Sculpting reality from our dreams: Prefigurative design for civic engagement

At their core, organizing and activist work are about envisioning and working towards an alternative, more just political future. Various digital tools are used to support activist work, however these tools engage with values that are at odds with activist practices: where many activists do work in the service of social justice and equity, the digital tools they use are often corporate made, and thus support the status quo, i.e. profit generation, cis-heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, oppression. The ideals underlying activists’ equitable visions—of a more accessible and just future—drive their practices. This intentional alignment falls under the purview of prefigurative politics, where political work “express[es] the political ‘ends’ of their actions through their ‘means.’” [53] If activists envision a more democratic future, they adopt more equitable practices in the present in anticipation of building a more equitable future. This dissertation explores the role of digital tools to contribute to—to prefigure—alternative, more radical political values. My work uses design research and anarchist literature to explore the opportunities that ICTs offer in support of radically progressive political organizing. This work offers prefigurative design as an approach for designers and practitioners who work with communities in service of progressive political change. Prefigurative design is an orientation within HCI design and research that encourages critical reflection of research and design practices to better align design artifacts and processes with anarchist goals of anti-oppression and collective liberation, ultimately building counter-structures to replace existing institutions complicit in violence and oppression.Ph.D

"This is shared work": negotiating boundaries in a social service intermediary organization

This article discusses the results from our fieldwork at a social service intermediary organization working to reform criminal justice institutions in a large city in the American South. Our findings focus on organizational staff's relationships with information and communication technologies (ICTs), both in the course of their daily work of delivering care work to vulnerable participants, as well as the project's broader political goals to reduce recidivism and repair community relationships with local police. The group needed to distinguish and negotiate the various -and often competing- needs and commitments of the civic actors involved. As on-site researchers, we were asked to design and deploy digital tools to support the organization in exchange for conducting research on organizational uses of technology. This work draws from our time with the group to ask: how might community-based researchers revisit and realign our research methods to better respond to the changing needs and practices of a research site? Our observations identified three recurring technological concerns expressed by staff that pointed to competing agendas and needs within the organization, specifically across different levels of scale: operational, proximal, and temporal. We then discuss these patterns around broader organizational concerns to reflect on how they impacted our own research methods and commitments. Finally, we reflect on the limitations of participatory methods in issue-oriented organizations that do progressive work across multiple scales and agendas

Hyperstructures in Chemical Hyperstructures of Redox Reactions with Three and Four Oxidation States

Hyperstructures find numerous applications across various disciplines. One notable application is in chemistry, particularly in the context of chemical reactions. In 2014, Davvaz introduced the concept of bi-hyperstructures, but their application specifically in chemical reactions, has yet to be thoroughly explored in previous studies. Thus, the primary aim of this paper is to examine and analyze the different types of bi-hyperstructures present within chemical hyperstructures. The scope of this study focuses on two types of chemical hyperstructures: redox reactions and reactions in electrochemical cells. Within these chemical hyperstructures, we investigate the possibility of bi-hyperstructures among bi-semihypergroups, bi-hypergroups, bi-H_v-semigroups, and bi-H_v-groups. Next, some properties of bi-hyperstructures related to hyperstructures are also investigate

Vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan is growing: here’s how it can be tackled

Since the start of the pandemic, Pakistanis have become less likely to say they will accept a COVID vaccine. Saher Asad (Lahore University of Management Sciences), Javaeria Qureshi (University of Illinois at Chicago), Mariam Raheem (Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan – CERP), Taimur Shah (CERP), and Basit Zafar (University of Michigan) looks at the findings of a new survey into vaccine hesitancy and suggests how the government could overcome it

Exploring Social Justice, Design,and HCI

The aim of this one-day workshop is to share existing research, discuss common practices, and to develop new strategies and tools for designing for social justice in HCI. This workshop will bring together a set of HCI scholars, designers, and community members to discuss social justice perspectives on interaction design and technology. We will explore theoretical and methodological approaches in and around HCI that can help us generatively consider issues of power, privilege, and access in their complexity. We will discuss the challenges associated with taking a justice approach in HCI, looking toward existing practices we find both productive and problematic. This workshop will bridge current gaps in research and practice by developing concrete strategies for both designing and evaluating social change oriented work in HCI, where agendas are made clear and researchers are held accountable for the outcomes of their work by members of their field site and the research community

A retrospective review on antibiotic use in acute watery diarrhea in children in a tertiary care hospital of Karachi, Pakistan

Introduction: Responsible for at least one in nine pediatric deaths, diarrheal diseases are the leading, global cause of death. Further abetted by improper antibiotic use in a hospital setting, children with acute watery diarrhea can see prolonged hospital stays, and unwanted adverse effects such as antibiotic resistance. Hence, this study is aimed to identify the association between antibiotic usage for the treatment of acute watery diarrhea in children, and the impact this line of management has on the duration of their hospital stay.Methods: A retrospective review was conducted at the department of Pediatric of Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) in Karachi. A total of 305 records of children aged 6 months to 5 years who were admitted with a diagnosis of acute watery diarrhea from June 2017 -December 2018 was screened, of which 175 fulfilled the eligibility criteria. A predesigned questionnaire was used to collect demographic information, comorbidities, and clinical features, severity of dehydration, clinical examination, treatment received, and laboratory investigations. The primary outcome of this study was the length of hospital stay measured against the number of hours a child stayed in hospital for treatment of acute watery diarrhea. The statistical analysis was carried out using STATA version 14 to reach conclusive results.Results: 175 patients presented with acute watery diarrhea, out of which 106 (60.6%) did not receive antibiotics. The median (IQR) age of the group that did not receive antibiotics was 12.0 (12.0) months compared to 15.0 (12.0) months for the group that did receive antibiotics. In both groups, there were more males than females, less than 15% of the patients were severely malnourished (WHZ score -3SD) and less than 10% of the patients were severely dehydrated. The median (IQR) length of hospital stay (hours) was 32.0 (19.0) respectively for the group that did not receive antibiotic and 41.0 (32.0) for the group that did receive antibiotic therapy. The expected length of hospital stay for the group that received antibiotic therapy was 0.22 hours higher than the group that did not. Finally, as compared to females, hospital stay for males was longer by 0.25 hours.Conclusion: In conclusion, antibiotic use was associated with a prolonged hospital stay in children with acute watery diarrhea as compared to children who did not receive antibiotics. Large scale robust prospective studies are needed to establish this association using this observational data

Academic Accomplices: Practical Strategies for Research Justice

This workshop brings together folks currently or interested in becoming academic accomplices, or scholars committed to leveraging resources and power to support the justice work of their community collaborators. Academic accomplices are necessary for research justice-research that materially challenges inequity-and owe it to community partners to challenge underlying oppressive structure and practices as perpetuated through academic research. The goal of this workshop is to discuss concrete strategies for challenging oppression through research methodologies, physical or institutional resources, and/or pedagogy. This workshop will generate practical strategies for research justice for DIS and HCI scholars

Bottom-Up Organizing with Tools from On High: Understanding the Data Practices of Labor Organizers

This paper provides insight into the use of data tools in the American labor movement by analyzing the practices of staff employed by unions to organize alongside union members. We interviewed 23 field-level staff organizers about how they use data tools to evaluate membership. We find that organizers work around and outside of these tools to develop access to data for union members and calibrate data representations to meet local needs. Organizers mediate between local and central versions of the data, and draw on their contextual knowledge to challenge campaign strategy. We argue that networked data tools can compound field organizers' lack of discretion, making it more difficult for unions to assess and act on the will of union membership. We show how the use of networked data tools can lead to less accurate data, and discuss how bottom-up approaches to data gathering can support more accurate membership assessments

Fourth-wave HCI meets the 21st century manifesto:Creative subversion in the 'CHI-verse'

We take up Bødker’s challenge to ‘identify’ a fourth wave HCI, building on the work of Blevis et al. and others to shore up a new vision that places ‘politics and values and ethics’ at the forefront without abandoning the strengths of previous waves. We insist that a fourth wave must push harder, beyond measured criticism for actual (e.g. institutional) change. We present two studies performed at CHI’19, where we used our MANIFESTO! game to: 1) take the temperature of colleagues on adopting an activist stance, 2) test manifesto writing as a key activity in pushing HCI forward into the fourth wave, and 3) test our game for subsequent iterations, and as a probe for inspiring new digital tools. With the enthusiastic response received to gameplay, facilitated in part through a novel method using tableau vivant, we argue for taking political activism from the margins into mainstream HCI