CSCW 2015 is around the corner!

The Feminism and Feminist Approaches in Social Computing pre-conference workshop is first on my list. Here are some excerpts from the background paper:

“CSCW has recently seen a resurgence of interest in gender and feminist approaches, largely catapulted by formative work in Feminist HCI as well as a series of gender and queer studies of technology.

…

At the heart of these dialogues is a recognition of the importance of things absent, invisible, vocal, silent or needed to be spoken for, or diminished by technological development. This feminist approach orients people to the values and biases inherent in the design and deployment of new technological systems. It also teaches people to scrutinize the obvious affordances or intended uses of technological artifacts, disabusing them of their assumed innocence and provoking consideration of the balance of competences between credentialed and amateur, entitled and disadvantaged, and human and nonhuman.“

We were asked to submit a position paper with an anecdote or extract from our work along with an annotated bibliography. Here’s mine, but there are many others listed on the participants page (many of whom took it to the next level and wrote short articles!).

Next at CSCW is a panel that I’m on called Facebooking in “Face:” Complex Identities Meet Simple Databases that was written with Mark Handel (Boeing), Jed R. Brubaker (UC Irvine), Oliver L. Haimson (UC Irvine), Jessa Lingel (Microsoft), and Svetlana Yarosh (Minnesota). Here’s the abstract:

“Online systems often struggle to account for the complicated self-presentation and disclosure needs of those with complex identities or specialized anonymity. Using the lenses of gender, recovery, and performance, our proposed panel explores the tensions that emerge when the richness and complexity of individual personalities and subjectivities run up against design norms that imagine identity as simplistic or one- dimensional. These models of identity not only limit the ways individuals can express their own identities, but also establish norms for other users about what to expect, causing further issues when the inevitable dislocations do occur. We discuss the challenges in translating identity into these systems, and how this is further marred by technical requirements and normative logics that structure cultures and practices of databases, algorithms and computer programming.”

Find the whole paper here or download from the ACM Digital Library.