Publications

Over the past several decades, Cubans have developed multiple collective strategies to navigate extended periods of constraint and precarity, from resource shortages to a global pandemic. With the increasing presence of internet technologies in Havana, digital media has become entangled in these processes, resulting in overlapping internet ecosystems supported by human relationships. This article explores the social nature of internet engagements in Havana through the lens of relational infrastructure—the people, relationships, and social practices that Cubans rely on to sustain overlapping internet ecosystems as they adapt and endure social, economic, and political pressures. Drawing on ethnographic data, I describe how people in Havana achieve their goals by stitching together the digital, the physical, and the social. Looking at social engagements through this lens reveals power dynamics and structural inequalities that challenge assumptions regarding the positive impact of internet technologies.

Accuracy and precision are central values in the AI communities and the technology sector. This paper provides empirical evidence on the construction and organizational management of technical accuracy, demonstrating how technology companies’ preoccupation with such values leads to harm. Drawing on nine months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in China, we document how AI trainers’ everyday work practices, challenges, and harms stem from clients’ demands for high levels of technical accuracy. We introduce the concept of precision labor to unpack the labor dimension of constructing and performing accuracy in AI training. This concept highlights the hidden and excessive labor required to reconcile the ambiguity and uncertainty involved in this process. We argue that precision labor offers a new lens to illuminate three critical aspects of AI training: 1) the negative health and financial impacts of hidden and excessive labor on AI workers; 2) emerging harms, including workers’ subordinate roles to machines and financial precarity; and 3) a conceptual contribution to contexts beyond AI training. This contribution re-centers arbitrariness in technical production, highlights the excessive demands of precision labor, and examines the legitimization of labor and harm. Our study also contributes to existing scholarship on the prevailing values and invisible labor in AI production, underscoring accuracy as performative rather than self-evident and unambiguous. A precision labor lens challenges the legitimacy and sustainability of relentlessly pursuing technical accuracy, raising new questions about its consequences and ethical implications. We conclude by proposing recommendations and alternative approaches to enhance worker agency and well-being.

Over the past decade, community collaborations have come into focus within the HCI and CSCW fields. Largely the result of increased concern for social and contextual dimensions of practice, these partnerships facilitate a pathway for researchers and practitioners to foreground the nuances of technology as it takes place in the real world. How these collaborations are engaged, what values mediate them, and how practices might vary across geographies remain active research questions. In this paper, we contribute by zooming into the experience of four HCI and CSCW researchers engaging in community collaborations in Latin America (LATAM). Through a collaborative autoethnography (CAE), we identify three main value tensions impacting HCI practices and methods in research collaborations with LATAM communities: camaraderie vs. cautiousness, informality vs. formality and hopefulness vs. transparency. Building on our findings, we provide three recommendations for researchers interested in engaging in community-based research in similar contexts.

This forum focuses on the conditions and futures of the labor underpinning technology production and maintenance. We welcome standalone articles as well as interviews and conversations about all tech labor within the global supply chain of digital technologies.
-Seyram Avle and Sarah Fox, Editors

Mainstream platforms’ content moderation systems typically employ generalized “one-size-fits-all” approaches, intended to serve both general and marginalized users. Thus, transgender people must often create their own technologies and moderation systems to meet their specific needs. In our interview study of transgender technology creators (n=115), we found that creators face issues of transphobic abuse and disproportionate content moderation. Trans tech creators address these issues by carefully moderating and vetting their userbases, centering trans contexts in content moderation systems, and employing collective governance and community models. Based on these findings, we argue that trans tech creators’ approaches to moderation offer important insights into how to better design for trans users, and ultimately, marginalized users in the larger platform ecology. We introduce the concept of trans-centered moderation – content moderation that reviews and successfully vets transphobic users, appoints trans moderators to effectively moderate trans contexts, considers the limitations and constraints of technology for addressing social challenges, and employs collective governance and community models. Trans-centered moderation can help to improve platform design for trans users while reducing the harm faced by trans people and marginalized users more broadly.

Many theorists of the information economy have argued that digitization has resulted in a “speeding up” of our experience of time (i.e. Gleick, 1999). This work contends that for many, especially those with less power, the techno-utopian vision characterized by datafication and Artificial Intelligence (AI) instead produces a state of prolonged waiting. Drawing from two long-term ethnographic studies examining the production and implementation phases of data-driven technologies in China and U.S., we demonstrate how the “long-standing but mistaken belief, hegemonic in Silicon Valley, that automation will deliver us more time” (Wajcman, 2019) belies the highly stratified temporal impacts of automation, datafication, and AI. Specifically, this work uses AI training and the homeless services system as case studies to reveal the politics of waiting; despite the promise of data-driven technologies, pervasive waiting serves as evidence of an enduring residue—an unequal power structure. Our findings also suggest that the technologies which mediated the experience of waiting in the first, more immediate sense, also impacted how people conceptualize the future.

Accuracy and precision are among the central values in the ML communities and tech industry. What does it take to achieve a high level of technical accuracy? What are the harms resulting from technology companies’ obsession with technical accuracy and precision, and who incurs the greatest burdens? This paper explores accuracy in the context of AI training in China. Drawing on 9-month multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, we document workers’ everyday working practices and challenges and harms under the guise of achieving extreme levels of technical precision demanded by the clients and ML practitioners. We introduce the notion of precision labor, referring to the hidden work involved in erasing the messy, ambiguous, and uncertain aspects of technology production, all in the pursuit of presenting technology as objective, truthful, and high-quality. This notion provides a lens to understand the disproportionate impact of unnecessary and unrecognized labor on digital labor communities within AI production and the emerging harms on them, such as financial precarity and machine subordination. It joins existing work on the prevailing values in ML communities, questions the legitimacy and sustainability of the pursuit of performative accuracy, and calls for enhanced reflexivity and timely intervention.

Machine intelligence relies on Al (artificial intelligence) trainers, workers who perform labor such as data annotation and algorithm optimization. However, the promise of Al does not often benefit workers equally; instead, it puts them in precarious situations, such as low wages and subordination to machines. My dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach to draw attention to these pressing issues by exploring the sociotechnical, cultural, and economic dimensions of this emergent technology-mediated labor in the context of large data infrastructures. My arguments and proposed concepts (e.g., sociotechnical/algorithmic mobility) respond directly to the under-theorization of mobility research and ecologically unequal exchange theory in HCI. In my dissertation, I argue that the Al trainers, who often work in developing regions of western China, are shouldering the burdens of (1) alleviating China’s poverty through Al for development programs, (2) sustaining Eastern China’s platform economy as key participants in large-scale data infrastructure projects, and (3) promoting global Al advancement by providing disembodied labor on products such as high-quality training datasets through repetitive and low-paying work. Using multi-sited ethnography and participatory design methods, my dissertation describes the experiences of under-resourced and under-studied Al trainer communities and the effects of AI on them. It will also offer context-sensitive design recommendations for supporting emergent technology-mediated labor and policy interventions for ethical and sustainable Al training practices.

In August 2020, the U.S. President issued an executive order to ban the Chinese-based social platform WeChat, alleging that WeChat posed a national security risk. WeChat is a vital application for Chinese diasporic communities in the United States. The ban’s status was uncertain for several months before it was temporarily halted and later revoked in 2021. Through interviews with 15 WeChat users and online participant observation, this study examines the anticipated impacts of the potential WeChat ban and participants’ reactions. We find that participants described negative consequences of the potential ban, including adverse network and economic effects and disruption of community-building efforts. We also find that many participants considered WeChat to be critical infrastructure in the United States, as it has become an indispensable part of their daily lives. To frame participants’ experiences, we introduce the concept of infrastructural migration-the process of users relocating to another digital media service that embodies the properties and functions of infrastructure or moving to an assemblage of different applications that meet their infrastructural needs separately. We then discuss implications for designing for infrastructural migration and future considerations for HCI research with diasporic communities.

In order to sustain everyday life in India during pandemic induced lockdowns, home service gig platforms materialized to provide essential services for urban society. As unemployment worsened, these gig platforms also emerged as key sources of paid work for gig workers, with some platforms promising an unusual degree of health and financial support for their gig workforce. Through semi-structured interviews, we examine how women beauty workers engaged with the infrastructural promise extended by home service gig platforms during the pandemic. While gig platforms promoted the potential of stable income and social security in the context of the Global South, we investigate the reality behind this image. We find that various breakdowns, from miscommunication around localized travel restrictions to limited platform helpline access, introduces day-to-day unpredictability for gig workers, hindering access to paid work as well as other platform extended benefits. We suggest that home service gig platforms actually serve as ‘faux infrastructure,’ in which the privatized logics work to enclose public value, while pushing the burden of access onto gig workers who must perform additional, often unpaid labors, in order to fill last-mile service gaps.

Venezuela is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. In addition to food and medicinal shortages, violent crime has risen dramatically since 2014, spurring a mass exodus from the country. In order to cope with persistent material, informational, and digital infrastructural breakdowns that their friends and family in Venezuela are facing, members of the Venezuelan diaspora have turned to social media platforms to support people they left behind. Through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, I uncover the ways participants form a critical infrastructure for people in Venezuela. I describe participants’ actions as infrastructural care — infrastructural action as a form of caring for others at a distance through the ongoing management of resources, relationships, and infrastructures. Infrastructural care consists of relational, negotiated, and dialectic actions that provide critical support while also generating ongoing tensions as participants are geographically separated from the crisis and, through their involvement, are forced to confront their own experiences of trauma. In addition to proposing the lens of infrastructural care, this paper contributes to our understandings of the ways people cope with an ongoing humanitarian crisis at a distance and how social media platforms fit in with wider ecologies of efforts.

From tweeting, to blogging, to engagement with the media, scholars in CSCW engage in a variety of forms of public scholarship. Public scholarship can result in positive outcomes, such as community engagement, accessible research, and self-promotion. Further, public scholarship can support ethical research as a way to (1) reconnect with participants after data collection; and (2) increase the societal benefit of the research. However, despite these benefits there are also challenges and risks associated with engaging in public scholarship, particularly for early career researchers and those who are marginalized. This workshop will bring together those who already engage or are interested in this practice to discuss how to integrate public scholarship in our work, identify best practices for this type of work in the context of CSCW, including the ethical implications of outreach, and develop strategies to effectively support those most affected by the potential risks.

We propose a mixed-methods approach to understanding the human infrastructure underlying StreetNet (SNET), a distributed, community-run intranet that serves as the primary ‘Internet’ in Havana, Cuba. We bridge ethnographic studies and the study of social networks and organizations to understand the way that power is embedded in the structure of Havana’s SNET. By quantitatively and qualitatively unpacking the human infrastructure of SNET, this work reveals how distributed infrastructure necessarily embeds the structural aspects of inequality distributed within that infrastructure. While traditional technical measurements of networks reflect the social, organizational, spatial, and technical constraints that shape the resulting network, ethnographies can help uncover the texture and role of these hidden supporting relationships. By merging these perspectives, this work contributes to our understanding of network roles in growing and maintaining distributed infrastructures, revealing new approaches to understanding larger, more complex Internet-human infrastructures—including the Internet and the WWW.

In Cuba, where internet access is severely constrained, technology enthusiasts have built StreetNet (SNET), a community network (CN) that has grown organically, reaching tens of thousands of households across Havana. Through fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2017, we investigate participants’ strategies as they engage with a network where the material elements—cables, switches, nanos, and servers—are regularly breaking down. Drawing on maintenance and care (M&C) scholarship, we present an in-depth investigation of the management and anticipation of breakdowns in SNET, foregrounding the deeply relational nature of repair work, collective efforts required for SNET’s M&C, and the values and motivations underpinning these practices. Our paper contributes a unique perspective on how CNs are run locally and organically, outlining considerations for how interventions along these lines might be more suitably designed. We also complicate perspectives of innovation through a discussion of cultural ideologies and tensions underpinning M&C practices.

This position paper draws on my work with StreetNet (SNET), a citizen-led intranet in Havana, Cuba. In Cuba’s capital city of Havana, access to the world wide web (WWW) is severely restricted by high costs, limited access points, and slow speeds [8, 10]. In response to their exclusion from the WWW,technology enthusiasts have built SNET, a community network (CN) that serves as an alternative to the WWW for thousands of people in Havana. Based on fieldwork trips throughout 2015-2017, I describe experiences of power and privilege that surfaced during data collection and the ways in which they are embedded within wider political, technical, and social structures. By highlighting elements of power acting upon as well as within SNET, I conclude with open questions that I hope to explore more deeply in the Design and the Politics of Collaboration workshop.

In Havana, technology enthusiasts have designed StreetNet, a community network that serves as an alternative to the worldwide web. This article describes the deeply relational practices that go toward the maintenance of StreetNet, highlighting elements of struggle that accompany innovative strategies that result from necessity.

Globally, nearly four billion people do not have access to the world wide web (WWW), and efforts to expand WWW access are growing rapidly. Despite these initiatives, local and international barriers along political, economic, and social dimensions continue to limit meaningful Internet engagements for individuals in politically and resource-constrained contexts. I focus on the case of Havana, Cuba, where, until recently, WWW access was limited to 5 % of the population. Based on fieldwork and qualitative research conducted throughout 2014-2018, this dissertation provides an empirical study of how increasing access to the WWW interoperates with locally-configured information networks to form a “Cuban Internet.’’ Against the backdrop of international media narratives that frame Cuba as an “isolated” country, I investigate the emergence of grassroots information networks for knowledge-sharing through content sold on USB thumb drives (“El Paquete”) and an intranet custom-designed by citizens (“StreetNet”). I also explore the introduction of government-sponsored WWW access initiatives through select workplaces and public WiFi hotspots. In Havana, the imagined potentials of the WWW collide with the realities of scarcity and barriers to access, as people collaboratively configure an Internet sustained by a human infrastructure. Incorporating the Cuban ethos of resolver (creative problem-solving amidst scarcity), I uncover the collective enterprises and negotiations that go towards the production of the Internet in Havana, thereby challenging established notions of what an (or the) Internet “should” look like in more and less connected contexts.

This consolidation of 18 stories from students and researchers of human-centered computing (HCC) represent some of the diverse shades of feminism that are present in our field. These stories, our stories, reflect how we see the world and why, also articulating the change we wish to bring.

The HCI Across Borders (HCIxB) community has been growing in recent years, thanks in particular to the Development Consortium at CHI 2016 and the HCIxB Symposia at CHI 2017 and 2018. This year, we propose an HCIxB symposium that continues to build scholarship potential of early career HCIxB researchers, strengthening ties between more and less experienced members of the community. We especially invite scholarship with a focus on intersections, examining and/or addressing multiple forms of marginalization (e.g. race, gender, class, among others).

There is a growing community within CSCW that examines issues of equity and inclusion in internet and social media use. With researchers focused on global development, social justice, accessibility, and more, we contend that there are issues of equity and inclusion impacting the research subjects located on the “margins” of digital existence, the research that examines these issues, and the researchers engaged in this research. The goal of our workshop is to brainstorm and discuss how we might demarginalize those researched, this research, and these researchers within CSCW scholarship. For this, we build on the concepts of intersectionality and solidarity from feminist scholarship, aiming to recognize the differences and similarities across disparate contexts and to uncover synergistic research trajectories and objectives. Our workshop will be led by academic and industry researchers pursuing CSCW, Social Computing, and Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) research focused on intersectionality, equity, and inclusion. We invite a broad range of participants from research and practice interested in learning about or deepening their understanding of these topics. Our workshop will foster solidarity across diverse subsections of the CSCW community and beyond.

We contribute a case study of El Paquete Semanal or “The Weekly Package”—the pervasive, offline internet in Cuba. We conducted a qualitative inquiry of El Paquete through extensive fieldwork—interviews and observations—in Havana, Cuba. Our findings highlight the human infrastructure that supports this offline internet, rendered visible through the lens of articulation work. By offering an in-depth perspective into these workings of El Paquete, we aim to challenge established notions of what an (or the) internet “should” look like in more and less “developed” contexts. We highlight how El Paquete is a non-standardized and non neutral internet, but still humancentered. We also offer an enriched understanding of how an entirely offline internet can provide expansive information access to support leisure and livelihood, additionally serving as a locally relevant platform that affords local participation.

Drawing on the fields of HCI, ICTD, and Social Computing, my research explores how increasing internet access influences the lives of intended users and how we might leverage local information infrastructures to design more effective services for users in emerging markets. Through ethnographic research in Havana, my dissertation unpacks the ways individuals actively and creatively stitch together multiple information infrastructures to create their own versions of the “internet.” Using Cuba as a case study, my work explores how future internet access initiatives might successfully map onto local information infrastructures to provide meaningful, sustainable engagement with the internet among under-connected communities in resource-constrained parts of the world.

Since 2014, Venezuela has experienced severe economic crisis, including scarcity of basic necessities such as food and medicine. This has resulted in over-priced goods, scams, and other forms of economic abuse. We present an investigation of Venezuelans’ efforts to form an alternative, Solidarity Economy (SE) through Facebook Groups. In these groups, individuals can barter for items at fair prices. We highlight group practices and design features of Facebook Groups which support solidarity or anti-solidarity behaviors. We conclude by leveraging design principles for online communities presented by Kollock to present strategies to design more effective SEs in environments of low trust.

Since March 2015, the public squares of Havana have been transformed from places where people stroll and children play to places where crowds gather to try to connect to the internet at all hours of the day and night. We present a field investigation of public WiFi hotspots in Havana, Cuba, and examine the possibilities of internet access these limited and expensive hotspots present to individuals, many of who are experiencing the internet for the first time. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2015-2016, we underscore the reconfigurations that have resulted from this access, as evolving internet users reconfigure their interactions with place, time, and individuals in their efforts to locate the internet. We also discuss the implications our findings have for the design of internet access interventions in Cuba and in other low-resource environments across the world, as well as the broader implications for social computing across diverse geographies.

Internet and social media use by individuals in developed countries is an extensively researched phenomenon, particularly in the fields of CSCW and HCI. However, with the growing number of social media adopters in developing countries, as well as the diversity of efforts to bring more individuals online, the need for more work in this area is evident. In this paper, we explore current research at the intersection of these fields, which we refer to as “Social Computing & Development” (SC&D). We highlight suggested areas where both fields might mutually inform each other in an effort to encourage additional work in this intersection.

When social networking sites give users granular control over their privacy settings, the result is that some content across the site is public and some is not. How might this content—or characteristics of users who post publicly versus to a limited audience—be different? If these differences exist, research studies of public content could potentially be introducing systematic bias. Via Mechanical Turk, we asked 1,815 Facebook users to share recent posts. Using qualitative coding and quantitative measures, we characterize and categorize the nature of the content. Using machine learning techniques, we analyze patterns of choices for privacy settings. Contrary to expectations, we find that content type is not a significant predictor of privacy setting; however, some demographics such as gender and age are predictive. Additionally, with consent of participants, we provide a dataset of nearly 9,000 public and non-public Facebook posts.

We present a study of internet use and its forced non-use in Bangladesh. In light of current initiatives by state and industry actors to improve internet access and bridge the ‘digital divide’ for under-served, under-resourced, and underrepresented communities across the world, we offer a situated, qualitative perspective on what the current state of internet use looks like for select social groups in Bangladesh. We analyze how a state-imposed ban attempted to affect the nonuse of particular web-based services and how the affected populations found or did not find workarounds in response. We also discuss takeaways for researchers as well as industry and state actors studying and working towards more equitable access to the internet in the ‘developing’ world.

Although the Cuban government has tightly controlled information access for more than half a century, a small number of Cubans have access at work. In this paper, we examine Internet and social media use by early adopters in Cuba in early 2015, as we enter a time of potential change. Specifically, we explore Cubans’ access limitations and the activities they do online, as well as what Internet access means to them. We conducted interviews with 12 Cuban Internet users and observed their social media use. Our findings suggest that access limitations and slow network speeds greatly restrict Cubans’ Internet use. To counter these limitations, Cubans are collaborative, often conducting online research and posting photos for friends with less access. Based on these findings, we propose future work to help meet Cuban citizens’ information needs.

In Cuba, information has been tightly controlled for more than 50 years and people are eager to access content long out of reach. Based on research findings from early 2015, this study explores crowdsourced information retrieval and cultural exchange for people living in regions with low Internet access, specifically Cuba. We discuss the deployment of Cuba Intercambio, an interactive, crowdsourced system designed to meet Cuban’s information needs during this time of potential change as well as serve as a type of cultural exchange between Cubans and those living outside of Cuba.

This qualitative study of parents in financially depressed communities in westside Atlanta examines parents’ access to information technology and out-of-school learning resources through five dimensions of digital divide: technical apparatus, autonomy, social support, skill, and purpose. The context of this study is a broader research agenda to explore how technology impacts parents’ knowledge and use of out-of-school learning resources for their children in low socioeconomic status neighborhoods. The findings contribute to a growing body of research on marginalized groups and provide a rich description of parents’ digital access and technology practices in the context of education. Finally, we identify design implications that are specific to this community and can be extended to similar populations to support parents in finding more learning opportunities.

CSCW systems are playing an increasing role in activism. How can new communications technologies support social movements? The possibilities are intriguing, but as yet not fully understood. One key technique traditionally leveraged by social movements is storytelling. In this paper, we examine the use of collective storytelling online in the context of a social movement organization called Hollaback, an organization working to stop street harassment. Can sharing a story of experienced harassment really make a difference to an individual or a community? Using Emancipatory Action Research and qualitative methods, we interviewed people who contributed stories of harassment online. We found that sharing stories shifted participants’ cognitive and emotional orientation towards their experience. The theory of “framing” from social movement research explains the surprising power of this experience for Hollaback participants. We contribute a way of looking at activism online using social movement theory. Our work illustrates that technology can help crowd-sourced framing processes that have traditionally been done by social movement organizations.

This thesis examines how Colombian women within the city of Atlanta utilize Facebook as a parallel public sphere, a cultural phenomenon through which the silenced use mediums of popular culture to discuss private and public dilemmas (Dewey 2009). Through ethnographic research in Atlanta, I analyze how these young women use Facebook as they negotiate their identity through the multiple contexts of their everyday lives. Drawing from feminist critiques, I explore whether Facebook provides an alternative to the traditional public sphere, while also investigating how power structures influence freedom of expression online. Through an international network of friends, these women tackle topics of discrimination, personal struggles, and individual accomplishments. By addressing pertinent issues, such as immigration reform policies, through a public forum, Colombian women become activists in order to disseminate information and educate others. This study explores the parallel public sphere, as well as its possible implications for diasporic communities, by examining the power of social connections and the performance of public personas through an arena not bounded by physical space.