Solidarity Across Borders

There is a growing community within CSCW that examines issues of equity and inclusion in Internet and social media use, including researchers focused on global development, social justice, and accessibility, among other areas. We contend that there are issues of equity and inclusion impacting not only the research subjects located on the “margins” of digital existence, but also the research that studies these issues, and the researchers engaged in this research. These margins include populations from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds that are typically viewed as “marginalized,” often in more ways than one.

The goal of our workshop is to brainstorm and discuss how we might demarginalize these researched, this research, and these researchers within CSCW scholarship.

For this, we borrow the notions of intersectionality and solidarity from feminist scholarship, aiming to recognize the differences and similarities across disparate marginal contexts, uncovering synergistic research trajectories and objectives. First, by rendering visible how different but interacting forms of power operate — via gender, race, caste, class, nationhood, sexuality, geography, etc. — an intersectionality lens helps in teasing apart the many overlapping margins of these power structures. Then, growing Mohanty’s notion of feminist solidarity, we intend to carve out a space in CSCW for future scholarship focused on equity and inclusion that acknowledges how the intersecting, marginalized realities studied across the fields of CSCW, Social Computing, and HCI4D (short for HCI for Development) are indeed different, but also similar, co-implicated, and interwoven. We identify what research focused on equity and inclusion across these fields shares in common in terms of motivations, goals, challenges, and workarounds. Engaging solidarity can potentially allow us to move forward not as fragments but as parts of a larger demarginalized whole. For more details, see our conference submission and our workshop agenda.

Our workshop will be led by academic and industry researchers pursuing CSCW, Social Computing, and HCI4D research aimed at recognizing intersectionality, and fostering equity and inclusion. Learn more about the organizers.