Prior work on transgender technology users in CSCW has primarily focused on how they interact with algorithms and communication technology, empirically identifying specific use cases and profiles, and speaking largely to the designers and developers of these platforms. This work has emphasized how trans people are excluded, harmed, and misrepresented in existing platforms, algorithms, and research methods. While these critiques are important, this paper explores what trans-inclusive quantitative methods could be by applying a participant- or user-driven approach. While the problem of trans-inclusive, -affirming, or -empowering research methods is not specifically a CSCW problem---as we directly confront by comparing and contrasting the perspectives of CSCW and conventional demography---we argue that a CSCW lens may be uniquely suited to addressing it. To this end, this paper makes several contributions: conceptually, we identify points of increasing convergence between conventional demographic research methods (and criticisms thereof) and CSCW, focusing on shared limitations surrounding how identity is handled in research; methodologically, we present a sketch of how these limitations might be addressed by using social network analysis to “triangulate” social identities while considering them relative and situated; empirically, we implement these methods in a case study of gender within the broader social context of Reddit and discuss the results.
Social platforms hold great promise for supporting marginalized communities, such as the LGBTQ+ community, yet they are frequently sites of further stigmatization and harm. By engaging a diverse sample of 31 US LGBTQ+ users in five qualitative, design-based value elicitation exercises, we find that misalignments between perceived platform values and the values of the marginalized users they serve are at the heart of this disconnect. We inductively identify two community-based design values for supporting LGBTQ+ users: self-determination and inclusion. These values can be used as design heuristics for both improving existing platforms as well as guiding future new platform development. Based on participant feedback, we provide directions for enacting these values to better align platform values with this marginalized population’s needs.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449162
Machines, from artificially intelligent digital assistants to embodied robots, are becoming more pervasive in everyday life. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies (STS) perspectives, we demonstrate how machine designers are not just crafting neutral objects, but relationships between machines and humans that are entangled in human social issues such as gender and power dynamics. Thus, in order to create a more ethical and just future, the dominant assumptions currently underpinning the design of these human-machine relations must be challenged and reoriented toward relations of justice and inclusivity. This paper contributes the “social machine” as a model for technology designers who seek to recognize the importance, diversity and complexity of the social in their work, and to engage with the agential power of machines. In our model, the social machine is imagined as a potentially equitable relationship partner that has agency and as an “other” that is distinct from, yet related to, humans, objects, and animals. We critically examine and contrast our model with tendencies in robotics that consider robots as tools, human companions, animals or creatures, and/or slaves. In doing so, we demonstrate ingrained dominant assumptions about human-machine relations and reveal the challenges of radical thinking in the social machine design space. Finally, we present two design challenges based on non-anthropomorphic figuration and mutuality, and call for experimentation, unlearning dominant tendencies, and reimagining of sociotechnical futures.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449175
This paper investigates how making activities and participation in makerspaces supports the wellbeing and empowerment of women, particularly in making domains that are typically male-dominated. We spent six months undertaking participant observations in a women-only makerspace that runs workshops aimed at teaching women skills in using power tools and woodwork. We conducted contextual interviews with 12 workshop attendees as well as with the makerspace founder and lead instructor. Through the lens of feminist HCI and legitimate peripheral participation, we present trajectories of participation within a women-only makerspace – from beginning as a peripheral participant to becoming a competent and confident maker. We found that through structured workshops in a women-only space that actively teach making skills, the women-only makerspace works to transform the current makerspace landscape so more women can engage with these spaces and participate within them. We contribute three core qualities to foster participation: women-only but without a ‘feminist’ label, configuring a formal and collaborative learning environment, and reification through artefacts. Collectively these work towards new configurations of makerspaces for women that enable their participation within them, and we detail how such configurations work to create trajectories for women’s participation.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449109
In our society, where technologies continue to act as a marginalizing force for various individuals and communities, makerspaces present unique opportunities for community-driven work that engages people with a variety of communal technologies, knowledge, and work practices. However, makerspaces grew out of largely exclusionary discourses, which continue to neglect non-dominant technology practices, knowledge bases, and communities. Despite these origins, research remains largely optimistic about the potential for makerspaces to provide equitable opportunities for those stereotypically excluded to engage, learn, and build with technologies. We mirror this optimism through our work examining how makerspaces might be positioned to address social inequities while supporting community growth and development. This paper traces the development of a social justice makerspace situated within a community of color in the United States. The work contributes a contextual analysis of the design of a makerspace explicitly positioned to forefront community voices and address issues of social inequities. We highlight community perspectives within our situated design process as we draw out the themes and tensions that arose. Applying a social justice framework from Dombrowski et al. (2016) and Lötter’s (2011) to our findings we demonstrate how makerspaces can be positioned to address social inequities through: identifying, educating, and communicating about inequities; engaging in the distribution of resources and opportunities; and enabling capacity building at the individual and structural levels. We highlight how an asset-based orientation can position the makerspace to grow in effective ways to address community issues.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479541
Street outreach is a violence prevention model in which organizations hire residents with strong relationships and local expertise to mediate violent conflicts in their communities. We present the results of a two-year co-design engagement with a street outreach organization in which we collaboratively designed, built, and deployed a mobile application (the Street Peace app) to support street outreach workers (SOWs) in the field and in building community. Three different street outreach organizations in Chicago adopted the app for two months. Results suggest that the app supported SOWs' work of building a counter-structure to traditional policing, which is historically oppressive to Black and Brown communities, and practice transformative justice. The SOWs used the app to mediate potentially violent conflicts without police involvement, build community through in-person events, and extend their communities of care through positive stories and narratives that countered harmful stereotypes about Black criminality. By affording SOWs more agency over their communication with each other, the VP app enabled SOWs to connect their strengths and scale their existing counter-structural practices.
Speech-based interfaces that feature conversational agents have a diverse population of users, including children. While recent HCI research has investigated child-agent interactions in the context of speech-based interfaces with rare mention of sample populations' racial makeup, scant research has examined how racially minoritized groups, in particular Black youth, interact with such technologies. Subsequently, issues of race and racism continue to be largely neglected within the HCI community, contributing to technology that marginalizes Black people. Leveraging Black feminist epistemology as a critical framework, we engage Black students in the ideation process of conversational agents as speech-based interfaces, drawing attention to how race, gender, and class influence their design choices. Our findings reveal that Black students prefer custom-designed conversational agents that are modeled after Black women, possessing knowledge of Black culture and serving as life coaches to help them achieve their goals. We also confirm that the current design of speech-based interfaces perpetuates racism, reinforcing whiteness as the norm.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449291
Research in sociology and linguistics shows that people use language not only to express their own identity but to understand the identity of others. Recent work established a connection between expression of identity and emoji usage on social media, through use of emoji skin tone modifiers. Motivated by that finding, this work asks if, as with language, readers are sensitive to such acts of self-expression and use them to understand the identity of authors. In behavioral experiments (n=488), where text and emoji content of social media posts were carefully controlled before being presented to participants, we find in the affirmative---emoji are a salient signal of author identity. That signal is distinct from, and complementary to, the one encoded in language. Participant groups (based on self-identified ethnicity) showed no differences in how they perceive this signal, except in the case of the default yellow emoji. While both groups associate this with a White identity, the effect was stronger in White participants. Our finding that emoji can index social variables will have experimental applications for researchers but also implications for designers: supposedly ``neutral`` defaults may be more representative of some users than others.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3476091