Imagining Intersectional Futures

Amelia Abreu is a design researcher, writer, and consultant based in Portland, Oregon. She has worked with engineering and security teams at organizations including Nike, Mozilla, Microsoft Research and Intel, as well as startups and cultural organizations. She holds graduate degrees in Human Computer Interaction and Information Studies from the University of Washington and the University of Texas-Austin. Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Motherboard, and Model View Culture, and she has been featured as a commentator on the BBC and Wired.

Position paper: Care, labor and design: An intersectional approach to Computer Supported Collaborative Work
Website: http://www.ameliaabreu.com/

 

Cynthia Bennett. I am a third year Ph.D. student at the University of Washington in the Human Centered Design and Engineering department. My research is at the intersection of accessibility, design, and disability studies. During a previous project, I interviewed people with limb loss to learn how they incorporate prostheses, including 3d-printed hands, into their identities and we comment on some miss-matches as the maker movement and assistive technology further entwine. For example, making still has a high barrier to entry that may be exacerbated by inaccessible assembly methods required to use 3d-printed prostheses. Before grad school, I worked as a research assistant on projects using features and sensors built into smartphones to create apps for people with vision impairments. One project consisted of smartphone games meant to help children learning braille to memorize dot patterns. My goal is to engage in projects that are impactful by elevating the voices and contributions of people with disabilities in academic and design spaces and to subtly and productively challenge ways HCI may unknowingly perpetuate ableism in our contributions and community.

Position paper: Exploring Care and Assistance in HCI with Disability and Feminist Studies
Website: https://www.bennettc.com/

 

Jill Dimond. I am a scholar, maker, and activist. I hold a PhD in Human Centered Computing from Georgia Tech and am a worker-owner of Sassafras Tech Collective.  I design critical information communication technologies (ICTs) with activists and then use that technology as way to understand the relationship between social justice causes and ICTs. The contributions of my work are always two-fold: furthering social justice causes and contributing to greater understandings of these socio-technical systems. I ground my work in deep qualitative and ethnographic investigations that then inform technological design, study, and critical analysis.

Position paper: Tech Worker-Cooperatives as Prefigurative Intersectional Feminism
Website: http://jilldimond.com/

 

Marisa Elena Duarte is an Assistant Professor of Justice and Sociotechnical change with the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Prior work includes an investigation of how Native American tribes command the build-out of Internet infrastructures across sovereign land, a decolonizing analysis of information classification practices in libraries, and an assessment of Native American activist uses of Twitter for disseminating critical information. Her book Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press. She is currently a member of the Human Security Collaboratory at ASU, where she is in the preliminary stages of a multi-level analysis of wearable health activity monitors and their effects in the life-worlds of women applying distinctive worldviews to health, wellbeing, and quantification.

Position paper: Prismatic Interfaces: Making Room for Intersectional Feminist Approaches in Interface Studies
Website: http://marisaduarte.net/

 

Melanie Feinberg. I am an associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am a classificationist: I design and study systems for organizing information. My research considers information systems (ranging from document repositories, scientific datasets, and social media sites to museums, supermarkets, and your spice cabinet) as forms of expression, valuable for what they say as well as for the functions they support. Throughout my scholarly career, my work has attempted to understand how information systems communicate and how they might communicate differently. One of my particular interests has been to consider how information systems might adopt situated, particular, partial perspectives, and to articulate the kinds of user experiences that such systems might enable. A significant stream of research over the past few years has attempted to understand how Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of mestiza consciousness might inform the design of information systems, and to understand the shape of user interactions that these experimental systems facilitate. As this project has continued, it has made me think more closely and systematically about the many forms of integration that contribute to the expressive character of data, including the material and technical (e.g., database environments) as well as the conceptual and social (e.g, categories and labels). My future work will continue to explore these relationships.

Position paper: A Feminist Challenge: Resisting the Success Narrative
Website: https://ils.unc.edu/~mfeinber/

 

Roxana Galusca. I am Project Manager and UX specialist at Sassafras Tech Collective, a tech cooperative in Ann Arbor, MI. My current work in agile project management and UX research/design gives me a holistic view of the planning and design processes, from the initial stages of product planning and creative exploration to the final phase of product implementation.

I come to the field of UX with a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies and have many years of experience in mentoring,  research, and team management. As a teacher, I worked hard to understand and meet students’ needs; as a UX specialist, my lifelong goal is to communicate efficiently users’ needs in order to facilitate the smooth and ethical integration of technologies in users’ lives.

Position paper: Tech Worker-Cooperatives as Prefigurative Intersectional Feminism
Website: https://rgalusca.com/

 

Patricia Garcia is a Research Fellow in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She conducts sociocultural research on race, gender, and technology with a special interest in studying how the use of culturally responsive computing practices can increase girls’ participation in STEM activities. She is currently conducting research on how technology programs can use girls’ self- identified cultural markers to shape the “responsive” nature of computational learning experiences. She is also experimenting with a low-resource model for promoting culturally responsive computing programs in public libraries. Her research aims to demonstrate how an intersectional and social constructionist approach to technology education can challenge stereotypes of girls of color as passive victims of technology and provide a counter-narrative that can empower girls of color to form generative and agentic relationships with technology.

Position paper: Embodying Data: Duoethnography as a Feminist Methodology for Studying Wearables
Website: https://patriciagarcia.org/

 

Jean Hardy. I am a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information. I am advised by Silvia Lindtner and Tiffany Veinot, am a member of the Tech. Culture. Matters. Research Collective, and co-convene the Queer Science & Technology Studies Workshop. My research focuses on the intersection of rurality, sexuality, and computing.

Position paper: Queer(ing) HCI: Problem or paradox
Website: https://jean.lgbt/

 

Leah Horgan is a doctoral student in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Before transferring to UCI she studied for two years in the Media Design Program (MDP) at Art Center College of Design, conducting fieldwork around ICTs in partnership with Unicef’s Innovation Lab in Kampala, Uganda. Prior to graduate studies, she held a position for over three years at MIT’s Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) working on design, communication, and executive administration efforts. She is currently working as a design fellow in a city data team to conduct a participant observation study of innovation culture, civic tech, and data work in an urban context.

Position paper: Complicity and Care: Tensions of Acting in Non-Interventional Ethnography
Website: https://isr.uci.edu/users/leah-horgan

 

 Anne Jonas is a PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Her research focuses on how people use, create, and understand digital platforms in the context of social inequality. In particular, she studies student experiences with online and hybrid schools in the context of ongoing school reform and privatization policies. She previously worked as a Program Manager at the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Position paper: Intersectional Analysis of Online and Hybrid Schools
Website: https://annejonas.com/

 

 

Katherine Lo is a PhD student in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on advocacy, policy, and design decisions around harassment and moderation in online platforms to understand the political and infrastructural entanglements that shape the social responsibility commitments of social media platforms. She also runs afterschool technology programs for high school girls in underserved communities, and through these programs she studies the structural barriers they face in building technology fluency and pursuing technology-centered careers.

Position paper: Complicity and Care: Tensions of Acting in Non-Interventional Ethnography
Website: http://www.klols.com/