “doubly intentional—it is purposefully practical” (para. 1)—giving participants a chance to engage in reflective practice while offering pathways toward change and empowerment. Furthermore, the goal of the agentic approach that we use is to impress on students that agency is not only possible but also necessary. As hooks (2003) writes, “learned helplessness is necessary for the maintenance of dominator culture” (p. 130), and we see cryptoparties as a tool to empower participants to resist and refuse helplessness.

Cryptoparties foreground an intersectional approach. Intersectionality highlights the importance of intersecting identities in the face of oppressive systems (Crenshaw, 1991). Along with Weiler (1991), who critiques Freire’s lack of attention to structural inequities stemming from class and gender, and Romero-Hall (2021), who argues for the necessity of an intersectional feminism that decentres whiteness and accounts for multiple and layered social identities, we believe that an intersectional approach is important to the work of critical engagement with the digital and to the design of cryptoparties. During cryptoparties, students reflect on their positionalities, how they have privilege and power (e.g., being students at a wealthy private institution) and how they face marginalization (e.g., intersections of their racial and gender identities). These reflections provide a jumping-off point for students to recognize how the risks and inequities that they face in the digital world are multi-faceted and closely tied to their positionalities.

Cryptoparties in Action: Designing Zoom against the Machine

We drew from student experiences during remote learning, and the feminist and critical theory traditions described above, to design the Zoom against the Machine (ZAtM) cryptoparty, led by Steven, a lead intern in our digital learning office. The spate of Zoom bombings during the pandemic, in which Zoom meetings were disrupted by uninvited participants broadcasting offensive material (Lorenz, 2020), was one impetus for the cryptoparty. We also wanted to respond to challenges that students were facing in online spaces such as safety and privacy, feelings of helplessness, and a loss of interpersonal connections. The cryptoparty began with an introductory chat, a threat modelling activity, followed by breakout room activities, and closed with a final reflection and discussion. Breakout sessions were led by interns paired with staff members and covered the following topics: Defusing the Zoom Bomb (acquire skills to use Zoom safely), No Room Like Zoom (create community norms in Zoom), and Dream Better (redesign Zoom and experiment with Zoom alternatives). Attendees chose breakout sessions according to their interests and rotated rooms throughout the event.

Although Zoom bombing and its effects are serious topics, we thought that it was essential to include opportunities for playfulness during the cryptoparty. To design playful moments, Steven drew from hooks’s (1994) description of erotic classrooms. These spaces are not necessarily sexual, but they are places where learners and teachers take pleasure in being together. The pandemic eroded many erotic pleasures of the classroom, such as seeing friends and professors, small-group discussions, and tactile learning. Many faculty members unfamiliar with remote learning found comfort in familiar approaches such as lecturing with PowerPoint slides. Yet these teaching methods contributed to Zoom fatigue and student unhappiness.

The question of fun and pleasure in the classroom was linked inextricably to the embodied, material realities of our participants’ lives. If we treated participants as disembodied faces on a screen, then playfulness was unlikely. Instead, we prioritized embodiment by focusing on connection, flexibility, and self-care. We used icebreakers such as “what kind of light are you: daylight, twilight, etc.?” and cute clip art to create a more relaxed tone and to humanize interactions. We held cryptoparties at different times to accommodate various time zones and integrated intentional breaks so that attendees could turn off their cameras and microphones, use the restroom, or stretch their legs. Informal, optional breakout rooms were also created to mimic the hallway conversations that one might have at an event. Attendees could pop into and out of the “hallway conversation” room during breaks, while transitioning to breakout sessions, or after the cryptoparty. Acknowledging and designing for material realities facilitated playful moments and helped to create a more inclusive event.

Below we elaborate on two specific activities from the cryptoparty—the threat modelling exercise and the creation of collaborative community norms using Padlet—and discuss how they embody feminist and critical approaches to learning.

Intersectional Exploration through Threat Modelling

In designing the threat modelling activity, Steven reflected on their experience of remote learning during the pandemic and highlighted the concern about student safety and privacy in online spaces. Steven thought that it might be useful to engage participants in perspective taking (hooks, 1994) on online safety, encouraging a shift in the conversation from what and how to protect a space to why someone might protect a space in the first place.

To meet this objective, Steven designed a threat modelling activity to help participants adopt an intersectional lens on safety in online spaces, based on a digital security exercise from Access Now, a non-profit that supports digital security for at-risk users such as activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. The Access Now exercise required participants to role-play a persona trying to secure a part of their digital footprint. In redesigning this activity, Steven focused on which tools were available in Zoom and personas that professors might encounter or embody in the classroom. The personas represent a variety of possible identities within the institutional community (see Table 13.1). Participants were assigned to one of the personas and asked to consider how their assigned personas might respond to a Zoom-bombing event by considering whom the persona represents, what needs protecting, and what harm might result if they fail to take protective measures. The threat modelling activity introduced the ideas of positionality and intersectionality and highlighted how attendees’ positionality can affect the privacy harms that they face.

Table 13.1. Threat Modeling Personas

For example, Dr. Bear might be more likely to draw the attention of Zoom bombers given their online notoriety. Dr. Bear also has more power within the institution and might have more resources and support in the event of a Zoom bombing. Professor Fox occupies a more precarious professional position, and their students face the possibility of greater harm given the sensitive nature of the class topic. The role-playing aspects of the activity helped to increase engagement because participants were able to explore issues that faculty, staff, and students might face, without being required to share personal experiences.

The exercise also reduced participants’ feelings of helplessness by narrowing the scope of digital security; instead of trying to anticipate every possible solution or need, the participants could exercise agency by solving a list of specific priorities. After completing the activity, the group discussed which security features in Zoom they would enable and why. Attendees compared their personal priorities to those of others who might share their digital space. Emphasizing that the Zoom host was now responsible for protecting those in their Zoom room made participants more sensitive to how their choices might affect others. Safety was framed as a collective responsibility that required an intersectional lens in order to protect the community’s most vulnerable members.

Using Padlet to Empower Participants

Given the feelings of helplessness that many reported during remote learning, we wanted to empower student participants to develop agency. In the No Room Like Zoom community norms breakout, we designed an activity using Padlet to challenge traditional power dynamics, emphasize student contributions, and encourage faculty to learn from student experiences. Padlet is a collaborative web platform that functions like a virtual bulletin board where participants can post virtual sticky notes with their contributions (which can be anonymous). Padlet also allows for commenting and up-voting on contributions.

The breakout session began with two student interns presenting an overview of community norms in Zoom. The facilitators created four prompts within the Padlet environment. (1) What community norms would you like to see in Zoom sessions? (2) What kinds of support would you need to implement these norms? (3) How can we make sure that everyone is equally represented in the norm-making process? (4) How can we resolve disagreements over norms? Participants were given time to post their thoughts, read others’ contributions, and comment on or up-vote responses. We intentionally chose Padlet to encourage diverse forms of participation. Using a structured discussion tool that emphasized various non-verbal forms of interaction allowed those with different styles of communication to contribute to the discussion (Brookfield & Preskill, 2005). Providing attendees with multiple opportunities and means of expressing themselves is a form of community building (CAST, 2018), and we made intentional choices about which technology would advance those values.

A small but important decision that we made was to anonymize the Padlet contributions. Doing so allowed students to provide feedback to faculty that might otherwise be challenging given the power differential between students and instructors. On the Padlet, several participants wrote that professors need to solicit feedback intentionally from their students about community norms and the class in general, particularly if they have students who are not dominant speakers. Faculty members were eager to dive into these topics, and several instructors asked the students how to approach various scenarios in their classrooms. In our exit survey, one student respondent expressed a desire for more instructors to attend such events. Because the cryptoparty was a student-led, co-curricular event, we could better facilitate learning across traditional academic hierarchies.

Discussion

As Tsemo (2011) points out, much of the literature on, and practice of, feminist pedagogy within a higher education context is situated within traditional classrooms, with a focus on how it shapes the design of courses and classroom practices. More recently, Aneja (2017) and Herman and Kirkup (2017) have argued that feminist pedagogy has tended to privilege face-to-face classes; their studies demonstrate how online courses can also be sites of feminist pedagogy. Similarly, we have described a learning activity both situated outside the traditional classroom and conducted online via Zoom, expanding the notion of where feminist pedagogy can be applied.

Structurally, our cryptoparties were created, developed, and hosted by staff and student members of our institution’s digital learning organization working in partnership. It is important to note that, though digital learning organizations typically are oriented to a service model, our organization’s ability to host cryptoparties was aided by our shift away from a service model and toward a partnership model that seeks to engage in explorations of digital teaching and learning with faculty, staff, and students. As we describe elsewhere, our organization used critical pedagogy as a language and framework to guide our work with faculty and students as partners in leading efforts toward critical engagement with the digital (see Collier & Lohnes Watulak, 2023).

In the ZAtM cryptoparty, students not only participated in the event but also were central to the planning and facilitation, and it was essential that they felt empowered. For example, in designing the “creating community” session, the staff member encouraged two interns to set the breakout room agenda and develop contents and activities. The student interns assumed the role of educators and knowledge producers, and the staff member served as a resource. Vera, one of the interns for this session, thought that she was able to use the community norms session to address the more quotidian ways in which Zoom affects students: “As important as Zoom protection is, the reality is that it doesn’t impact our day-to-day student lives nearly as much as stuff like Zoom fatigue and Zoom community.” By prioritizing the interns’ voices and agency, we could tailor our sessions to address multiple aspects of the student experience that might not have been apparent from a staff or faculty perspective. Vera noted the agency that she felt during the planning process: “An important part of the experience was feeling like someone was actually listening and responding to your ideas.”

The planning process dispensed with rigid academic hierarchies and helped to position students as experts, a role that they do not frequently occupy in higher education. By centring the unique expertise of students, we could challenge traditional academic hierarchies that position students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge. We also embraced the partnership model in writing this chapter by including a student co-author and student voices throughout.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have described cryptoparties, which at our institution served as co-curricular sites for students, faculty, and staff to engage critically with digital technologies and spaces that they use in their daily lives and as part of their educational experiences at our institution. By applying critical and feminist pedagogical lenses to the design and implementation of cryptoparties, we were able to engage participants in critical explorations of Zoom while modelling feminist and critical approaches to teaching and learning in Zoom. We were also able to use the process of designing the cryptoparty itself as a space for student interns to take the lead in planning and facilitating the cryptoparty.

At the end of the cryptoparty, we asked participants to contribute to another Padlet, where they shared their takeaways from the event. Many noted the need for students to be able to provide anonymous feedback to faculty about their learning experiences, emphasizing open communication over making assumptions. Some reflected on the need to be intentional in creating online spaces, whereas others thought that the cryptoparty helped them to be more comfortable with learning new digital tools. Responses indicate a consciousness raising of knowledge and power in the online classroom that we hope will be translated into action.

However, not all students approach cryptoparties with a readiness to engage in them critically. In the post-event survey, some respondents wished for more focus on technical skills, such as recording audio and using breakouts in Zoom. Our initial response to such feedback might have been to feel disappointed that students did not understand the more critical and consciousness-raising aspects of the cryptoparties. However, we wonder whether there are approaches that we could use next time, such as implementing a more training-oriented approach potentially to open the door to future opportunities for consciousness raising or focusing more explicitly on why consciousness raising is needed. We will continue to explore these possibilities in future cryptoparty events. Although the Zoom against the Machine cryptoparty developed in response to pandemic learning, the issues that we explored did not begin with the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Instead, the pandemic magnified existing inequities in education, and we expect these issues, along with online and hybrid modalities, to remain part of higher education.

Key Takeaways

• Designing cryptoparties using critical and feminist pedagogical lenses can engage participants in critical explorations of Zoom while modelling intersectional approaches to teaching and learning in Zoom.
• Partnering with students to design cryptoparties positions them as experts and provides an avenue for their agency.
• Cryptoparty participants might need more explicit scaffolding and support to engage fully with the critical and consciousness-raising aspects of cryptoparties.

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