This study investigates how professional writers’ complex relationship with GenAI shapes their work practices and outcomes. Through a cross-sectional survey with writing professionals (n=403) in diverse roles, we show that collaboration and rivalry orientation are associated with differences in work practices and outcomes. Rivalry is primarily associated with relational crafting and skill maintenance. Collaboration is primarily associated with task crafting, productivity, and satisfaction, at the cost of long-term skill deterioration. Combination of the orientations (high rivalry and high collaboration) reconciles these differences, while boosting the association with the outcomes. Our findings argue for a balanced approach where high levels of rivalry and collaboration are essential to shape work practices and generate outcomes aimed at the long-term success of the job. We present key design implications on how to increase friction (rivalry) and reduce over-reliance (collaboration) to achieve a more balanced relationship with GenAI.

Generative AI (GAI) technologies are disrupting professional writing, challenging traditional practices. Recent studies explore GAI adoption experiences of creative practitioners, but we know little about how these experiences evolve into established practices and how GAI resistance alters these practices. To address this gap, we conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with writing professionals who adopted and/or resisted GAI. Using the theoretical lens of Job Crafting, we identify four strategies professionals employ to reshape their roles. Writing professionals employed GAI resisting strategies to maximize human potential, reinforce professional identity, carve out a professional niche, and preserve credibility within their networks. In contrast, GAI-enabled strategies allowed writers who embraced GAI to enhance desirable workflows, minimize mundane tasks, and engage in new AI-managerial labor. These strategies amplified their collaborations with GAI while reducing their reliance on other people. We conclude by discussing implications of GAI practices on writers' identity and practices as well as crafting theory.

This paper presents Saharaline, an intervention designed to provide collective social support for teachers in low-income schools. Implemented as a WhatsApp-based helpline, Saharaline enables teachers to reach out for personalized, long-term assistance with a wide range of problems and stressors, including pedagogical, emotional, and technological challenges. Depending on the support needed, teachers’ requests are routed to appropriate domain experts— staff employed by educational non-profit organizations who understand teachers’ on-the-ground realities—who offer localized and contextualized assistance. Via a three-month exploratory deployment with 28 teachers in India, we show how Saharaline’s design enabled a collective of diverse education experts to craft and deliver localized solutions that teachers could incorporate into their practice. We conclude by reflecting on the efficacy of our intervention in low-resource work contexts and provide recommendations to enhance collective social support interventions similar to Saharaline.

Recently, the AI/ML research community has indicated an urgent need to establish Responsible AI (RAI) values and practices as part of the AI/ML lifecycle. Several organizations and communities are responding to this call by sharing RAI guidelines. However, there are gaps in awareness, deliberation, and execution of such practices for multi-disciplinary ML practitioners. This work contributes to the discussion by unpacking co-production challenges faced by practitioners as they align their RAI values. We interviewed 23 individuals, across 10 organizations, tasked to ship AI/ML based products while upholding RAI norms and found that both top-down and bottom-up institutional structures create burden for different roles preventing them from upholding RAI values, a challenge that is further exacerbated when executing conflicted values. We share multiple value levers used as strategies by the practitioners to resolve their challenges. We end our paper with recommendations for inclusive and equitable RAI value-practices, creating supportive organizational structures and opportunities to further aid practitioners.

Support plays a vital role in the teaching profession. A good support system can empower teachers to regulate their emotions and effectively manage stress while working in isolation. The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a hybrid form of education, necessitating the acquisition of new skills by teachers and compelling them to adapt to remote teaching. This new development further amplifies the sense of isolation prevalent amongst the teaching community. Against this backdrop, our study investigates the availability of sociotechnical support infrastructures for teachers in low-income schools while also looking into the support practices embraced by this class of teachers following the pandemic. Through 28 qualitative interviews involving teachers, management and personnel from support organizations, we demonstrate how teachers have largely taken the initiative to establish their own informal support networks in the absence of formal support infrastructures. Smartphones have significantly augmented these support practices, serving as both a valuable source of support as well as a medium for facilitating support practices. However, in comparison to other forms of support received from these sources, the availability of emotion-focused support for teachers have proven to be inadequate, creating imbalances in their support seeking practices. Our paper provides different contextual ways to reduce these imbalances and improve the occupational well-being of teachers.

In recent years, there has been a growing focus on HCI research in non-western contexts, attracting junior researchers from diverse backgrounds to actively engage in this global community. However, there are limited avenues for junior researchers to learn the unwritten practices and nuances of the research process. Our workshop addresses this need through a 3-hour coaching session where junior researchers are paired with experienced senior researchers to work on a concrete research task of the junior researcher’s choice, providing valuable mentorship and guidance.

Social media has witnessed an unprecedented growth in users based in low-income communities in the Global South. However, much remains unknown about the drivers of misinformation in such communities. To fill this gap, we conducted an interview-based study to examine how rural and urban communities in India engage with misinformation on WhatsApp. We found that misinformation led to bitterness and conflict – rural users who had higher social status heavily influenced the perceptions and engagement of marginalized members. While urban users relied on the expertise of gatekeepers for verification, rural users engaged in collective deliberations in offline spaces. Both rural and urban users knowingly forwarded misinformation. However, rural users propagated hyperlocal misinformation, whereas urban users forwarded misinformation to reduce their efforts to assess information credibility. Using a public sphere lens, we propose that the reactions to misinformation provide a view of Indian society and its schisms around class, urbanity, and social interactions.

Women’s economic empowerment is central to gender equality. However, work opportunities available to low-income women in patriarchal societies are infrequent. While crowd work has the potential to increase labor participation of such women, much remains unknown about their engagement with crowd work and the resultant opportunities and tensions. To fill this gap, we critically examined the adoption and use of a crowd work platform by low-income women in India. Through a qualitative study, we found that women faced tremendous challenges, for example, in seeking permission from family members to do crowd work, lack of family support and encouragement, and often working in unfavorable environments where they had to hide their work lives. While crowd work took a toll on their physical and emotional wellbeing, it also led to increased confidence, agency, and autonomy. We discuss ways to reduce frictions and tensions in participation of low-income women on crowd work platforms.

Although WhatsApp-based communication is playing an increasingly large role in the professional lives of teachers in low-income schools, the nature of the interactions that occur and how these interactions enable cooperative work are not well understood. We contribute a qualitative analysis of 26 existing WhatsApp groups (35,567 messages) that examines (1) the strategies used to encourage interaction within teacher-focused WhatsApp groups, and (2) how these interactions are sustained by teachers, management, and organizations over a period of time. We use teacher networks and activity awareness model to make sense of WhatsApp-based interactions and show how WhatsApp narrows the gap between management and teachers, leading to additional work and stress for teachers. WhatsApp was also used to circulate polarizing and malicious information, leading to a variety of interesting content moderation strategies. Our findings expand the scope of research on teacher networks to low-income contexts and will inform future interventions that enable cooperative work among teachers.

Low-income merchants in India, who conduct business via makeshift shops and handcarts, are increasingly using digital payment systems for business operations. Although these merchants are a key stakeholder in digital payment ecosystems, they have not yet received much attention from the research community. We present a qualitative study consisting of observations and interviews with 24 low-income merchants and 10 agents that explores the vulnerabilities merchants experience as they adopt and use digital payments. Using the notion of vulnerability as a lens, we show how socio-technical interactions between merchants and agents contribute to at least four different types of vulnerabilities: access-based, identity-based, financial, and informational vulnerabilities. We discuss how agents, customers, and fraudsters take advantage of merchants’ vulnerabilities to commit different types of fraud that lead to serious harm for merchants. We show how merchants developed strategies to combat fraud that lead to more work and extra burdens for merchants. Our research suggests a cyclic model of vulnerability that exposes the cumulative effects of vulnerabilities, frauds, and harms experienced by merchants. We end by providing practical recommendations for digital payment companies to break this cycle and better serve low-income merchants.

Smartphones play an increasingly large role in the professional lives of teachers in low-income contexts, creating an urgent need to better understand the role of technology-related stress (technostress) in teachers' smartphone use for work. We contribute a mixed methods study analyzing the impact of smartphone use on teachers' work lives in low-income Indian schools. Findings from 70 interviews and 1,361 survey responses suggest that although smartphones aid teaching and administrative functions, smartphone use also significantly predicts burnout among teachers, with technostress providing a major explanation for this relationship. We reveal how teachers' work is constantly surveilled and monitored via technology and how teachers' personal smartphones were controlled and repurposed through socio-technical structures by the higher management to serve management's goals, substantially increasing the work teachers were required to perform outside of work hours. Our work extends technostress research to HCI4D contexts and highlights the need to develop better support structures for teachers and rethink how smartphones are used in their work.

Current ICTD best practices call on practitioner organizations that deploy technology interventions with marginalized communities to commit to long-term engagements and provide continuous support. This paper describes a qualitative study that examines the challenges and issues that arise for organizations that have tried to answer this call: a set of education-focused non-profit organizations in India that have invested heavily in building long-term relationships with low-income schools and that are deeply committed to providing ongoing support, both in-person and via technology. Interviews and observations with 71 participants (51 from eight organizations, and 15 teachers and five principals from 12 schools) reveal (1) the challenges and issues that arise as organizations integrate smartphones into teacher support programs, and (2) the strategies that teachers and organizations use to ease smartphone adoption in teacher support programs. Our findings uncover the effects of organizations' smartphone-oriented support programs on teachers' workloads, efficacy, and stress, and highlight opportunities for organizations to improve their programs and support structures.

The proliferation of mobile devices around the world, combined with falling costs of hardware and Internet connectivity, have resulted in an increasing number of organizations that work to introduce educational technology interventions into low-income schools in the Global South. However, to date, most prior HCI research examining such interventions has focused on interventions that target students. In this paper, we expand prior literature by examining an intervention, called Meghshala, that targets teachers in low-income schools as its primary users. Through interviews and observations with 39 participants from 12 government schools in India, we show how the introduction of a teacher-focused technology intervention causes teachers to reconfigure their work practices, including lesson preparation, in-classroom teaching practices, bureaucratic work processes, and post-teaching feedback mechanisms. We use the concept of material agency to analyze our findings with respect to teacher agency and reconfiguration, and use theories of teacher knowledge to highlight the kinds of knowledge production that teachers in our research context tend to focus on (e.g., content knowledge). Finally, we offer design opportunities for future teacher-focused technology interventions.

Despite software engineering's inherently collaborative nature, collaboration with others hasn't been the primary way for students to learn how to program. Although various collaboration frameworks, such as Git, are widely used in software engineering, they've been treated as separate skills to acquire in addition to learning programming languages, rather than ways of learning, working, and thinking while learning to program. One collaborative software development task that students often want to engage in is building websites. However, the complexity of web syntax and architecture has been a hurdle in teaching and learning web design and development, especially for beginners without sufficient technical background. Specifically, syntactic barriers in several different languages for a webpage, inherent coupling of content and design in HTML, difficulty in understanding server-client model, and need for hosting resources for deployment contribute to a steep learning curve in building websites "from scratch". This work aims to address these issues by developing GLIDE (Git-Learning Integrated Development Environment) - a set of tools and curriculum that support in-class collaborative development in web engineering courses. GLIDE structures the website development process as a teacher-guided Git workflow for a team of students collaborating in groups in a Git repository. The application also provides a web programming model that separates content, from design, from implementation, allowing students to take on different roles and responsibilities during the development process. This demo presents a tutorial on how a group of students can build websites collaboratively with teacher's assistance based on the GLIDE software platform and curriculum.