Going Beyond the T in CTC : Social Practices as Care in Community Technology Centers

Community technology center (CTC) is a term usually associated with facilities that provide free or affordable computer and internet access, and sometimes training, to people in underserved communities. Despite the large number of studies done on CTCs, the literature has focused primarily on the use of ICTs as the main, if not the only, activity in these centers. When it comes to addressing social concerns, the literature has often seen them as an outcome of ICT use. It does not highlight CTCs as an inherent and important social space that helps to tackle social issues. Thus, in this study, I present an ethnographic account of how residents of favelas (urban slums in Brazil)—who are from understudied and marginalized areas—used these centers beyond the “T” (technology) in order to fulfill some of their social needs. I highlight the social practices afforded by the CTCs that were beneficial to the underserved communities. By social practices, I focus exclusively on the acts of care performed by individuals in order to address self and community needs. I argue that CTCs go beyond the use of technology and provide marginalized people with a key social space, where they alleviate some of their social concerns, such as lack of proper education, violence, drug cartel activities, and other implications of being poor

Re-Shape: A Method to Teach Data Ethics for Data Science Education

Data has become central to the technologies and services that human-computer interaction (HCI) designers make, and the ethical use of data in and through these technologies should be given critical attention throughout the design process. However, there is little research on ethics education in computer science that explicitly addresses data ethics. We present and analyze Re-Shape, a method to teach students about the ethical implications of data collection and use. Re-Shape, as part of an educational environment, builds upon the idea of cultivating care and allows students to collect, process, and visualizetheir physical movement data in ways that support critical reflection and coordinated classroom activities about data, data privacy, and human-centered systems for data science. We also use a case study of Re-Shape in an undergraduate computer science course to explore prospects and limitations of instructional designs and educational technology such as Re-Shape that leverage personal data to teach data ethics

The Care Work of Access

Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access—the continual affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up in attempts to get things done are concerns for one another and how well people are doing together. Reading this work through emerging disability studies and feminist STS scholarship, we account for two important forms of work that give rise to access: (1) mundane attunements and (2) noninnocent authorizations. Together these processes work as sensitizing concepts to help HCI scholars account for the ways that intelligent ATs both produce access while sometimes subverting people with disabilities

Crafting, Communality, and Computing: Building on Existing Strengths To Support a Vulnerable Population

In Nepal, sex-trafficking survivors and the organizations that support them have limited resources to assist the survivors in their on-going journey towards reintegration. We take an asset-based approach wherein we identify and build on the strengths possessed by such groups. In this work, we present reflections from introducing a voice-annotated web application to a group of survivors. The web application tapped into and built upon two elements of pre-existing strengths possessed by the survivors -- the social bond between them and knowledge of crafting as taught to them by the organization. Our findings provide insight into the array of factors influencing how the survivors act in relation to one another as they created novel use practices and adapted the technology. Experience with the application seemed to open knowledge of computing as a potential source of strength. Finally, we articulate three design desiderata that could help promote communal spaces: make activity perceptible to the group, create appropriable steps, and build in fun choices.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'20

Identifying and transforming sites of power in collaborative community-based research

For this dissertation, I analyzed collaboration practices and power structures within three community-based participatory research (CBPR) studies I conducted for my Ph.D. I ask: 1) How do dominant power structures, epistemologies, and narratives manifest in HCI research and praxis? 2) How can we structure research to support our community partners\u27 goals while resisting dominating and extractive practices in academic research? To respond to these questions, I conducted member checking interviews with my collaborators and a duoethnography with my dissertation advisor, Dr. Sheena Erete, about our experiences in the studies as a Black female professor and a white female graduate student. I grounded my findings in Black feminist thought by employing the intersectional analysis method developed by Erete, Rankin, and Thomas (2022). Through my intersectional analysis, I identified how systems of power and disciplinary norms influenced Dr. Erete\u27s and my decisions about how to structure our collaborations and organize our time and labor. These decisions impacted the distribution of benefit and harm within our collaborations. Systems of power also manifested in cultural narratives imbued within the studies; these narratives informed our methods and interactions with our collaborators and community members. I organize these findings into five saturated sites of power (a term developed by Collins, 2019) within CBPR. These are sites where intersecting systems of power acutely impact collaborators\u27 experiences and study outcomes. To support researchers in developing a non-extractive and mutually beneficial CBPR practice, I offer a set of reflexive prompts that address three themes: 1) evaluating researchers’ capacity for the work; 2) distributing resources through CBPR; and 3) using narratives as a reflexive tool. This dissertation contributes to critical human-computer interaction (HCI) literature and offers recommendations that researchers can use to intentionally co-design studies that mitigate harm and advance community-defined goals