Credit scoring is an increasingly central and contested domain of data and AI governance, frequently framed as a neutral and objective method of assessing risk across diverse economic and political contexts. Based on a nine-month ethnography of credit scoring practices in Nairobi, Kenya, we examined the sociotechnical and institutional work of data science in digital lending. While established regional telcos and banks are leveraging proprietary data to develop digital loan products, algorithmic credit scoring is being transformed by new actors, techniques, and shifting regulations. Our findings show how practitioners construct alternative data using technical and legal workarounds, formulate risk through multiple interpretations, and negotiate model performance via technical and political means. We argue that algorithmic credit scoring is accomplished through the ongoing work of alignment that stabilizes risk under conditions of persistent uncertainty, which takes epistemic, modeling, and contextual forms. Extending work on alignment in HCI, we show how alignment operates as a two-way translation, where models are made “safe for worlds” while those worlds are reshaped to be “safe for models.”

Ethnography attends to relations among people, practices, and the technologies that mediate them. Central to this method is the duality of roles ethnographers navigate as researchers and participants and as outsiders and insiders. However, the rise of digital platforms has introduced new opportunities as well as practical and ethical challenges that reshape these dualities across hybrid media environments spanning both online and offline contexts. Drawing on two case studies of VRChat and WhatsApp, we examine how ethnographers employ diverse tactics to study both enduring and emerging socio-cultural issues of race and caste, particularly those that form what are often called publics. We propose emergent relationality as a key analytic for understanding the mutual shaping of ethnographers, platforms, and publics. In this work, emergent relationality offers registers for analyzing how positionality and hybrid media environments constitute and condition what can be accessed, articulated, and made public.

In this position paper, we argue that baseball-and sports more broadly-provide a unique and under-explored opportunity for researchers to study human-robot interaction (HRI) in real-world settings. Using the rise of robot umpires in baseball as a primary example, we examine emerging themes such as power dynamics among players and umpires, labor implications, and technical challenges. We emphasize the affordances and benefits of studying sports within HRI, including the integration of interdisciplinary perspectives, the large-scale deployment of robots, and the examination of their role in deeply rooted cultural practices.

This paper reexamines appropriation in human-computer interaction (HCI), which refers to the unexpected alterations made to artifacts by users. We analyze when earlier informal practices of exchanging airtime for cash became enclosed into proprietary mobile money platforms, and show that this enclosure has a longer history in global telecommunications. Building on interviews with 19 experts in computing, policy, and media, we challenge teleological narratives of the inevitability of mobile money often overlooked in computing and global development. We develop an ‘appropriation matrix’ introducing a dialectic of re- and reverse- appropriation animated by three elements—users, artifacts, and imaginaries—that unexpectedly switch between production and consumption, complicating invention and innovation in formal and informal economies. This matrix may help HCI and development better understand how different values, visions, and practices might have led (or could still lead) to different designs of products like mobile money.

HCI researchers work within spaces of possibility for potential designs of technology. New methods (e.g., user centrism); expected types of interaction (user with device); and potential applications (urban navigation) can extend the boundaries of these possibilities. However, structural and systemic factors can also foreclose them. A recent wide and shallow survey of 116 individuals involved in technology development across 26 countries in sub-Saharan Africa reveals how factors of political economy significantly impact upon technological possibilities. Monopolies, international power dynamics, race, and access to capital open or constrain technological possibilities at least as much as device-centric or user-focused constraints do. Though their thrust may have been anticipated by reference to political economic trends, the structural constraints we found were underestimated by technologists even a decade ago. We discuss the implications for technology development in Africa and beyond.