Emerging techniques developed by AI researchers promise to offer the capacity to support disaster risk management (DRM), through making data collection or analysis practices faster, less costly, or more accurate. However, in every socially consequential domain in which AI tools have been applied, these technologies have been demonstrated to have some degree of negative consequences. This paper explores an attempt to convene technical experts in the area of DRM to discuss potential negative impacts, their approaches toward mitigating these impacts as well as identifying some of the overarching challenges. In doing so, we contribute new findings about a domain that has received relatively little attention from critical and ethical AI researchers, and the opportunities and limitations that are presented by working with domain experts to evaluate the social consequences of emerging technologies.

Women in the global south often seek justice to their online harassment through unveiling the harassers and the screenshots of their sent harassment texts and visual contents before the relevant authorities. Nevertheless, such evidence is often challenged for their authenticity. Our survey (n=91) and interview (n=43) with Bangladeshi online gender harassment victims revealed the depth of the problem, and we set design goals to collect evidence from Facebook Messenger with ensured authenticity. Building on the ‘shame-based model’ of gender justice [12], we designed ‘Unmochon’, a tool that captures authentic evidence and shares with victims’ intended group. Our user-study (n=48) revealed that diminishing authenticity problem may still leave the victim and online gender justice entangled with mob-sentiment, hegemonic legal consciousness, and several privacy aspects. Our findings open up a new discussion on how HCI-design should address online gender justice in such a complex social setting.

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 design of participatory media platforms can have many variations in terms of whether or not anonymous communication is allowed, what moderation policies are in use, the conversation model that is supported, etc. We use six case-studies of voice-based ICT4D participatory media platforms running in India to outline a typology of design axes that can be used to characterize these platforms. Such typologies can be useful for ICT4D practitioners to conceptualize suitable designs for their platforms in different contexts, and to reconfigure the platforms in case design changes are required. We also use this typology to discuss the design constraints and flexibilities allowed by Internet based social media platforms.

A series of events in October 2017 led to the initiation of an unprecedented global feminist movement over various social media platforms, where using the hashtag #MeToo (or some variants of it), women across the world publicly shared their untold stories of being sexually harassed. We conducted an anonymous online survey (n=180) and an interview study (n=30) to understand the participation of Bangladeshi women in this movement. Our study concurs that while Bangladeshi women, who are regular users of social media, supported the spirit of this movement; did not participate in it, even though they had many bitter experiences. Our analysis shows that their non-participation was largely influenced by a cultural difference, patriarchy, perceived futility and lack of hope, and a reliance on alternatives. We discuss how our findings of women's use of technology platforms, which is conditioned and limited by male-dominated and conservative Bangladeshi society, relates to the broader issues in feminism that the GROUP community is interested in.

In October 2017, there happened the uprising of an unprecedented online movement on social media by women across the world who started publicly sharing their untold stories of being sexually harassed along with the hashtag #MeToo (or some variants of it). Those stories did not only strike the silence that had long hid the perpetrators, but also allowed women to discharge some of their bottled-up grievances, and revealed many important information surrounding sexual harassment. In this paper, we present our analysis of about one million such tweets collected between October 15 and October 31, 2017 that reveals some interesting patterns and attributes of the people, place, emotions, actions, and reactions related to the tweeted stories. Based on our analysis, we also advance the discussion on the potential role of online social media in breaking the silence of women by factoring in the strengths and limitations of these platforms.

In October 2017, an unprecedented social media movement started where women from all around the world publicly shared their untold stories of being sexually harassed using the hashtag #MeToo (or some variants of it). While this movement raised voices against sexual harassment across the globe, many women in South Asia did not participate in this movement. In this paper, we present our study on non-participation of many Bangladeshi women in this movement through an anonymous online survey (n = 180), and an in-depth interview study (n = 30). Our study shows that many Bangladeshi women, despite being supportive of the movement, did not participate in this movement because of several social, cultural, and infrastructural reasons. We use transnational feminism as a theoretical framework to explain their non-participation. We further discuss how the lessons learned from this study help us better understand the participation, functioning, and impact of social media movements.

It is well known that technology based interventions targeted towards development need to look beyond technology to be successful - cultural nuances, capability and intentions of the people, institutional linkages, financial sustainability, etc all need to fall in place to build a robust development program. Supporting this argument, we describe an interactive voice-based community media platform in rural India that works through mobile phones, and how several non-technological innovations in content management, community mobilization, and social impact processes were brought about to make the program an effective social development intervention. We believe that the challenges and insights described in this paper, which span over the last three years of functioning of the platform, will be useful for other researchers and practitioners involved in both mobile and non-mobile based community media projects around the world.