The best of both worlds? Online ties and the alternating use of social network sites in the context of migration

While an ever-growing body of research is concerned with user behavior on individual social network sites (SNSs)—mostly Facebook—studies addressing an alternating use of two or more SNS are rare. Here, we investigate the relationship between alternating SNS use and social capital in the context of migration. Alternating SNS use avoids some of the problems associated with large networks located on one site; in particular the management of different social or cultural spheres. Not only does this strategy hold potential for increased social capital, it also provides a particular incentive for migrants faced with the challenge of staying in touch with back home and managing a new social environment. Two survey studies are presented that focus on the relationship between alternating SNS use and online ties in a migrant context involving Indian nationals. Study 1 looked at migration within India, whereas Study 2 compared international with domestic SNS users. In both studies, alternating SNS use added to the prediction of online network size and accounted for differences in network size found for migrant and non-migrant users. Differences were due to the number of peripheral ties, rather than core ties. Findings suggest that alternating SNS use may constitute a compensatory strategy that helps to overcome lower levels of socializing represented through a single SNS

Testing in Translation: Conducting Usability Studies With Transnational Users

What do we mean by usability in everyday life? For us, everyday life implies the series of choices and decisions that happen each day as people are trying to get things done. These things are often taken for granted, they might seem mundane, they may be overlooked. Usability inhabits everyday life in the documents used by a Vietnamese mother of two young children, having recently moved to the United States, and navigating the healthcare system in a new country for the first time. Usability shows up again as a Chinese couple considers whether or not to move out of their father’s home in a Seattle neighborhood, but wonder how it might impact the family’s ability to afford health insurance

Software project work in an African context:myths, maps and messes

Research in HCI and CSCW has consistently shown how software design approaches are an abstract idealisation of work practices, raising questions regarding the appropriateness and applicability of what might be considered as ‘best practice’ or ‘doable practice’ in project work. Such issues have magnified the fundamental need for examining exactly how conventional (and generally Western) constructs, approaches and methods, widely adopted in the process of producing and deploying technologies, actually work. The paper reports findings from a study that seeks to understand the implications for adopting ‘well-known’ practices for framing, undertaking, and analysis distributed and collaborative software project in the context of Nigeria. Findings show that documenting and analysing what is often considered as ‘best practice’, supposedly prescriptive maps and scripts for accomplishing work, necessitates considering how they get adopted, interpreted, and extended as ‘orderly’ and occasionally ‘messy’ alternatives, offering some sensitivities for understanding the translocal features and transitional meaning of agile project work

Designing prenatal m-Health interventions through transmigrants reflection on their pregnancy ecology

This dissertation presents the findings from three participatory focus group and co-design sessions with Caribbean transmigrant women in the United States. Informed by their focus group discussions regarding their pregnancy experiences in the United States, the participants produced design ideas that reflected on physical, emotional, informational and social gap themes. The purpose of this study was to understand the challenges affecting the women’s prenatal wellbeing practices, and to conceive a set of recommendations and opportunities for mHealth technology design to assist with prenatal preventative care and management. The study uses the theoretical concept of pregnancy ecology to identify gaps in prenatal health management, and understand participants’ reflection on these gaps through design. Then, the study identifies opportunities for mHealth and HCI research to consider designing tailored interventions to the realities of the expecting immigrant mother, including the role of transnational social support, and embracing the role of entertainment in mental health during pregnancy

Revolting from Abroad: The Formation of a Lebanese Transnational Public

Nowadays social movements are driven by networks of people who resort to social media platforms to rally, self-organise and coordinate action around a shared cause, which can be referred to as the formation of publics. Due to years of political instability, conflicts, corruption, sectarianism, economic collapse and declining living conditions, in October 2019 Lebanon witnessed uprisings which transcended into a wider social movement. As the movement unfolded, Lebanese diaspora members living across the world formed their own publics in support of the Lebanese revolution that interfaced with the local Lebanon-based publics. As such, a broader transnational public emerged as a result of the coordinated online and offline efforts between diaspora actors and local actors, which had a crucial role in mitigating the aftermath of the compounded crises that hit Lebanon. In this paper, through observation and interviews with Lebanese diaspora members, we contribute a socio-technical understanding of the formation of a transnational public, with a particular focus on the underlying infrastructures that enabled its creation. Furthermore, we surface the challenges in relation to sustaining such a diaspora public and its interfacing with local publics in Lebanon. We contribute empirical insights that highlight how different technological tools and platforms, coupled with social processes built within diaspora groups and with local actors, led to the formation of such a multilayered transnational public

The "IT" Girls of Arabia: Cybercultured Bodies, Online Education, and the Networked Lives of Women at a University in Saudi Arabia

This dissertation analyzes transformation in early 21st century educational practice through the lens of information technology (IT) use at a private, women's university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Academic and extracurricular Internet use, which is enabled through ubiquitous mobile devices, students' attitudes toward information and communication technology (ICT), and the nature and purpose of their activities in social network sites (SNS) will be discussed alongside critical analysis of peer-to-peer teaching and learning in relation to knowledge production and educational practice. Richly ethnographic discussion delves into emerging global education paradigms that are (re)configuring the experience of women's higher education in Saudi Arabia and influencing women's participation in public, economic, and political spheres from which they might have been previously excluded. This dissertation also seeks to engage bigger questions about young people's intimate relationships with ICTs and the nuances of the networked spaces in which they experience life online as students and citizens coming of age as members of the digital generation

Education Technology Design and Deployment in HCI4D:A Nigerian Perspective

The decolonisation of knowledge has shown significant impact in reframing the understanding of technology as a means to the development of African communities. However, post-development narratives in HCI4D have failed to explicate how situated and grassroot alternatives can inform the innovative design of diverse perspectives and experience. As such, this thesis approaches this fundamental gap in our understanding of the practice of technology design and deployment by problematising conventional approaches for understanding, designing, and deploying educational technologies in the context of Nigeria. Through the adoption of a range of indigenous sensitivities, the thesis seeks to develop candidate approaches for analysing diverse cultural perspectives and for designing technologies that embody and extend them. Through the thematic analysis of empirical data, the thesis shows how stereotypical approaches to educational research and technology design presents postcolonial narratives of innovation in Nigeria as neo-colonial design agenda’s that needed to be appropriated in line with emerging conditions and relations in Africa. The interpretive analysis of the perspective of stakeholders in three Universities shows the relevance of developing context-specific pedagogical approach relevant to the politics of decolonialise blended education. The analysis also attempts to revive the arguments about the processes of technology diffusion and acceptance, showing the relevance and limit of traditional models for understanding the acceptance or rejection of technologies in an educational context. Using the Wittgensteinian approach of Winch and a range of Feminist positionalities, I attempted showing how a situated epistemological orientation can bring about envisioning alternative’s ways of articulating and translating transnational encounters and exchange of technological innovation. The sensitization and evaluation of the mundane practice of three software development firm shows the mythology of design innovation in/from Africa. This led to the consideration of how reframing the basic assumption about creativity from Africa could present African culture of innovation not merely as a passive space for the transfer and appropriation of technology but as a transitional space where innovate practices get regenerated and redistributed across already polarised boundaries of innovation. Finally, the thesis argues for an ‘ontological’ framing of designing localised and indigenous technologies. Through critical reflection on a range of issues associated with post-colonialism and post-development, I examine the possibilities that various historical tropes might offer to the reinvention of the African perspective on innovation. This leads to the consideration of how engaging in critical discussions about the future dimensions of African HCI can allow for grappling with the effect of the coloniality of being, power and knowledge. Developing on the ideas of futuring as a way of dealing with the complexities of the present – in this case the coloniality of the imagination - the thesis ends by discussing three tactical propositions for ‘remembering’ future identities of African innovation where the values of autonomy are known and acted upon

The making of computer scientists: rendering technical knowledge, gender, and entrepreneurialism in Singapore

This dissertation explores the making of computer scientists in Singapore. I explore how transnational computer science epistemologies and Singaporean state policies work to render the world into technical problems that computer scientists can manipulate and solve. Computer science knowledge and practice is thereby presented as mobile, while masking the colonization of places like Singapore by specifically rendered and gendered American computer science. I also map out the diffractive effects of these transnationally mobile renderings. This research is based on participant observation and interviews centring on an undergraduate computer science program in Singapore. Singaporean and technology media, Singaporean government policies, and university and computer science curricula are also analyzed. I first show how students learn to model and render “reality” into technical frames, creating naturalized computing “worlds,” but ones wherein magic is real and computer scientists are the magicians. Heteronormative binary renderings of gender are (re)produced within these worlds through narratives about algorithms and computing “problems” that constitute a transnational, but US-centric, tradition and that govern the possible ways for students and professors to think about and do computer science. I also show how students themselves are “rendered technical” and their lives and identities “torqued” as they are summoned to inhabit gender norms and hegemonic values of neoliberal competition, passion, and entrepreneurialism. In particular, the performance of passion by certain students works to create a gendered benchmark against which all students come to measure themselves, but which often turns to promoting over-work and exploitation in the name of career development and innovation. Moreover, while some students perform situationally dependent and fluid gender identities, I argue that the predominance of research reducing gender to the question of “women in” computing limits the possibilities both for research on and enactments of gender in computer science and works both to mask and reproduce gender inequalities. Yet, I also show how – in the space produced through conflicting intra-actions of different norms and values – students’ performances of self complicate binary renderings of gender and disrupt the hegemonic status of neoliberal passion and entrepreneurialism, suggesting new possibilities for becoming/being a “good” computer scientist