Recent geographic shifts in high-tech labor markets have redirected attention toward economic growth in small cities and rural regions across the United States. We examine how this shift has spurred economic development organizations, think tanks, and rural municipalities to leverage digital data in local economies as a strategic tool for attracting investment. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on rural development policy and practice, we turn to the design of a new type of development tool: the digital asset map. In this paper, we describe how nationwide mapping and data visualization initiatives push for the digitization of rural community-based asset data, from broadband infrastructure to breweries. While these systems are intended to promote sustainable rural development, and to help leaders in their efforts to repopulate and revitalize rural communities in decline, their design often encourages comparison across communities in ways that reify divides between the rural “haves” and “have-nots”. By privileging quantifiable data, digital asset maps risk marginalizing communities whose strengths are less easily captured in datasets, potentially reinforcing existing patterns of uneven rural development.

Through design workshops and ethnographic fieldwork, this manuscript explores how students in hybrid alternative high-schools navigate their conflicting desires for nurturing educational environments and efficient certification. We highlight two competing visions in students’ designs of future educational technologies: one of affirmative and supportive spaces that address student mental health, sense of community, and identity needs; another that prioritizes expediency through self-paced, on-demand learning. We make three key contributions: 1) documenting how students struggle to navigate competing educational purposes; 2) analyzing how current hybrid school structures meet and conflict with student desires; 3) demonstrating how design ideas originating from students embody these tensions, sometimes offering paths forward for creative reconciliation. We argue that hybrid schools represent a critical site for understanding the future of educational technology, and advocate for designing digital tools and platforms that balance care and efficiency while supporting diverse student needs in increasingly digitized educational landscapes.

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CSCW and HCI scholars are increasingly adopting asset-based approaches to community-based social computing research. Emerging from asset-based community development (ABCD), an approach to community and economic development research and practice that emerged in the 1990s, advocates for asset-based approaches argue that a "needs-based approach" to development is overly focused on community deficits, and in doing so portrays communities in a largely negative light. Using ABCD methods, social computing scholars work to aid communities in identifying, classifying, and deploying their unrealized assets through sociotechnical systems. But researchers deploying asset-based approaches in CSCW and HCI more broadly have yet to grapple with the origins of ABCD in neoliberal economic shifts of the 1980s and 1990s that perpetuated distrust in the state and sought to transfer development power to private, local actors. Drawing on a case study of controversy around the construction of a cell tower in a very remote and rural community in the Midwestern United States to examine the inherent tradoffs present in asset- and deficit-based research.

For young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, and those belonging to other marginalized sexual and gender identities (LGBTQ+), accessing information to develop one's identity and community is essential. Yet information and resource access is a particularly complex process for LGBTQ+ youth living in rural areas and small towns without dense, visible LGBTQ+ networks. While efforts to remove LGBTQ+ resources and demonize LGBTQ+ people intensify, this study asks a group of young LGBTQ+ adults living in and around a college town in the rural Midwestern United States to document their experiences with navigating information landscapes in low-resource settings. Despite the remarkable everyday creativity required to craft their information practices, participants' current efforts produce several vulnerabilities that make local queer information networks precarious and often inaccessible. We lay out several patterns in this data, including experiences of both connectedness and disconnectedness, the role of organizations in information sharing, and the existence of both active and passive information search. Building on prior research that found increasing demand for multi-modal access to relevant information that is digitally enabled, but deeply embedded in localized social geography and LGBTQ+ community, we use this data and complementary interviews to identify problem areas and potential interventions to strengthen rural LGBTQ+ young people's information access. In response to the informational needs and desires of LGBTQ+ youth in this community, we propose a series of imaginative designs. These speculative artifacts are embedded in local communities to strengthen grassroots webs of knowledge. We focus on contributing solutions that fall under three problem areas in participants' information ecosystem: increasing information stumbling, building expert capacity and support, and bridging the disconnected to the connected. We propose speculative conceptual designs that address core challenges in LGBTQ+ information networks, working in the tradition of ''information activism'' to create and maintain access to otherwise precarious and ephemeral resources and spark social change.

This paper presents the findings from a series of participatory design workshops with LGBTQ people living in the rural Midwestern United States. Using future workshops as a method, we seek to understand contemporary problems facing rural LGBTQ people and leverage design exercises to facilitate community members to come up with creative solutions. What we find are people grappling with the complexities of visibility, safety, and resource access in their rural communities; people who wanted to be able to use and create sociotechnical solutions that could help them navigate these complexities. Drawing on these findings, we argue for further exploration of design that experiments with the tension between visibility and safety for LGBTQ people. Further, we argue that future workshops and participatory design are well-positioned for continued work with marginalized communities, but that we need to maintain political orientations towards liberation and justice.?

introduction Introduction: Performing Rurality with Computing Share on Authors: Norman Makoto Su Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University BloomingtonView Profile , Jean Hardy Michigan State University Michigan State UniversityView Profile , Morgan Vigil-Hayes Northern Arizona University Northern Arizona UniversityView Profile , Tiffany Veinot University of Michigan University of MichiganView Profile , Rob Comber KTH Royal Institute of Technology KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 28Issue 3July 2021 Article No.: 16epp 1–13https://doi.org/10.1145/3461832Online:03 July 2021Publication History 0citation126DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads126Last 12 Months126Last 6 weeks17 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

HCI researchers are increasingly conducting research in rural communities. This paper interrogates how rurality has been treated in previous HCI research conducted in developed and high-income countries. We draw from research outside of HCI to suggest how we can effectively engage with rurality in research. We present results of a scoping review of HCI literature that asks: 1) How do HCI researchers define rurality?; 2) How do the unique characteristics of rural communities enter into study findings?; 3) What methods are used in rural research?; and 4) Where has rural research been conducted? More than twice as many rural HCI articles have been conducted in low-income and/or developing countries than in high-income and/or developed countries. HCI researchers rarely define rurality, and when they do, they primarily define it using descriptive rather than sociocultural or symbolic definitions. Rural research findings have primarily addressed infrastructure and distance/geographic isolation as unique rural characteristics, while qualitative, observational, and cross-sectional methods dominate this research. There are further opportunities for HCI research to more productively advance understanding of what rurality is, and how it matters for sociotechnical systems.

A growing body of literature addresses the use of Grindr and SCRUFF, location-based networking applications for gay, bisexual, and queer men. This study builds on that work, asking whose sexuality is produced in the design and use of these applications. Drawing from ethnographic research and discourse analysis, we build on analytical frames from science and technology studies, feminist HCI, and sexuality studies, proposing what we call the desiring user: a user whose desires and sexuality are mediated through technological devices in particular ways. In doing so, we demonstrate how the discursive constructions of the user put forth by the creators of Grindr and SCRUFF clash with the lived reality of our rural interlocutors. We address emerging themes in CSCW and HCI related to the construction of sexual subjectivities and social computing in rural settings.

Increasing numbers of American parents identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT). Shifting social movements are beginning to achieve greater recognition for LGBT parents and more rights for their families; however, LGBT parents still experience stigma and judgment in a variety of social contexts. We interviewed 28 LGBT parents to investigate how they navigate their online environments in light of these societal shifts. We find that 1) LGBT parents use social media sites to detect disapproval and identify allies within their social networks; 2) LGBT parents become what we call incidental advocates, when everyday social media posts are perceived as advocacy work even when not intended as such; and 3) for LGBT parents, privacy is a complex and collective responsibility, shared with children, partners, and families. We consider the complexities of LGBT parents' online disclosures in the context of shifting social movements and discuss the importance of supporting individual and collective privacy boundaries in these contexts.