CARE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HACKER IDENTITIES, COMMUNITIES, AND SOCIETY

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Informatics and Computing, 2016Recent scholarship in Human-Computer Interaction, science and technology studies, and design research has focused on hacker communities as sites of innovation and entrepreneurship, novel forms of education, and the democratization of technological production. However, hacking practices are more than new technical practices; they are also political, value-laden, and ideological practices. The significances of these underlying commitments is less understood not only in academic research, but also within the communities themselves, which tend to profess a libertarian ethos often articulated as apolitical. In this dissertation, I investigate how the process of developing a hacker identity within a hacker community is influenced not only by technical skill, but also by care and community maintenance practices. By studying their projects, community interactions, and social policies, I explore how the broader hackerspace movement unintentionally but systematically excludes broader participation. I leverage several qualitative methods to create a well-rounded account of the hacker identity development process, including: an interview study of hackers’ projects; a 19-month ethnography in a hackerspace; and an analysis of the most-discussed issues on the international hackerspaces.org Discuss listserv. I analyzed these data through a lens informed by care ethics, foregrounding the interdependent, nurturing relationships hackers develop, and explicating the duties to care that are felt and acted on—but rarely discussed—in these spaces. I present results suggesting that developing a hacker identity can be a vulnerable process, and is both supported and made difficult by the social environment in these communities. While critical to a hackerspace’s success, care and maintenance practices are often overshadowed by rhetoric of self-empowerment and independence. As a result, it becomes difficult for women and minorities to join and fit in, despite members’ best intentions. These results have implications for research on hackerspaces, for hackerspaces themselves, and for analyses of care in such communities

Knowledge Production and Social Roles in an Online Community of Emerging Occupation: A Study of User Experience Practitioners on Reddit

New occupations are emerging that have high job demand in the market, but lack a coherent body of disciplinary knowledge. For example, user experience (UX) design is an emerging occupation that has not been adequately supported by the traditional educational system. For learners beginning their undergraduate education, there is no concrete path to follow to become a UX professional, due to few UX-focused undergraduate academic programs. Online communities of practices have been recognized as important learning venues, even while institutions of formal education often lag behind in structuring knowledge production and distribution. However, little is known about how knowledge is generated and diffused in online communities in the context of emerging occupations with volatile knowledge boundaries. In this paper, we analyze knowledge production in relation to social roles in an online UX community. We show that knowledge production is highly distributed, involving the participation of community members of varied levels of experience. We discuss how online communities support the development of the UX occupation

Editorial: Ethics, Values, and Designer Responsibility

As we rely upon increasingly complex sociotechnical systems to support ourselves and, by extension, the structures of society, it becomes yet more important to consider how ethics and values intertwine in design activity. Numerous methods that address issues related to ethics and value-centeredness in design activity exist, but it is unclear what role the design research and practice communities should play in shaping the future of these design approaches. Importantly, how might researchers and practitioners become more aware of the normative assumptions that underlie both their design activity and the design artifacts that result

Frames for Justice Consciousness

We describe how UX design students become aware of citizen-engaged design work, and indicate the extent to which a progression toward social justice-focused design work might be possible in a single project cycle. Our study site is a sophomore-level UX design studio at a large Midwestern US university—part of a five-semester sequence in which students engage in a range of projects that address competence in user research, prototyping, and evaluation. The project cycle we focus on directly challenges the apolitical framing in most foundational UX methods literature, explicitly asking students to engage with issues of power disparities. We analyzed three years of digital civics-focused project work (2018 n=6 groups; 2019 n=7; 2020 n=8) undertaken by students in groups of five over a seven-week period, representing the work of 100 students over three years of this course offering. We analyzed the resulting data that supported the development of the Frames for Justice Consciousness model, mapping a range of trajectories of student engagement with social justice-focused design philosophies, highlighting cases where students were able to successfully “pivot” or re-frame the design situation in ways that were consistent with the digital civics philosophy of engagement, addressing goals of participation and advocacy, as well as cases where students tended to repeat common solutionist framings of work within an “apolitical” or product-focused human-centered philosophy. The model facilitates instructor reflection on differing student trajectories that may inform changes to the types of critique given or instructional scaffolds provided in social justice-informed design work

#CHIversity: Implications for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Campaigns

In this alt.chi paper, we reflect on #CHIversity a grassroots campaign highlighting feminist issues related to diversity and inclusion at CHI2017, and in HCI more widely. #CHIversity was operationalised through a number of activities including: collaborative cross-stitch and 'zine' making events; the development of a 'Feminist CHI Programme'; and the use of a Twitter hashtag #CHIversity. These events granted insight into how diversity discourses are approached within the CHI community. From these recognitions we provide examples of how diversity and inclusion can be promoted at future SIGCHI events. These include fostering connections between attendees, discussing 'polarizing' research in a conservative political climate, and encouraging contributions to the growing body of HCI literature addressing feminisms and related subjects. Finally, we suggest how these approaches and benefits can translate to HCI events extending beyond CHI, where exclusion may routinely go undetected

Making community : the wider role of makerspaces in public life

Makerspaces—public workshops where makers can share tools and knowledge—are a growing resource for amateurs and professionals alike. While the role of makerspaces in innovation and peer learning is widely discussed, we attempt to look at the wider roles that makerspaces play in public life. Through site visits and interviews at makerspaces and similar facilities across the UK, we have identified additional roles that these spaces play: as social spaces, in supporting wellbeing, by serving the needs of the communities they are located in and by reaching out to excluded groups. Based on these findings, we suggest implications and future directions for both makerspace organisers and community researchers

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

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

Genomic reconstruction of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in England.

The evolution of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus leads to new variants that warrant timely epidemiological characterization. Here we use the dense genomic surveillance data generated by the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium to reconstruct the dynamics of 71 different lineages in each of 315 English local authorities between September 2020 and June 2021. This analysis reveals a series of subepidemics that peaked in early autumn 2020, followed by a jump in transmissibility of the B.1.1.7/Alpha lineage. The Alpha variant grew when other lineages declined during the second national lockdown and regionally tiered restrictions between November and December 2020. A third more stringent national lockdown suppressed the Alpha variant and eliminated nearly all other lineages in early 2021. Yet a series of variants (most of which contained the spike E484K mutation) defied these trends and persisted at moderately increasing proportions. However, by accounting for sustained introductions, we found that the transmissibility of these variants is unlikely to have exceeded the transmissibility of the Alpha variant. Finally, B.1.617.2/Delta was repeatedly introduced in England and grew rapidly in early summer 2021, constituting approximately 98% of sampled SARS-CoV-2 genomes on 26 June 2021