PhD student Mariam Asad is co-hosting a workshop on Social Justice at the 2016 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2016) in San Jose, California. Along with Asad, the workshop is being organized by a former DM MS student who is now pursing a degree at University of Washington (Sarah Fox), and a junior faculty member who spent a semester as a visiting graduate student in DM (Lynn Dombrowski). Exploring Social Justice, Design, and HCI is a one day workshop to be held May 7 or 8th.
The goal of the workshop is to first and foremost build a community of researchers, practitioners, and organizers around the intersection of technological design and social justice. Specifically, the workshop seeks to facilitate the conversations necessary to move beyond “design with good intentions” toward design praxis, or reflection and action directed to transform oppressive structures with and by the dispossessed, marginalized, and oppressed. There are examples of projects that contend with individual systems of oppression—however, there is presently no unified community or common understanding of how these research projects and activism can hang together. Moreover, there is a clear need to unpack and provide nuanced understandings of HCI projects that promote “good”.
