While people's identities can be marginalized through various forces, colonialism is one of the primary ways that continues to influence people's lives and identities. Colonialism refers to the policies and practices where foreign powers migrate to other lands and alter the social structures, and thus identities, of local populations. What is less understood is how online spaces can support people in the aftermath of colonization in revising, repairing, and strengthening their identities---the process of identity decolonization work. Using trace ethnography beginning on 15 May, 2020 and ending on 15 July, 2020 and drawing on Poka Laenui’s framework of decolonization, we explore how South Asian Bengalis on the platform Bengali Quora (BnQuora) engage in collaborative identity decolonization work to reclaim narrative agency. We discuss how narratives serve to help people bounce back from threat or vulnerability---a concept we dub narrative resilience. We also describe potential implications for future scholarship focused on decolonization that extends multiple ongoing conversations around ICT for development, social justice, decolonial HCI, and identity research within the CHI community.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517600
Recent HCI research has suggested a move from individualistic models of digital care and wellbeing to considering the family unit as a locus of support in this area; however, little work has examined the complex, granular everyday experience of such relationships, and the role of gender, class, and care is underexplored. This study focuses on women's familial relationships through interviews with 6 Irish women about their relationships with their mothers, as well as ways in which they maintain the care of themselves and others within these relationships. Our thematic analysis of this data generated four themes: self-other care, leaky boundaries, changes over the lifecourse, and space and conflict – from which we ideated a series of design concepts, six of which are presented here with critiques from our participants. From this exploratory work, we delineate directions for future HCI research into women's close relationships.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517611
This paper critically examines the impacts of social media-based business on urban residential architecture in Dhaka, Bangladesh and joins the growing body of work in critical HCI. Based on a seven-month-long qualitative empirical study in Dhaka, this paper reports how Facebook commerce (F-commerce) drives many local women to actively engage in home-based businesses, which in turn, challenges the inherent spatial regulations of modern residential architecture. This paper also documents how F-commerce mediated transformations in residential spaces are promoting heterogeneous functions, re-surfacing traditional values, and altering orders and rationales that define modern housing. Drawing from a rich body of literature in urban housing architecture, critical theories around modernism, South-Asian feminism, and postcolonial computing, we explain how these spatial transformations and alterations are ``appropriating" architectural design vocabularies. Our findings further explain how negligence toward such emerging needs often marginalizes the women spatially and economically, who are involved in F-commerce. We conclude with design implications to architecture and HCI to address these issues, and connect our findings to the broader agendas of Postcolonial HCI around diversity, inclusion, and global development.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3502071
Gender/ing guides how we view ourselves, the world around us, and each other—including non-humans. Critical voices have raised the alarm about stereotyped gendering in the design of socially embodied artificial agents like voice assistants, conversational agents, and robots. Yet, little is known about how this plays out in research and to what extent. As a first step, we critically reviewed the case of Pepper, a gender-ambiguous humanoid robot. We conducted a systematic review (n=75) involving meta-synthesis and content analysis, examining how participants and researchers gendered Pepper through stated and unstated signifiers and pronoun usage. We found that ascriptions of Pepper’s gender were inconsistent, limited, and at times discordant, with little evidence of conscious gendering and some indication of researcher influence on participant gendering. We offer six challenges driving the state of affairs and a practical framework coupled with a critical checklist for centering gender in research on artificial agents.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501996
This project illuminates Black women and femme’s experiences with unwanted behavior and harassment on social media, and how they (re)claim and transform their experiences to cope, heal, and experience joy. This work situates Black women and femmes’ experiences within extant social media research, and examines how their unique identity creates multiple forms of interlocking oppression. In our focus groups, participants (N=49) described harms they experienced through racism, misogyny, ableism, and sexual objectification, and their complex labor of protecting and transforming their experiences online. Despite the harmful effects of unwanted behavior online, participants described a Black transformative politic, in which they cultivated healing and joy through nurturing relationships and blocking and refusing others. Using a transformative justice lens, we discuss their experiences of harassment from White women and men, as well as the complexities of cultural betrayal trauma when experiencing harassment from Black men.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517608