People with visual impairments (PwVI) increasingly rely on digital navigation tools to travel independently, yet these tools misalign with the lived realities of navigating unpredictable urban environments, especially during severe weather events. Drawing on a journey mapping workshop, we explore how PwVI combine mobile apps, Orientation and Mobility (O&M) training, and human assistance to build flexible routines that adapt to recurrent disruptions, and prioritize predictability, safety, and confidence over speed. We argue that digital navigation technologies should support resilience through considering interoperability and designing for routine breakdown and multiple temporalities. We further articulate critical design considerations to better align accessible navigation with the everyday practices of PwVI.

This multi-sited critical ethnography investigates how Mexican farmers’ knowledge practices are reclassified as they circulate between smallholder farms in Mexico and greenhouses in Canada. These farmers are recognized as skilled at home and reclassified as ‘unskilled’ in Canada, a shift reinforced by surveillance technologies and managerial control. From this empirical work, we introduce the prism of labour. The prism traces how knowledge practices, skill classifications, and sociotechnical systems interrelate to form labour infrastructures, and provides a lens for analysis and intervention to consider how these infrastructures are formed, stabilized, and contested. Our contributions are threefold: we provide novel empirical research on migrant farm workers in HCI, introduce the prism as an analytic and intervention tool, and show how migration reorganizes expertise through classification, producing hybrid knowledge practices that reshape how technologies are adopted.

Universities in North America often frame accessibility as an individual responsibility, emphasizing individualized accommodations for disabled students. However, these systems do not always align with students’ access needs, leaving them to take on additional labour. At a Canadian university, we interviewed 13 student activists and leaders of disability-related groups. We investigate how disabled students collectively address access frictions that emerge from institutional infrastructure; adopting community practices that work with, within, and around the university to address gaps. Using the concept of ’routine infrastructuring’, we demonstrate how student groups leverage technologies to mobilize and negotiate access needs through informal and formal practices as collective care infrastructure. We introduce the concept of ’counteractive frictions’, which are produced collectively to disrupt and provoke negotiation with institutions. We call for scholars and designers to rethink ’infrastructuring’ as adapting and maintaining, which masks the politics and generative potentialities of friction to re-imagine disability futures.

Design equity toolkits are increasingly being invoked to address the ethical and political consequences of technology design, yet they are criticized for being either too generic or too narrow to address the complex realities of equity in design. To examine the intended purpose of these toolkits from creators’ perspectives and explore how designers envision using them in practice, we conducted a two-phase study: interviews with toolkit creators and a walkthrough demonstration workshop with early-career UX designers. Our findings highlight divergent values around toolkit functionality: while creators emphasize flexibility and reflection, early-career designers express a need for actionable pathways to help mediate design equity work within corporate hierarchies. We show how toolkits act as supports for articulation work in design equity, their role as boundary objects for values translation, and conclude by framing how design equity toolkits can be re-conceptualized as legitimacy-building artefacts with capacites to help early-designers advocate for more equitable futures.

Blockchain has increasingly been positioned in the humanitarian aid sector as a revolutionary technology that can deliver decentralizing and transparent alternatives to traditional aid systems. Yet examinations of blockchain’s practical implementation in humanitarian contexts reveals gaps between what it promises and what it delivers. This paper examines Oxfam’s UnBlocked Cash (UBC) project in Vanuatu, a blockchain-enabled cash-and-voucher assistance (CVA) program, to interrogate how such blockchain-based systems are implemented on the ground. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with organizational stakeholders, we show how the allure of “charismatic” technology mobilizes funding, attention, and enthusiasm around promises of decentralization, transparency, and choice, while consolidating control over data and infrastructure amongst non-ni-Vanuatu actors. We analyze how blockchain intertwines with existing power structures, transparency claims, and inclusion in post-disaster aid delivery, highlighting tensions around sovereignty and governance. In addition, we offer insights for HCI practitioners around limitations and considerations for designing humanitarian technologies in low resource settings.

Although the call to “study up” — directing the scholarly gaze towards elites — was made over half a century ago, HCI scholarship in this area remains underdeveloped. This paper demonstrates digital ethnography as a critical entry point, particularly for researchers from marginalised positionality facing refusals and deterrents when accessing elite social worlds. Drawing on 20 months of digital ethnography on Brahmin women food vloggers in Kerala, India, we show how caste-privileged cultural producers caste-code socio-technical practices of nichification, leverage platform affordances and constitute conservative caste enclaves in response to anxieties about threats to the prestige associated with Brahmin ways of life. These enclaves archive and circulate Brahmin food pedagogies, preserve caste customs and norms, guide younger Brahmin generations to remain connected to their roots, and seek recognition from wider publics. By foregrounding these dynamics, we expand methodological and political possibilities for “studying up” and critical caste and technology studies in HCI.

This study is based on a community-led participatory soil health workshop with 34 Caribbean temporary farmworkers in Ontario, Canada. Working with two migrant community leaders as co-designers and facilitators, we centered this farmworker community as leaders of their own digital agricultural education by leveraging artifacts like tomato plants as transnational boundary objects for dialogical learning between farmworkers’ existing agricultural knowledge, and soil science principles and digital sensing instruments. We find that: (1) community-led facilitation produced unplanned but generative knowledge translation work to center farmworker perspectives; and (2) participants engaged with soil sensing principles and tools selectively, integrating new knowledge based on their own contexts and values. Through this work, we offer four workshop design insights for community-led digital education, showing how infrastructural concepts like boundary objects and infrastructural inversion can function as pedagogical tools whose force depends on dialogical conditions that begin from participants’ existing knowledge and values. We also leverage the concept of selective appropriation to consider how participants negotiate technological adoption in agricultural contexts under infrastructural constraint. Across these contributions, our aim is to support communities to build epistemic agency, which we define as a liberatory force that enables community participants to evaluate new knowledge on their own terms, in relation to their own worlds.

Diasporic Hong Kong communities are increasingly shaped by transnational repression, which is amplified through the sociotechnical systems within which they are embedded. In this context, risk is not merely a condition to be endured but a subjective, relational, and sociotechnical construct that modulates everyday social life and political organizing. Drawing on 11 semi-structured interviews with diasporic organizers in North America, we identify five interrelated forms of perceived risk — reputational harm, “Sam Tau” (滲透), infiltration, state surveillance, and non-state surveillance. These risks reveal how collective vulnerability emerges through both explicit repression and ambient uncertainty. In response, actors engage in boundary work — through gatekeeping, selective participation, and socio-technical vetting practices — to construct digital enclaves, maintain cohesion, and cultivate a risk-aware Hong Kong identity. This paper contributes to CSCW by extending existing scholarship on diasporic social movements, community moderation, and boundary maintenance, offering insights into how sociotechnical infrastructures are leveraged, and must be reimagined, for organizing under conditions of transnational repression.

Peer Reviewed

Peer Reviewed

Universities grow increasingly committed to equal access for individuals with disabilities, balancing the appearance of inclusion while upholding values of academic rigour. Within these universities, employees working in accessibility must mediate an unstable web of organizational and technological infrastructures. This study examines the government mandates, organizational structures, processes, and policies in a research university in Canada aimed at meeting the accessibility needs of its students. Our findings suggest that there is an interplay between informal and formal practices to navigate institutional systems. Technology serves as a mediator in the ''behind-the-scenes'' work that occurs at the intersection of infrastructures. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to better support accessibility work in universities. We suggest the use of seamful design to support accessibility work, as it aligns with the dynamic nature of disability and distributed networks of accessibility work. We recommend designers foster interdependence to support workers who navigate overlapping infrastructures and breakdowns at the seams.

In August 2020, Alexander Lukashenko's re-election, amid widespread allegations of electoral fraud, marked the continuation of his uninterrupted presidency since Belarus's independence and triggered an unprecedented wave of mass protests in the country's history. In response, Lukashenko's adaptive authoritarian regime unleashed brutal repression and systemic human rights violations. In this context, the diasporic social movement community, leveraging information and communication technologies (ICTs), emerged as critical actors supporting the anti-regime social movement in their origin-homeland. Based on semi-structured interviews with 13 members of the North American Belarusian diasporic social movement community, this paper explores the role of ICTs in facilitating their political actions during the 2020 protests, as well as the factors that facilitated or hindered their participation and use of ICTs. Our study highlights that ICTs facilitated diaspora geopolitics from below by enabling ''social movement community,'' where otherwise disparate diasporic satellite publics converged around the common political goal of overthrowing the Lukashenko regime. However, the diasporic social movement community's use of ICTs was also fraught with ethical and moral complexities, navigating the ''proximity dilemma'' of remote participation and influencing a cause from a distance, while benefiting from socio-spatial privileges in their host country. Furthermore, the diaspora's ICT usage is shaped by the political regime, fear of transnational repression, and the geopolitical positions of both the origin-homeland and host country, as a consequence of adaptive authoritarianism in the Belarusian case. We discuss how CSCW can support decentralised, geographically dispersed diasporic organising with respect to social movements under varying authoritarian constraints.

This mixed method study situated in Ontario, Canada, investigates how migrant farmworkers’ experiences with agricultural technologies (agtech) affect their attitudes, conditions, and expectations of work, and how workers envision technologies serving as supportive interventions. Through a survey and interviews, we identify that surveillance and tracking agtech (chequeadoras) affect workers, imparting negative health and safety consequences. Workers’ interactions with chequeadoras reveal three major impacts: performance expectations engender stress, surveillance causes fears of disciplinary action, and performance tracking heightens competition. These impacts demonstrate how chequeadoras erode workers’ capacity to build sociality and solidarity. In response to these impacts and to support workers’ desired workplace changes, which aim for safer environments with technical skill development opportunities, we examine tactics from HCI, critical design, and migrant justice movements. Our findings lead us to contemplate what qualifies as agtech and how we may support marginalised workers with divergent opinions regarding workplace technologies, and desired collective change.

Communicating risk to the public in the lead-up to and during severe weather events has the potential to reduce the impacts of these events on lives and property. Globally, these events are anticipated to increase due to climate change, rendering effective risk communication an integral component of climate adaptation policies. Research in risk communications literature has developed substantial knowledge and best practices for the design of risk messaging. This study considers the potential for quantifying the compliance of severe weather risk messages with these best practices, individually and at scale, and developing tools to improve risk communication messaging. The current work makes two contributions. First, we develop a string-matching approach to evaluate whether messaging complies with best practices and suggest areas for improvement. Second, we conduct an interview study with risk communication professionals to inform the design space of authoring tools and other technologies to support severe weather risk communicators.

Care work has long been relegated to private households and small communities, however, with the entry of digital marketplaces, it is becoming part of public economic spheres. While care work has been generally devalued and understudied, it is a complex practice embedded in a network of economic transactions, social relations, material conditions, and socio-cultural norms. This paper explores the care giving networks among migrant house-cleaners guided by Tronto’s ‘care ethics’ and Puig de la Bellacasa’s ‘matters of care’. We interviewed 19 Latino house-cleaners in Toronto to understand their care practices and networks. Our analysis identifies gaps in our participants’ care networks. We create a new term, lateral care, to explicate the digital communities of care practice our participants formed. We conclude with implications for the future design of technologies for labor economies that attend to concerns of care.

This paper explores the interplay between identity, collective action, and digital marketplaces among Latino house-cleaners in Toronto. Domestic work, such as house-cleaning, has traditionally been devalued, gendered, and delegated to marginalised immigrant populations. The informal nature of house-cleaning work, also introduces precarity, vulnerabilities and potential avenues of exploitation. Drawing on 19 interviews with Latino house-cleaners, the paper underscores how identity shapes experiences and strategies in the labour markets. We find that Latino house-cleaners prefer to use asynchronous digital marketplaces, such as social media commerce groups and online classified advertisement websites, as the platforms provides flexibility and control over their labour outcomes. The paper further delves into how group identities online - such as being Latino and women - foster collective action and solidarity. The paper provides insights on how we can support the needs support the challenges and needs of immigrant domestic workers in technology-mediated labour markets.

The entry of on-demand ridesourcing digital labour platforms (OR-DLPs) in Kolkata, India, restructured the local taxi-cab service industry's economic geography and spatial practices. Notably, they eroded the significance of the spatial fixity of taxi stands operated by traditional trade unions, enmeshed in local society's partisan political dynamics. Therefore, OR-DLPs triggered a reconfiguration of the socio-spatial and political practices around the taxi-cab industry in the city. Globally, traditional trade unions have struggled to organise workers in informal work arrangements and DLPs. However, in Kolkata, the Kolkata Ola-Uber App-Cab Operator and Drivers Union has proved to be successful. They established hybrid and networked unionism through technological affordances, placing worker-organisers rather than external organisers at the centre of their organisational structure. Furthermore, they undertook tech-mediated resistance against the OR-DLPs, local bureaucracy (e.g. the police) and the state. We explore this context to examine the impact of OR-DLPs on labour geography, worker-organising and resistance practices, along with the revitalisation strategies of traditional trade unions in response. From a non-Western context, we expand the frame for CSCW and HCI scholars' ongoing efforts to design worker-centric technologies for resistance.

Design toolkits that aim to to promote equity offer designers simplified approaches to creating more equitable technology. However, it is important to understand how equity is conceptualized in practice. As a curated collection of methods, toolkits signal how equity is imagined in design. In this paper, we perform a qualitative analysis of 17 design toolkits related to equity. We explore alternative design approaches that address inequity in design. We evaluate whether equity toolkits align with calls for changes to design practice, as well as Nancy Fraser’s dimensions of justice. Finally, we find that design toolkits focus on the ‘digital divide’ rather than redistributing world-building power, and thus continue to keep design power with professional designers. We also find that ‘design thinking’ continues to influence design toolkits. Furthermore, the simplicity of toolkits does not engage with the complexities that shape equity in practice. We conclude with suggestions to help researchers and designers rethink design toolkits.

Ramadan is an important and blessed month for Muslims around the world. It is both a time of spiritual contemplation as well as an opportunity for reinvigorating communal bonds. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, disrupted many of the rituals and traditions of Ramadan. In this exploratory study, we present findings from 22 young Muslims' experiences with Ramadan and fasting during the pandemic. Our article sheds light on the techno-religious practices and information strategies used to mitigate isolation, share information, and celebrate Ramadan. We examine the sociotechnical configurations of religious rituals and highlight the resilience of these rituals even in the midst of a global pandemic. Our paper contributes to CSCW scholarship on technology appropriation and non-use as they relate to religious practices in the face of exogenous shocks such as the pandemic, and how design can better cater to the religious lives of individuals and communities.

Scholarly work interrogating time and temporality in CSCW predominantly focuses on the temporal coordination of work in high-resource settings and is usually based in Global North. This paper aims to complicate and complement this scholarship by investigating the temporal entanglements of digital humanitarian work with refugees and asylum seekers in Turkey during COVID-19. We interviewed 22 humanitarian workers to understand their experiences and concerns as well as strategies they employed to support refugees and immigrants at a distance. The data reveal the complex temporal, informational, and infrastructural dimensions of technologically-mediated refugee support work, challenging the trope of "pivot to remote work", as popular in western countries. Our findings contribute to the CSCW research on the theory of anticipation work and its relationship with the concept of collaborative rhythms to explicate the relational and situated aspects of the temporal experiences of humanitarian workers in low-resource settings.

The farmers' movement began in November 2020, when more than 300,000 protesters marched towards New Delhi in India in opposition to new agrarian acts introduced by the Indian central government. Organised by over 400 farmers' unions along with other organisations, for the next year, farmers and allied protesters set up bases around New Delhi and sustained the movement leading to its eventual success. We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with participants from the movement and explored the social organisation, the underlying technical infrastructures, and how collective action was organised. We outline how the social media ecosystem enabled hybrid forms of organisational structures and facilitated coalition-building between diverse groups. Further, the movement created and disseminated alternative media that opposed mainstream media narratives and facilitated community-building. We discuss how designed technologies and spaces can support social movements in the face of powerful antagonistic actors.

Financial technology (FinTech) platforms often exclude certain countries from their services due to global political conflicts. As a result, immigrants from these neglected countries struggle with transferring money to and from their homeland through formal mechanisms. Instead, they get involved in informal transnational transactions that, while flexible, are often risky and full of hassles. We looked into this issue through an online survey (n=127) and engaged with multiple stakeholders (n=16), including the Iranian immigrant community in Canada, to co-design an application called ?Kabootar' that matches senders and receivers of money across borders. In this application, a sender-receiver pair is matched with a pertinent pair sending money in the opposite direction. By facilitating two intra-national transactions in local currencies instead of two relatively complicated inter-national transactions, the need for money to cross borders is eliminated while staying within the boundaries of the law. Our user study (n=13) revealed several tensions in users trusting such informal transnational transactions. This work contributes to CSCW, HCI, and social computing's growing scholarship in personalized and collaborative computing technologies by advocating for a novel design approach based on collaboration and informality and extends their scope to the domain of FinTech for politically marginalized communities.

While the growth of financial technologies (FinTech) is making the flow of money faster, easier, and more secure, such technologies are often unable to serve many countries due to the global political environment. Despite its severe impact, this issue has remained understudied in the HCI literature. We address this gap by presenting our findings from a three-month-long ethnography with the Iranian community in Toronto, Canada. We present their struggles in transferring money to and from their home country - a process that entails financial loss, fear, uncertainty, and privacy breaches. We also outline the informal workarounds that allow this community to circumvent these challenges, along with the associated hassles. This paper contributes to broadening the scope of FinTech in the HCI literature by connecting it with the politics surrounding transnational transactions. We discuss the design implications of our findings and their contribution to the broader interests of HCI in mobilities and social justice.

India's #MeToo movement began in late-2018, and was largely a platform for some privileged women sharing their accounts of sexual harassment. Beyond issues of access to digital technology, our paper investigates why various sections of India's female and LGBTQ+ population chose not to engage with the #MeToo movement. Focusing on experiences with sexual harassment, we conducted 44 qualitative interviews with middle-class working women, feminist and queer activists, academics, and other stakeholders working against gender-based violence, to understand their perspectives on #MeToo. Our paper explores why some survivors bypass the legal infrastructure to speak out against sexual harassment using #MeToo, while others choose not to participate despite having access to social media platforms. Using the lens of infrastructure, we outline the imbrication of social media movements with existing social norms and legal infrastructures. Further, we highlight how infrastructural politics are connected to patriarchy, colonialism, caste, class, and gender struggles.

The Global South has seen a proliferation of e-governance initiatives aimed at digitizing governmental service delivery. However, paper continues to remain the primary medium of bureaucracy. During ethnographic fieldwork at the CM Helpline, a state-wide e-governance initiative in central India, we observed that even tech-savvy bureaucrats who fully supported both the initiative and its paper-to-electronic transition ensured that paper continues to persist in abundance. Drawing upon scholarship from HCI, anthropology, and science & technology studies, we theorize this contradiction to uncover the circulations of power between people, paper, and electronic systems. We suggest that designers should recognize that new systems often disempower existing actors. The process of transition should integrate new systems into the existing ecosystem and plan for the graceful retirement of older technologies. In addition to machine errors, systems should be resilient to human errors. Finally, new systems should attend to sociocultural and historical specificities.

With a rapid increase in the use of digital technologies, people in the Global South including Bangladesh are exposed to a wide-range of smartphone applications (termed as apps in this paper), which offer a variety of features and services. However, privacy leakage through apps has increasingly become a major concern in Bangladesh, where the app collecting users' sensitive information without their consent was reported in news media for privacy violation. Our study with 32 participants from varying age, literacy level, and profession in Dhaka, Bangladesh unveils the perceptions of people around data collection and sharing by the app reported in privacy leakage news. All of our participants were aware of information leakage through the app they use, where they possess varying perceptions around providing personal information, like a sense of benefit, necessity and contribution, indifference, fear, or (no) authority over data collection. Our analysis reveals the relation between users' privacy perceptions, local infrastructure, and social practices in Bangladesh, where we identify the situated challenges that interfere with people's understanding of privacy notice. Our results lead to a discussion on how people's privacy perceptions are influenced by rapid urbanization and the opportunities offered by digitization in Bangladesh. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations to develop situated and sustainable strategies to enhance privacy awareness and practices in the social setting of Bangladesh, and Global South.

This paper joins a growing body of work within ICTD and related fields studying the privacy challenges in the Global South. While most of the existing work in this area has focused on uses of technology in personal and home settings, a large part of computing in the Global South centers around public places, such as commercial Digital Service Centers (DSCs). In this paper, we present the findings from a six-month-long ethnography studying 19 Digital Service Centers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We find that infrastructural limitations, local power politics, lack of knowledge, and insufficient protection mechanisms lead to privacy vulnerabilities for the customers of these centers. We apply the lens of informal markets to analyze these vulnerabilities and connect our findings to the broader concerns of ICTD around development, ethics, and postcolonial computing and discuss potential design and policy implications around these issues.

Stigma, a critical challenge for social justice, has not received much attention in ICTD literature. Most existing designs that aim to combat stigma draw on an 'information and awareness' approach that is often inadequate to address stigma's deeper roots. To address this gap, we have conducted an interview and design study in five special needs schools1 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, involving twenty-nine parents and nine teachers. Based on our study, we present how the primary caretakers of children with autism face the stigma associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and how misogyny, economic apprehension, and misinformation generate this stigma. Drawing from a range of scholarly work in sociology and psychology, we demonstrate how those factors are rooted in the colonial history and contemporary social hierarchy of Bangladesh. Based on our participatory design sessions, we introduce and analyze potential design directions and connect our findings to the politics of inclusion and social justice in the context of the developing world.

This paper examines software piracy in the Global South from an accessibility lens, using the bio-technical metaphor of the 'cyborg.' Drawing on qualitative interviews with people with visual impairment (VI) from India and Peru, the paper interrogates the intimate relationships that users have with assistive technologies (ATs). It outlines the effectiveness of ATs in allowing users to actively control and shape their own lives and identities, and describes the various modalities that regulate the human body, technology, and human body-technology linkages. The paper argues that software piracy, when looked through the lens of the 'cyborg,' is an act of self-making that is motivated by a desire to gain autonomy and independence, i.e., it can be understood as a way to overcome the barriers that undermine access to the technological self. Further, software piracy allows a shift in the distribution of power from those who control and regulate the assistive technologies to the cyborgs themselves.

Rumors are an enduring form of communication across socio-cultural landscapes globally. Counter to their typical negative association, rumors play a nuanced role, helping people collectively deal with problems through constructing a representation of an uncertain situation. Drawing on unstructured interviews and participant observation from a technology goods marketplace in Bangalore, India, we study the circulation of rumors related to the government's recent policy of demonetization and entry of online marketplaces and digital wallets, all of which disrupted existing market practices. These rumors emerge as attempts at sensemaking when a community is faced with ambiguity. Through highlighting the relationship of institutional trust with rumors, the paper argues that the study of rumors can help us identify the concerns of a community in the face of differential power relations. Further, rumors are a form of social bonding which help communities make sense of their place in society and shape existing practices.

Marketplaces are rich sites for studying existing practices surrounding technology adoption, as well as for understanding how the entry of new technologies impact a diversity of social-economic groups. With the high-profile entry of e-commerce companies into the Indian retail scene, this paper seeks to understand the ways in which online shopping integrates into the everyday practices of shoppers. Using semi-structured qualitative interviews with shoppers in marketplaces at Bangalore, India and through the lens of domestication theory, we examine how the relationship between online shopping and shoppers is constructed. Beyond individual agency, this paper describes how institutional, infrastructural, and cultural forces shape the use and non-use of online marketplaces. By specifically studying non-use, we improve our understanding of the shortcomings of existing sites where technologies are encountered and of the potential considerations for future introductions of new ICTs.

In November 2016, the Government of India banned the vast majority of the nation's banknotes in a move referred to as 'demonetization', with the stated goals of fighting corruption, terrorism, and eventually expanding digital transactions. In this study of 200 shop-keepers in Mumbai and Bengaluru, we found that cash shortage increased digital payment adoption but that digital payments fell after new banknotes became available. Digital payment adoption depended on the nature and scope of transactions, type of product sold, as well as personal factors specific to business owners such as comfort and familiarity with other digital technologies and online transactions. Using theoretical work on market and information behavior, we examined environmental pushes for technology adoption against prevalent transactional practices, trust, and control. We propose that the move toward digital payments must be framed within a larger undertaking of technology-driven modernity that drives these initiatives, rather than just the efficiency or productivity gains digital payments present.

Citizens' perception of politicians and political issues is increasingly influenced by social media. However, little is known about the potential of second order effects of social media in parts of the world where the majority of voting citizens are not online. In this paper, we examine whether a politician can move to communicating through social media as their primary means of outreach, and still present their message to the mainstream population through traditional media. By studying of the use of Twitter by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi between 2009 and 2015, the second-most followed elected official in the world, we present evidence of the impact of social media on print news. We use computational text mining techniques to automatically identify print news reports that use Modi's tweets as a source, alongside manual qualitative coding of tweets to analyze the role of tweet themes in print news coverage. We conclude that while Modi's social media messaging does get coverage in the print news, it is his more "newsworthy" tweets, such as references to celebrities, other politicians, or major events such as holidays that have a greater likelihood of coverage.

This paper explores how actors in local markets in the Global South adapt traditional communication technologies to successfully collaborate to sustain the markets and their business practices. Drawing on ethnographic observations at a local technology goods market in Bangalore, India, the study details the use of a landline telephone intercom system as the primary tool for business communication in the market. Through analyzing how the intercom system relates to informality and physical space, the paper argues that it bridges the formal with the informal, and helps facilitate informal business practices while also allowing them to remain hidden from the formal regulatory gaze of the state.

Local informal markets or bazaars play a central role in embedding the adoption, consumption, and reproduction of digital technologies within the economic and cultural fabric of the Global South. This paper presents ethnographic accounts of informal ICT markets in two sites, one in India and the other in Bangladesh, and assesses how technology consumption unfolds within local practices. Building on social practice theory, this paper depicts the role of materiality, relationships, and situated knowledge in the functioning of a bazaar. We discuss how this knowledge expands our understanding of the evaluation of technology and technical expertise, and the persistence of these informal spaces despite the uptake of corporatized technology marketplaces. We argue that the bazaar represents a special kind of local voice that enriches the HCI scholarship in postcolonial computing.

Studies on technology adoption typically assume that a user's perception of usability and usefulness of technology are central to its adoption. Specifically, in the case of accessibility and assistive technology, research has traditionally focused on the artifact rather than the individual, arguing that individual technologies fail or succeed based on their usability and fit for their users. Using a mixed-methods field study of smartphone adoption by 81 people with visual impairments in Bangalore, India, we argue that these positions are dated in the case of accessibility where a non-homogeneous population must adapt to technologies built for sighted people. We found that many users switch to smartphones despite their awareness of significant usability challenges with smartphones. We propose a nuanced understanding of perceived usefulness and actual usage based on need-related social and economic functions, which is an important step toward rethinking technology adoption for people with disabilities.

The paper analyzes the warez scene, an illegal underground subculture on the Internet, which specializes in removing copy protection from software and releasing the cracked software for free. Despite the lack of economic incentives and the absence of external laws regulating it, the warez scene has been able to self-govern and self-organize for more than three decades. Through a directed content analysis of the subculture's digital traces, the paper argues that the ludic competition within the warez scene is an institution of collective action, and can, therefore, be approached as a common-pool resource (CPR). Subsequently, the paper uses Ostrom's framework of long-enduring common-pool resource institutions to understand the warez scene's longevity and ability to govern itself. Theoretical and design implications of these findings are then discussed.

ICTD benefits from being a broad multidisciplinary field that unites researchers from a wide range of domains attempting to understand the role of ICTs in the context of social, economic and political development. As a new field of study, however, ICTD continuously grapples with epistemological differences and varying (and often evolving) notions of what counts as development, and there still exists a significant gap in outlining where the current boundaries of this field lie. In this paper we present "Missing Pieces," an ongoing research project with the primary aim of uncovering the constitution, development, growth and impact of ICTD. Through in-depth quantitative and qualitative analyses of the distribution of participation in and impact of ICTD research across places, people, institutions, organizations and funding agencies, this project will look beyond just trends, and instead focus on finding the missing pieces, i.e. what, or rather who is being left out.

We propose an "accessibility infrastructure" view to understanding accessibility in real-world settings for people with visual impairments in the Global South. We study six cities --- Blantyre, Freetown, Kigali, Mumbai, San Jose, and Seoul --- all major cities from signatory nations of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Using mixed methods including a survey of 219 respondents and 59 in-depth interviews, we examine the gap between the policy promise of technological accessibility and existing social and economic infrastructure. We examine the idea of accessibility infrastructure and specifically focus on its social components through two factors --- stigma related to disability, and the community around technology users --- both of which emerge as important factors in enabling or excluding AT use. We propose that efforts around accessibility, particularly in the post-CRPD global awareness need to closely examine the reasons behind the gaps between the technological capabilities, and the real world possibilities for people with visual impairments where a social infrastructure provides a major barrier to meaningful accessibility.

This note discusses the use of cyborg theory to study assistive technology (AT) use by people with visual impairment (VI) in development contexts. We argue that the deep intimate interconnections that people form with their AT, while allowing them to become cyborgs, also become the means by which they can be regulated and controlled. This is a concern for ICTD, which strives to consider the instrumental outcomes of technology implementation as it is interwoven throughout people's lives. Applying Lessig's model of regulation to a cyborg body, we discuss the implications for protecting autonomy in AT use by people with visual impairment.

We examine the role of mobile devices in access to social, economic, and architectural spaces and resources by people with vision impairments in two urban agglomerations in Rwanda and Malawi using a survey and open-ended interviews. We discuss ways in which the intersection of gender and disability distinguishes the ways men and women experience access in their respective societies.