This paper presents a feminist autoethnographic critique of technology and research on gender-based violence, grounded in my lived experience and current work as an HCI researcher engaged in community-led design on forced marriage and broader gender-based violence. Through chronological narratives, I recount encounters with digital technologies during help-seeking, from early online searches to the quiet work of rebuilding life, alongside reflections from my position as a researcher embedded in my own community and observing how HCI engages with it. These accounts reveal how digital interventions often fail to align with the realities of those affected, whether by prematurely pushing legal solutions, vanishing after research funding, or reinforcing harmful labels such as “victim.” I argue for HCI approaches that sustain tools beyond prototypes, translate research into practice, and attend to language and power, calling for research and design that begins with those most impacted: not spoken for, but speaking.

Third sector organizations that address gender-based violence often rely on makeshift tools to manage complex, emotionally intensive casework. Although digital systems promise structure, most fail to support the narrative, relational, and time-sensitive nature of frontline support. This paper presents the design, development, and deployment of CaseCompass, a digital case management system co-created with the Competence Center against Forced Marriages, a national NGO in Switzerland. The project emerged from a long-term, trust-based collaboration and foregrounded organizational priorities, care practices, and long-term sustainability. Rather than treating the tool as the endpoint, we use its creation as a lens to examine how participation can be structured under severe time and capacity constraints, and how design decisions can serve as infrastructural care. We contribute to feminist and social justice-oriented HCI by offering a detailed case study of community-led infrastructuring within a small NGO, articulating strategies for structuring participation under constraints, and framing sustainability as an active practice of care, responsibility, and justice.

Toxicity detection algorithms , originally designed for reactive content moderation systems, are being deployed into proactive end-user interventions to moderate content. Yet, there has been little critique on the use of these algorithms within this moderation paradigm. We conducted design workshops with four stakeholder groups , asking participants to embed a toxicity detection algorithm into an imagined mobile phone keyboard. This allowed us to critically explore how such algorithms could be used to proactively reduce the sending of toxic content. We found contextual factors such as platform culture and affordances, and scales of abuse, impacting on perceptions of toxicity and effectiveness of the system. We identify different types of end-users across a continuum of intention to send toxic messages, from unaware users, to those that are determined and organised. Finally, we highlight the potential for certain end-user groups to misuse these systems to validate their attacks, to gamify hate, and to manipulate algorithmic models to exacerbate harm.

People are increasingly introduced to each other offline thanks to online platforms that make algorithmically-mediated introductions between their users. Such platforms include dating apps (e.g., Tinder) and in-person gig work websites (e.g., TaskRabbit, Care.com). Protecting the users of these online-offline systems requires answering calls from prior work to consider 'post-digital' orientations of safety: shifting from traditional technological security thinking to consider algorithm-driven consequences that emerge throughout online and offline contexts rather than solely acknowledging online threats. To support post-digital safety in platforms that make algorithmically-mediated offline introductions (AMOIs), we apply a mixed-methods approach to identify the core harms that AMOI users experience, the protective safety behaviors they employ, and the prevalence of those behaviors. First, we systematically review existing work (n=93), synthesizing the harms that threaten AMOIs and the protective behaviors people employ to combat these harms. Second, we validate prior work and fill gaps left by primarily qualitative inquiry through a survey of respondents' definitions of safety in AMOI and the prevalence and implementation of their protective behaviors. We focus on two exemplar populations who engage in AMOIs: online daters (n=476) and in-person gig workers (n=451). We draw on our systematization and prevalence data to identify several directions for designers and researchers to reimagine defensive tools to support safety in AMOIs.

HCI engages with data science through many topics and themes. Researchers have addressed biased dataset problems, arguing that bad data can cause innocent software to produce bad outcomes. But what if our software is not so innocent? What if the human decisions that shape our data-processing software, inadvertently contribute their own sources of bias? And what if our data-work technology causes us to forget those decisions and operations? Based in feminisms and critical computing, we analyze forgetting practices in data work practices. We describe diverse beneficial and harmful motivations for forgetting. We contribute: (1) a taxonomy of data silences in data work, which we use to analyze how data workers forget, erase, and unknow aspects of data; (2) a detailed analysis of forgetting practices in machine learning; and (3) an analytic vocabulary for future work in remembering, forgetting, and erasing in HCI and the data sciences.

In recent years HCI and CSCW work has increasingly begun to address complex social problems and issues of social justice worldwide. Such activist-leaning work is not without problems. Through the experiences and reflections of an activist becoming academic and an academic becoming an activist, we outline these difficulties such as (1) the risk of perpetuating violence, oppression and exploitation when working with marginalised communities, (2) the reception of activist-academic work within our academic communities, and (3) problems of social justice that exist within our academic communities. Building on our own experiences, practices and existing literature from a variety of disciplines we advocate for the possibility of an activist-academic practice, outline possible ways forward and formulate questions we need to answer for HCI to contribute to a more just world.

On the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (IDEVASW), sex worker rights advocates and support services commemorate lives lost due to violence. In this paper we describe and reflect on a Feminist Participatory Action Research project that supported the activities of IDEVASW over two years in North East England. Working alongside a charity that provides services to women who are sex workers or have experienced sexual exploitation, we co-organised the first activist march on the day. As researchers and service providers, we present detailed reflections on the use of digital technologies during the public activist march, a private service for commemoration, and the development of a semi-public archive to collect experiences of the day. We develop three implications for the design of digital technologies for activism and the commemoration of lost lives: as catalysts for reflection and opportunities to layer experience.

Work addressing the negative impacts of domestic violence on victim-survivors and service providers has slowly been contributing to the HCI discourse. However, work discussing the necessary, pre-emptive steps for researchers to enter these spaces sensitively and considerately, largely remains opaque. Heavily-politicised specialisms that are imbued with conflicting values and practices, such as domestic violence service delivery can be especially difficult to navigate. In this paper, we report on a mixed methods study consisting of interviews, a design dialogue and an ideation workshop with domestic violence service providers to explore the potential of an online service directory to support their work. Through this three-stage research process, we were able to characterise this unique service delivery landscape and identify tensions in services' access, understandings of technologies and working practices. Drawing from our findings, we discuss opportunities for researchers to work with and sustain complex information ecologies in sensitive settings.

This paper provides analysis and insight from a collaborative process with a Canadian sex worker rights organization called Stella, l'amie de Maimie, where we reflect on the use of and potential for digital technologies in service delivery. We analyze the Bad Client and Aggressor List - a reporting tool co-produced by sex workers in the community and Stella staff to reduce violence against sex workers. We analyze its current and potential future formats as an artefact for communication, in a context of sex work criminalization and the exclusion of sex workers from traditional routes for reporting violence and accessing governmental systems for justice. This paper addresses a novel aspect of HCI research that relates to digital technologies and social justice. Reflecting on the Bad Client and Aggressor List, we discuss how technologies can interact with justice-oriented service delivery and develop three implications for design.

DIY-making can be an expensive pastime if makers are relying on ready-made toolkits, specialised materials and off-shelf components. Many prefabricated commercial kits seek to lower the learning barrier of making and to help beginners to successfully take their first steps in engineering. However, as soon as the novices become a little more advanced, these toolkits often do not fit the specific requirements of personal maker projects anymore. We introduce the idea of a Schnittmuster (or a meta-toolkit) as a novel approach to toolkit design that seeks to address these creativity-limiting factors as well as practical entrance hurdles. To demonstrate the adaptive power of the Schnittmuster concept, we discuss an exemplar in the context of capacitive touch sensing (FlexE-Touch). Implemented under the constraints of materials, user skill sets and making environments, we illustrate how the Schnittmuster facilitated four cheap and flexible toolkit instantiations for crafting custom touch sensor electrodes.

Sex workers' rights are human rights, and as such are an issue inherently based in social, criminal, and political justice debates. As HCI continues to move towards feminist and social justice oriented research and design approaches, we argue that we need to take into consideration the difficulties faced by sex workers; and explore how technology can and does mediate social justice outcomes for them. We contribute directly to this challenge by providing an empirical account of a charity whose work is built on the underlying move towards social and criminal justice for sex workers in the UK. Through ethnographic fieldwork, meetings, interviews, surveys, and creative workshops we describe the different points of view associated with the charity from a variety of stakeholders. We discuss their service provision and the ways in which HCI is uniquely positioned to be able respond to the needs of and to support sex work support services.

Non-homeless youths outperform their homeless peers in school even if they live in extreme poverty. This disadvantage can have long-term consequences for engagement with and navigation of wider society. In this paper we examine how differences in achievement could be tackled outside of school through the re-envisioning of ecologies of digital education. Through interviews, design workshops, and a street visit with a total of 20 homeless young adults during a three-week engagement with a centre for people of low social stability in Bucharest, Romania, we examine the perceptions of education among street involved youth or adults. We identify the core values, aspirations, opportunities and barriers for education among these people, including survival, friendship, learning networks, and curiosity. These findings resulted in five implications for design: learning "happens", learning "works", designing for distanced learning, designing for the social politics of learning, and designing artefacts of everyday learning. These show the importance and necessity of educational reform in the field of HCI.