In August 2020, Alexander Lukashenko’s re-election, amid widespread allegations of electoral fraud, marked the continuation of his uninterrupted presidency since Belarus’s independence and triggered an unprecedented wave of mass protests in the country’s history. In response, Lukashenko’s adaptive authoritarian regime unleashed brutal repression and systemic human rights violations. In this context, the diasporic social movement community, leveraging information and communication technologies (ICTs), emerged as critical actors supporting the anti-regime social movement in their origin-homeland. Based on semi-structured interviews with 13 members of the North American Belarusian diasporic social movement community, this paper explores the role of ICTs in facilitating their political actions during the 2020 protests, as well as the factors that facilitated or hindered their participation and use of ICTs. Our study highlights that ICTs facilitated diaspora geopolitics from below by enabling “social movement community,” where otherwise disparate diasporic satellite publics converged around the common political goal of overthrowing the Lukashenko regime. However, the diasporic social movement community’s use of ICTs was also fraught with ethical and moral complexities, navigating the “proximity dilemma” of remote participation and influencing a cause from a distance, while benefiting from socio-spatial privileges in their host country. Furthermore, the diaspora’s ICT usage is shaped by the political regime, fear of transnational repression, and the geopolitical positions of both the origin-homeland and host country, as a consequence of adaptive authoritarianism in the Belarusian case. We discuss how CSCW can support decentralised, geographically dispersed diasporic organising with respect to social movements under varying authoritarian constraints.

Universities grow increasingly committed to equal access for individuals with disabilities, balancing the appearance of inclusion while upholding values of academic rigour. Within these universities, employees working in accessibility must mediate an unstable web of organizational and technological infrastructures. This study examines the government mandates, organizational structures, processes, and policies in a research university in Canada aimed at meeting the accessibility needs of its students. Our findings suggest that there is an interplay between informal and formal practices to navigate institutional systems. Technology serves as a mediator in the “behind-the-scenes" work that occurs at the intersection of infrastructures. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to better support accessibility work in universities. We suggest the use of seamful design to support accessibility work, as it aligns with the dynamic nature of disability and distributed networks of accessibility work. We recommend designers foster interdependence to support workers who navigate overlapping infrastructures and breakdowns at the seams.

As multifaceted concerns related to humans, nonhumans, ecologies, and technologies gain prominence within the design community, posthumanism is emerging as a key intellectual pathway for critical design theory and research. This study surveys 151 design papers published in ACM venues up to September 2024 to explore the operationalization of posthumanism in computing and design scholarship. Our findings indicate that papers incorporating posthumanism are shaping an emerging field of posthuman design. We argue that the posthuman turn in computing and design can be characterized into three phases: early encounters with the posthuman, the integration of posthuman concepts, and transformation into a material-discursive practice. To support and advance the objectives of this third phase, we propose a posthuman vocabulary — a conceptual framework composed of five guiding principles — post-humanism, post-anthropocentrism, post-dualism, post-Enlightenment, and post-technologism. These principles address issues of justice, sustainability, relationality, agency, subjectivity, and critique of technological intensification, offering a guide for future material-discursive design practices.

Care research in HCI is evolving to encompass a broader spectrum, where care is not only given to and performed by a human care-giver and human care-receiver, but also extends to non-humans like technologies and more-than-humans, including post-human entities. This expansion reflects a growing recognition of the complex, interconnected networks through which care is enacted and experienced across varying scales. To explore the expanding conceptualization of care in HCI, we conducted a literature review of 93 papers, examining both practical and ethico-political focuses across different scales of care. We identified six categories of care conceptualizations: service, repair, intimate, burden, infrastructure, and ethic. We define care in the HCI space, propose a novel tool to support care research, and suggest conceptual spaces for future exploration with a focus on critical care theorists.

The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily disrupted the operations of on-demand ride-sourcing digital labour platforms like Uber and Ola, severely impacting gig workers’ labour opportunities. In response, the Kolkata Ola-Uber App-Cab Operator and Drivers Union in West Bengal, India, mobilised an alternate socio-technical infrastructure by operating emergency transport and taxi ambulance services. Our ethnographic study explores how this initiative leveraged technologies to structure and coordinate hybrid sites of action and ‘generate’ a labour market without profit motive to support the public health infrastructure. Our paper highlights the significance of what we call the gig worker union’s ‘generative politics’ in creating resources to support workers and citizens, facilitating political action beyond protest politics, contributing to new counter-hegemonic formations, and shaping collective action centered around regeneration and care for the city and life under capitalism. We contribute to the HCI literature by offering insights to design alternate and participatory socio-technical infrastructures that challenge the hegemony of digital labour platforms.

In this paper, we pay ethnographic attention to the failed attempts at platformization of agricultural trade in one of Asia’s largest onion markets, located in rural western Maharashtra. We focus on e-NAM, or the electronic National Agricultural Market, a state-sponsored digital trading platform intended to create a transparent, efficient, and frictionless online national agricultural market by collapsing geographical barriers of traditional marketplaces, commonly known as mandis. We found that despite e-NAM’s intended benefits, mandis continue to be the preferred mode of transaction for trading agricultural commodities. We demonstrate that these two agricultural marketplaces foster different meanings of information transparency, efficiency, and participation among stakeholders. In agrarian societies dominated by smallholder farmers, such as India, social collectives and non-economic relationships are crucial for providing safety and risk mitigation when dealing with perishable commodities like onions. We argue that e-NAM fails because its digital intermediation prioritizes an ahistorical and depoliticized free-market approach, which treats farmers (and traders) as independent units driven solely by the economic logic of demand and supply, disconnecting them from their historical and political agrarian social class.

This paper explores the interplay between identity, collective action, and digital marketplaces among Latino house-cleaners in Toronto. Domestic work, such as house-cleaning, has traditionally been devalued, gendered, and delegated to marginalised immigrant populations. The informal nature of house-cleaning work also introduces precarity, vulnerabilities, and potential avenues of exploitation. Drawing on 19 interviews with Latino house-cleaners, the paper underscores how identity shapes experiences and strategies in the labour markets. We find that Latino house-cleaners prefer to use asynchronous digital marketplaces, such as social media commerce groups and online classified advertisement websites, as the platforms provide flexibility and control over their labour outcomes. The paper further delves into how group identities online - such as being Latino and women - foster collective action and solidarity. The paper provides insights on how we can support the challenges and needs of immigrant domestic workers in technology-mediated labour markets.

The entry of on-demand ridesourcing digital labour platforms (OR-DLPs) in Kolkata, India, restructured the local taxi-cab service industry’s economic geography and spatial practices. Notably, they eroded the significance of the spatial fixity of taxi stands operated by traditional trade unions, enmeshed in local society’s partisan political dynamics. Therefore, OR-DLPs triggered a reconfiguration of the socio-spatial and political practices around the taxi-cab industry in the city. Globally, traditional trade unions have struggled to organise workers in informal work arrangements and DLPs. However, in Kolkata, the Kolkata Ola-Uber App-Cab Operator and Drivers Union has proved to be successful. They established hybrid and networked unionism through technological affordances, placing worker-organisers rather than external organisers at the centre of their organisational structure. Furthermore, they undertook tech-mediated resistance against the OR-DLPs, local bureaucracy (e.g., the police), and the state. We explore this context to examine the impact of OR-DLPs on labour geography, worker-organising and resistance practices, along with the revitalisation strategies of traditional trade unions in response. From a non-Western context, we expand the frame for CSCW and HCI scholars’ ongoing efforts to design worker-centric technologies for resistance.

This mixed-method study, situated in Ontario, Canada, investigates how migrant farmworkers’ experiences with agricultural technologies (agtech) affect their attitudes, conditions, and expectations of work, and how workers envision technologies serving as supportive interventions. Through a survey and interviews, we identify that surveillance and tracking agtech (chequeadoras) affect workers, imparting negative health and safety consequences. Workers’ interactions with chequeadoras reveal three major impacts - performance expectations engender stress, surveillance causes fears of disciplinary action, and performance tracking heightens competition. These impacts demonstrate how chequeadoras erode workers’ capacity to build sociality and solidarity. In response to these impacts and to support workers’ desired workplace changes, which aim for safer environments with technical skill development.

Communicating risk to the public in the lead-up to and during severe weather events has the potential to reduce the impacts of these events on lives and property. Globally, these events are anticipated to increase due to climate change, rendering effective risk communication an integral component of climate adaptation policies. Research in risk communications literature has developed substantial knowledge and best practices for the design of risk messaging. This study considers the potential for quantifying the compliance of severe weather risk messages with these best practices, individually and at scale, and developing tools to improve risk communication messaging. The current work makes two contributions. First, we develop a string-matching approach to evaluate whether messaging complies with best practices and suggest areas for improvement. Second, we conduct an interview study with risk experts to assess practical implications.

Care work has long been relegated to private households and small communities; however, with the entry of digital marketplaces, it is becoming part of public economic spheres. While care work has been generally devalued and understudied, it is a complex practice embedded in a network of economic transactions, social relations, material conditions, and socio-cultural norms. This paper explores the caregiving networks among migrant house-cleaners, guided by Tronto’s ‘care ethics’ and Puig de la Bellacasa’s ‘matters of care.’ We interviewed 19 Latino house-cleaners in Toronto to understand their care practices and networks. Our analysis identifies gaps in our participants’ care networks. We create a new term, lateral care, to explicate the digital communities of care practice our participants formed. We conclude with implications for the future design of technologies for labor economies that attend to concerns of care.

Ramadan is an important and blessed month for Muslims around the world. It is both a time of spiritual contemplation as well as an opportunity for reinvigorating communal bonds. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, disrupted many of the rituals and traditions of Ramadan. In this exploratory study, we present findings from 22 young Muslims’ experiences with Ramadan and fasting during the pandemic. Our article sheds light on the techno-spiritual practices and information strategies used to mitigate isolation, share information, and celebrate Ramadan. We examine the sociotechnical configurations of religious and spiritual rituals and highlight the resilience of these rituals even in the midst of a global pandemic. Our paper contributes to CSCW scholarship on technology appropriation and non-use as they relate to cultural and religious practices in the face of exogenous shocks such as the pandemic, and how design can better cater to the religious lives of individuals and communities.

Design toolkits that aim to promote equity offer designers simplified approaches to creating more equitable technology. However, it is important to understand how equity is conceptualized in practice. As a curated collection of methods, toolkits signal how equity is imagined in design. In this paper, we perform a qualitative analysis of 17 design toolkits related to equity. We explore alternative design approaches that address inequity in design. We evaluate whether equity toolkits align with calls for changes to design practice, as well as Nancy Fraser's dimensions of justice. Finally, we find that design toolkits focus on the ‘digital divide’ rather than redistributing world-building power, and thus continue to keep design power with professional designers. We also find that ‘design thinking’ continues to influence design toolkits. Furthermore, the simplicity of toolkits does not engage with the complexities that shape equity in practice. We conclude with suggestions to help researchers and designers rethink design toolkits.

The farmers' movement began in November 2020, when more than 300,000 protesters marched towards New Delhi in India in opposition to new agrarian acts introduced by the Indian central government. Organised by over 400 farmers' unions along with other organisations, for the next year, farmers and allied protesters set up bases around New Delhi and sustained the movement leading to its eventual success. We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with participants from the movement and explored the social organisation, the underlying technical infrastructures, and how collective action was organised. We outline how the social media ecosystem enabled hybrid forms of organisational structures and facilitated coalition-building between diverse groups. Further, the movement created and disseminated alternative media that opposed mainstream media narratives and facilitated community-building. We discuss how designed technologies and spaces can support social movements in the face of powerful antagonistic actors.

Financial technology (FinTech) platforms often exclude certain countries from their services due to global political conflicts. As a result, immigrants from these neglected countries struggle with transferring money to and from their homeland through formal mechanisms. Instead, they get involved in informal transnational transactions that, while flexible, are often risky and full of hassles. We looked into this issue through an online survey (n=127) and engaged with multiple stakeholders (n=16), including the Iranian immigrant community in Canada, to co-design an application called 'Kabootar' that matches senders and receivers of money across borders. In this application, a sender-receiver pair is matched with a pertinent pair sending money in the opposite direction. By facilitating two intra-national transactions in local currencies instead of two relatively complicated inter-national transactions, the need for money to cross borders is eliminated while staying within the boundaries of the law. Our user study (n=13) revealed several tensions in users trusting such informal transnational transactions. This work contributes to CSCW, HCI, and social computing's growing scholarship in personalized and collaborative computing technologies by advocating for a novel design approach based on collaboration and informality and extends their scope to the domain of FinTech for politically marginalized communities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced people to reimagine how they engage in spiritual and religious activities. This paper presents an analysis of the information practices of young Muslims during Ramadan, with a focus on their social, spiritual, and COVID-related needs and strategies.

While the growth of financial technologies (FinTech) is making the flow of money faster, easier, and more secure, such technologies are often unable to serve many countries due to the global political environment. Despite its severe impact, this issue has remained understudied in the HCI literature. We address this gap by presenting our findings from a three-month-long ethnography with the Iranian community in Toronto, Canada. We present their struggles in transferring money to and from their home country - a process that entails financial loss, fear, uncertainty, and privacy breaches. We also outline the informal workarounds that allow this community to circumvent these challenges, along with the associated hassles. This paper contributes to broadening the scope of FinTech in the HCI literature by connecting it with the politics surrounding transnational transactions. We discuss the design implications of our findings and their contribution to the broader interests of HCI in mobilities and social justice.

India's #MeToo movement began in late-2018, and was largely a platform for some privileged women sharing their accounts of sexual harassment. Beyond issues of access to digital technology, our paper investigates why various sections of India's female and LGBTQ+ population chose not to engage with the #MeToo movement. Focusing on experiences with sexual harassment, we conducted 44 qualitative interviews with middle-class working women, feminist and queer activists, academics, and other stakeholders working against gender-based violence, to understand their perspectives on #MeToo. Our paper explores why some survivors bypass the legal infrastructure to speak out against sexual harassment using #MeToo, while others choose not to participate despite having access to social media platforms. Using the lens of infrastructure, we outline the imbrication of social media movements with existing social norms and legal infrastructures. Further, we highlight how infrastructural politics are connected to patriarchy, colonialism, caste, class, and gender struggles.

This paper examines software piracy in the Global South from an accessibility lens, using the bio-technical metaphor of the 'cyborg.' Drawing on qualitative interviews with people with visual impairment (VI) from India and Peru, the paper interrogates the intimate relationships that users have with assistive technologies (ATs). It outlines the effectiveness of ATs in allowing users to actively control and shape their own lives and identities, and describes the various modalities that regulate the human body, technology, and human body-technology linkages. The paper argues that software piracy, when looked through the lens of the 'cyborg,' is an act of self-making that is motivated by a desire to gain autonomy and independence, i.e., it can be understood as a way to overcome the barriers that undermine access to the technological self. Further, software piracy allows a shift in the distribution of power from those who control and regulate the assistive technologies to the cyborgs themselves.

The Global South has seen a proliferation of e-governance initiatives aimed at digitizing governmental service delivery. However, paper continues to remain the primary medium of bureaucracy. During ethnographic fieldwork at the CM Helpline, a state-wide e-governance initiative in central India, we observed that even tech-savvy bureaucrats who fully supported both the initiative and its paper-to-electronic transition ensured that paper continues to persist in abundance. Drawing upon scholarship from HCI, anthropology, and science & technology studies, we theorize this contradiction to uncover the circulations of power between people, paper, and electronic systems. We suggest that designers should recognize that new systems often disempower existing actors. The process of transition should integrate new systems into the existing ecosystem and plan for the graceful retirement of older technologies. In addition to machine errors, systems should be resilient to human errors. Finally, new systems should attend to sociocultural and historical specificities.

Rumors are an enduring form of communication across socio-cultural landscapes globally. Counter to their typical negative association, rumors play a nuanced role, helping people collectively deal with problems through constructing a representation of an uncertain situation. Drawing on unstructured interviews and participant observation from a technology goods marketplace in Bangalore, India, we study the circulation of rumors related to the government's recent policy of demonetization and entry of online marketplaces and digital wallets, all of which disrupted existing market practices. These rumors emerge as attempts at sensemaking when a community is faced with ambiguity. Through highlighting the relationship of institutional trust with rumors, the paper argues that the study of rumors can help us identify the concerns of a community in the face of differential power relations. Further, rumors are a form of social bonding which help communities make sense of their place in society and shape existing practices.

Marketplaces are rich sites for studying existing practices surrounding technology adoption, as well as for understanding how the entry of new technologies impact a diversity of social-economic groups. With the high-profile entry of e-commerce companies into the Indian retail scene, this paper seeks to understand the ways in which online shopping integrates into the everyday practices of shoppers. Using semi-structured qualitative interviews with shoppers in marketplaces at Bangalore, India and through the lens of domestication theory, we examine how the relationship between online shopping and shoppers is constructed. Beyond individual agency, this paper describes how institutional, infrastructural, and cultural forces shape the use and non-use of online marketplaces. By specifically studying non-use, we improve our understanding of the shortcomings of existing sites where technologies are encountered and of the potential considerations for future introductions of new ICTs.

This paper explores how actors in local markets in the Global South adapt traditional communication technologies to successfully collaborate to sustain the markets and their business practices. Drawing on ethnographic observations at a local technology goods market in Bangalore, India, the study details the use of a landline telephone intercom system as the primary tool for business communication in the market. Through analyzing how the intercom system relates to informality and physical space, the paper argues that it bridges the formal with the informal, and helps facilitate informal business practices while also allowing them to remain hidden from the formal regulatory gaze of the state.

Local informal markets or bazaars play a central role in embedding the adoption, consumption, and reproduction of digital technologies within the economic and cultural fabric of the Global South. This paper presents ethnographic accounts of informal ICT markets in two sites, one in India and the other in Bangladesh, and assesses how technology consumption unfolds within local practices. Building on social practice theory, this paper depicts the role of materiality, relationships, and situated knowledge in the functioning of a bazaar. We discuss how this knowledge expands our understanding of the evaluation of technology and technical expertise, and the persistence of these informal spaces despite the uptake of corporatized technology marketplaces. We argue that the bazaar represents a special kind of local voice that enriches the HCI scholarship in postcolonial computing.

The paper analyzes the warez scene, an illegal underground subculture on the Internet, which specializes in removing copy protection from software and releasing the cracked software for free. Despite the lack of economic incentives and the absence of external laws regulating it, the warez scene has been able to self-govern and self-organize for more than three decades. Through a directed content analysis of the subculture's digital traces, the paper argues that the ludic competition within the warez scene is an institution of collective action, and can, therefore, be approached as a common-pool resource (CPR). Subsequently, the paper uses Ostrom's framework of long-enduring common-pool resource institutions to understand the warez scene's longevity and ability to govern itself. Theoretical and design implications of these findings are then discussed.

In the wake of the Dobbs v Jackson decision—and the subsequent limits on abortion access—the use of technologies to coordinate access to abortion care in the United States has evolved. Organizations which have coordinated access to abortion for decades are increasing their use of technologies to address the gaps in care which are emerging from the complex legal landscape. This work in progress examines the ways that abortion access organizations are caring for abortion seekers, and using activism to make that care possible. We conducted a qualitative interview study with 11 abortion access workers in Colorado and 2 in national telehealth which serve Colorado. In our analysis, we show the relationships between abortion access workers and the technologies they use. We preview interviews in-progress, and anticipate future work to design resources for abortion access organizations to bring into being a reproductive justice future, through both care and activism.

Issues related to sexual health have been perceived as taboo for centuries across many cultures, yet social media platforms have changed the way that individuals approach these topics in our current day and age. In this provocation, we explore the implications of using memes to communicate information about taboos related to sexual health on TikTok. To begin, we explore what exactly a meme is and how TikTok functions as memetic platform. We then ponder the possibilities of using memes to discuss taboos on TikTok. Specifically, we consider how memes may aid in destigmatizing taboos, particularly related to sexual health and circumventing platform censorship, as well as how they are appropriated by corporations for advertising purposes. We end by speculating about using memes as both a design material and output on digital platforms.

This preliminary study explores the financial practices of older Hong Kong immigrants in the Greater Toronto Area through semi-structured interviews with 10 participants. First, this study examines the impact of social networks in settlement patterns and financial decisions such as choosing banks. Secondly, this study looks at the variety of ways people use and track money, including the adoption of digital banking and contexts of cash use. Finally, a comparison between banking practices in Hong Kong and the Greater Toronto Area is explored. These narratives reveal how social capital, trust, geography and community influence financial habits from managing transnational bank accounts to navigating technological advancements. The diversity of financial practices revealed here highlights the importance of avoiding broad categorizations of older adults and immigrants, and instead contextualizing Fintech design within communities and cultural practices.

Academic work dealing with queerness in HCI is predominantly based in the Global North and has often dealt with one identity dimension at a time. This work-in-progress study attempts to complicate the notion of queerness in HCI by highlighting how in the multi-religious, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural context of India, LGBTQ+ movements and spaces are deeply fractured on the basis of various identity intersections. We interview 18 LGBTQ+ activists, lawyers, and allied activists in the Delhi, India to understand the issues faced by queer Indians from minority groups and their use of social media and discuss how they negotiate their non-normative identities to create safe spaces, gain access to resources, and engage in care work. The argument that we are bringing into HCI scholarship through this paper is geared toward a future endeavor for designing safe space for marginalized groups in the global south keeping in mind negotiations of power, legitimacy, and resources.

We propose hosting a design workshop style sprint to create a list of guidance for researchers who study the links between social media and social movements, based on the collective knowledge-making of researchers and practitioners interested in varied social movements across global contexts. The guidance will be split into current empirical/tactical knowledge of social media use in social movements, theoretical provocations, and best practices for ethical and safety considerations for researchers working in this field.

From HCI and CSCW to labour studies and human geography, disciplines are expanding their scholarly focus to address the increasingly dire consequences of climate change. At the same time, there is growing attention being paid to the rise and ubiquity of platform companies across societal sectors, such as communication, transportation, and work. However, although climate change and platform economies affect one another, they are rarely examined in relation to each other. This multi-part workshop aims to build an interdisciplinary research foundation for critical studies of climate change and platform economies. Participants will critically engage with three intersecting themes in discourses on climate change and platform economies—labour, data, and infrastructure. Through activities such as lightning talks, mapping exercises, and reflective discussions, participants will collaboratively develop a living syllabus and a shared resource database to (re)work and design pathways toward more sustainable futures.

The use of digital technologies in grassroots community organizing has multifaceted implications. It has extended the scope of sharing information and experiences, building solidarities and coordination, and fostering common identities to enable participation and amplify the voice of diverse actors in social movements. However, the rise of surveillance technologies, computational propaganda and internet shutdowns are creating novel barriers to democratic action, particularly affecting the participatory parity of marginalized grassroots groups. This one-day hybrid workshop will invite conversations on the complex interrelation between ICTs and social movements and devise ways to support grassroots movements by bringing together HCI researchers, activists and designers. We invite formal position papers to participate in workshop and encourage participants to ideate and contribute to creating zines that can serve as a helpful resource for supporting grassroots movements.

Science fiction imaginaries and Silicon Valley innovators have long envisioned a workerless future. However, this industrial ambition has often outpaced technological realities in robotics and artificial intelligence, leading to a reassertion of human skills to cover untenable gaps in autonomous systems. This one-day workshop will invite discussion on this recent retrograde trend toward precarious (and often concealed) human labour across such domains as agriculture, transportation, and caregiving through paper presentations and design activities. Throughout, we will ask how this phenomenon speaks to engineering and design challenges and, subsequently, encourage participants to ideate new cybernetic arrangements that centre the agency and well-being of essential workers.