The future of care work: towards a radical politics of care in CSCW research and practice

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) have long studied how technology can support material and relational aspects of care work, typically in clinical healthcare settings. More recently, we see increasing recognition of care work such as informal healthcare provision, child and elderly care, organizing and advocacy, domestic work, and service work. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored long-present tensions between the deep necessity and simultaneous devaluation of our care infrastructures. This highlights the need to attend to the broader social, political, and economic systems that shape care work and the emerging technologies being used in care work. This leads us to ask several critical questions: What counts as care work and why? How is care work (de)valued, (un)supported, or coerced under capitalism and to what end? What narratives drive the push for technology in care work and whom does it benefit? How does care work resist or build resilience against and within oppressive systems? And how can we as researchers advocate for and with care and caregivers? In this one-day workshop, we will bring together researchers from academia, industry, and community-based organizations to reflect on these questions and extend conversations on the future of technology for care work

Mobile Health and the Social Organization of Care in the Global South: Beyond Technological Fixes

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2022The notion of a global “care crisis” has recently loomed large in public consciousness, drawing attention to the longstanding problem of how our care infrastructures are increasingly overburdened and unsupported. The chronic underinvestment in paidand unpaid healthcare work has been made especially clear in light of the shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to this crisis, transnational agencies, national governments, hospitals, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have sought to leverage increasing smartphone and mobile internet use globally to create “technological fixes” that restructure work, time, and space with the aim of meeting care needs with limited resources—this in contrast to investments that could increase resources but ultimately compromise on capitalistic aims of profit and efficiency. In this dissertation, I examine multiple types of fixes that have gotten significant traction in global health, including digital payments, personal chat apps, and semi-automated chatbots, focusing on contexts within India and Kenya. I describe care workers’ and health organizations’ experiences with these technologies and how they integrate with larger health infrastructures. Drawing on feminist social reproduction theory, I tease out ways that these technologies meet real and urgent care needs, while also belying the mere redistribution, short-term valuation, and narrowing of care work that takes place by and through technological fixes (often most affecting those with the least power in a given context). Taking this dilemma seriously, I argue for the responsibility of researchers and practitioners to combat dominant narratives of technological fixes for the care crisis, even as we seek to support care work through design. Thus, this work considers how we might center futures of care work in which societies make concrete investments in care workers and care infrastructures, not for efficiency’s sake but for the needs and aspirations of care workers and the sustainability of our care infrastructures

Virtual Browsing: The Georgia Tech Library in the Digital Age

White paper exploring virtual browsing in the digital age. Authored by undergraduate students on the Georgia Tech Library undergraduate advisory board

Human-Computer Interaction and the Future ofWork

Advances in computing technology, changing policies, and slow crises are rapidly changing the way we work. Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a critical aspect of these trends, to understand how workers contend with emerging technologies and how design might support workers and their values and aspirations amidst technological change. This SIG invites HCI researchers across diverse domains to reflect on the range of approaches to future of work research, recognize connections and gaps, and consider how HCI can support workers and their wellbeing in the future.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Human-Centred Artificial Intelligenc

Human-computer interaction and the future of work

Advances in computing technology, changing policies, and slow crises are rapidly changing the way we work. Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a critical aspect of these trends, to understand how workers contend with emerging technologies and how design might support workers and their values and aspirations amidst technological change. This SIG invites HCI researchers across diverse domains to reflect on the range of approaches to future of work research, recognize connections and gaps, and consider how HCI can support workers and their wellbeing in the future.</p