This study investigates how Iranian immigrant nonprofit groups experience exclusion within technology and AI-driven infrastructures. Based on 27 semi-structured interviews, it identifies how legitimacy barriers, capacity gaps, and ethical dilemmas intersect to create a cycle of infrastructural immobility that restricts these groups’ participation in the digital nonprofit ecosystem. The findings reveal that generative AI, while providing some opportunities, risks exacerbating these challenges by deepening marginalization and reinforcing inequalities in access, data visibility, AI fluency, and AI-mediated representation. Uncritical adoption of generative AI in the nonprofit domain undermines transparency and human connection in everyday organizational practice and induces bias in AI-generated content in the context of Iranian immigrant nonprofit work. To address these issues, the paper proposes interaction-level design strategies that promote community-driven inclusion, support context-aware capacity building, and leverage AI’s augmentative potential to strengthen transparency practices and human connection among Iranian immigrant nonprofits.

Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) scholarship has begun to examine religion and spirituality; yet, devotion as a lived, material, and world-making practice remains largely overlooked. For millions across the Global South, devotional labor such as sculpting, tending to, or worshipping sacred figures forms a primary mode of engaging with the divine and shaping everyday social and technological imaginations. Drawing on a four-month ethnography with an idol-maker community in Kumartuli, Kolkata, India, this paper examines how artisans bring gods into being through materials, gestures, obligation, and collective care. Their practices reveal forms of knowledge, intentionality, and agency that complicate HCI’s predominantly secular and instrumental understandings of craft, creativity, and technology. Building on anthropological craft studies, postcolonial computing, and scholarship on religion and materiality, we show how sacred making foregrounds relational, embodied, and cosmological dimensions of practice. We argue that devotional craft constitutes an under-recognized site from which HCI can critically rethink its assumptions about materiality, mediation, knowledge, and the sacred.

This paper joins the growing body of HCI work on critical AI studies and focuses on the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) tools in Bangladesh. While the West has started to examine the limitations and risks associated with these tools, their impacts on the Global South have remained understudied. Based on our interviews, focus group discussions (FGD), and social media-based qualitative study, this paper reports how popular text-to-image GAI tools (ex., DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Firefly) are affecting various image-related local creative fields. We report how these tools limit the creative explorations of marginal artists, struggle to understand linguistic nuances, fail to generate local forms of art and architecture, and misrepresent the diversity among citizens in the image production process. Drawing from a rich body of work on critical image theory, postcolonial computing, and design politics, we explain how our findings are pertinent to HCI’s broader interest in social justice, decolonization, and global development.

The sex workers in the Global South represent a significant portion of the world sex industry. However, when compared to the relevant HCI literature on sex work and computing, there exists a noticeable gap in comprehending the experiences and circumstances of the sex workers in this region. This study fills the void by presenting the findings of a three-month-long ethnography with 25 legal sex workers in Daulatdia brothel, Bangladesh, revealing their struggles with stigma, low-tech literacy, and the emerging threats of online security, along with their skills and creativity to bypass those. Drawing on the previous literature on South Asian feminism, postcolonial computing, and critical urban studies, we demonstrate how these findings are deeply rooted in the country’s history and culture and propelled by a modernist vision of “development” that marginalizes such communities. Our discussion advances HCI’s discourse on sexuality, privacy, equity, and generates implications for design and policy changes.

This paper critically examines the impacts of social media-based business on urban residential architecture in Dhaka, Bangladesh and joins the growing body of work in critical HCI. Based on a seven-month-long qualitative empirical study in Dhaka, this paper reports how Facebook commerce (F-commerce) drives many local women to actively engage in home-based businesses, which in turn, challenges the inherent spatial regulations of modern residential architecture. This paper also documents how F-commerce mediated transformations in residential spaces are promoting heterogeneous functions, re-surfacing traditional values, and altering orders and rationales that define modern housing. Drawing from a rich body of literature in urban housing architecture, critical theories around modernism, South-Asian feminism, and postcolonial computing, we explain how these spatial transformations and alterations are “appropriating” architectural design vocabularies. Our findings further explain how negligence toward such emerging needs often marginalizes the women spatially and economically, who are involved in F-commerce. We conclude with design implications to architecture and HCI to address these issues, and connect our findings to the broader agendas of Postcolonial HCI around diversity, inclusion, and global development.

This paper joins the growing body of critical HCI work that studies the digitization of the Global South and reports the elements of ‘secularization’ in it. Based on a year-long ethnography on the contemporary transformations in religious practices in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this paper presents how the emerging “digital” cattle marketplaces subdue various forms of traditional manifestations of urban religiosity during Eid-ul-Adha, the second-largest Islamic festival in the city. This paper further depicts how such secularization contributes to diminishing rural-urban linkages, affecting electoral politics, and reducing the tolerance to religious celebrations in a city. Drawing from a rich body of work in critical urban studies, postcolonial computing, and sociology of religions, we explain how such oft-overlooked embedding of secularization in computing affects the religious fabrics in the urban regions of the Global South, and discuss its implication for HCI scholarship in diversity, inclusion, and development.

This paper joins the growing body of work in postcolonial computing in HCI, and critically examines the impacts of online social media on the urban architecture in the Global South. Based on our nine-month long ethnography at eight residential areas in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this paper reports how online fame drives local users to produce digital images of their houses mimicking various Western standards, which in turn, brings changes to the organization, aesthetics, and functions of domestic spaces. This paper also describes how such digital image mediated transformations to local architecture are diminishing traditional spaces, altering their usual functions, and limiting the movement of many women inside their home. Drawing from a rich body of literature in postcolonialism, critical image theory, architecture, and Islamic feminism, we explain how these practices demonstrate a subaltern experience of using social media in the Global South. We further discuss design implications to both HCI and architecture to address these issues, and connect our findings to the broader agendas of HCI around social justice and global development.

This paper explores discrepancies between the founding assumptions of mobile and ubiquitous computing in the western world, and the starkly different experiences of mobility and infrastructure to be found in many post-colonial environments. Based on a field study of forced mobility and technology use among populations displaced by the Hatirjheel waterfront development project in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we make two basic arguments. First, we point to the partial nature of assumptions around mobility that frame the imagination of mainstream HCI research, and argue that different and heretofore residual experiences of mobility must also be accounted for in post-colonial and other marginal computing environments. Second, we document four forms of infrastructural experience -- dispossession, reconstitution, collaboration, and repair -- that characterize real-world engagements with infrastructure in such settings. We conclude with implications for HCI research and design, and reflections on how HCI researchers might better account for such experiences in their work.