I’ve been slow to share papers here, so posting about two recently published papers. With both publications it was a absolute joy and privilege to work with my co-authors.
(2020) The Care Work of Access, CHI ’20, p. 1–15, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/3313831.3376568
Abstract
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) non-innocent 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.
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) non-innocent 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.
(2020) Conformity of Eating Disorders through Content Moderation, Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4(CSCW1), New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, pdf, doi:10.1145/3392845
Abstract
For individuals with mental illness, social media platforms are considered spaces for sharing and connection. However, not all expressions of mental illness are treated equally on these platforms. Different aggregates of human and technical control are used to report and ban content, accounts, and communities. Through two years of digital ethnography, including online observation and interviews, with people with eating disorders, we examine the experience of content moderation. We use a constructivist grounded theory approach to analysis that shows how practices of moderation across different platforms have particular consequences for members of marginalized groups, who are pressured to conform and compelled to resist. Above all, we argue that platform moderation is enmeshed with wider processes of conformity to specific versions of mental illness. Practices of moderation reassert certain bodies and experiences as ‘normal’ and valued, while rejecting others. At the same time, navigating and resisting these normative pressures further inscribes the marginal status of certain individuals. We discuss changes to the ways that platforms handle content related to eating disorders by drawing on the concept of multiplicity to inform design.
For individuals with mental illness, social media platforms are considered spaces for sharing and connection. However, not all expressions of mental illness are treated equally on these platforms. Different aggregates of human and technical control are used to report and ban content, accounts, and communities. Through two years of digital ethnography, including online observation and interviews, with people with eating disorders, we examine the experience of content moderation. We use a constructivist grounded theory approach to analysis that shows how practices of moderation across different platforms have particular consequences for members of marginalized groups, who are pressured to conform and compelled to resist. Above all, we argue that platform moderation is enmeshed with wider processes of conformity to specific versions of mental illness. Practices of moderation reassert certain bodies and experiences as ‘normal’ and valued, while rejecting others. At the same time, navigating and resisting these normative pressures further inscribes the marginal status of certain individuals. We discuss changes to the ways that platforms handle content related to eating disorders by drawing on the concept of multiplicity to inform design.