This study investigates how Iranian immigrant nonprofit groups experience exclusion within technology and AI-driven infrastructures. Based on 27 semi-structured interviews, it identifies how legitimacy barriers, capacity gaps, and ethical dilemmas intersect to create a cycle of infrastructural immobility that restricts these groups’ participation in the digital nonprofit ecosystem. The findings reveal that generative AI, while providing some opportunities, risks exacerbating these challenges by deepening marginalization and reinforcing inequalities in access, data visibility, AI fluency, and AI-mediated representation. Uncritical adoption of generative AI in the nonprofit domain undermines transparency and human connection in everyday organizational practice and induces bias in AI-generated content in the context of Iranian immigrant nonprofit work. To address these issues, the paper proposes interaction-level design strategies that promote community-driven inclusion, support context-aware capacity building, and leverage AI’s augmentative potential to strengthen transparency practices and human connection among Iranian immigrant nonprofits.

Social media platforms increasingly function as informal infrastructures to seek justice in contexts where formal justice systems are inaccessible or distrusted. We examine how Bangladeshi individuals leverage Facebook to disclose personal experiences of harm (e.g., sexual harassment, fraud, and abuse) and pursue justice. Our in-depth interviews with 18 participants unpacked the motivations, strategic choices, and sociotechnical risks involved in such disclosures. Our participants carefully navigated trade-offs between visibility, credibility, privacy, and legal vulnerability. Our findings contribute to HCI by (1) conceptualizing justice-seeking behaviors in low-trust, high-risk environments; (2) offering empirical insights into post-curation, audience targeting, and identity management; and (3) identifying design opportunities for safer, more equitable platform interactions. We present implications for platform governance and moderation, including features that support credibility, mitigate emotional harm, and enhance the legibility of justice claims. This work advances critical HCI and social computing perspectives on safety, care, and power in digital participation.

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and large language models have created a new dynamic of student engagement beyond academic contexts. While prior research focused on AI’s role in providing academic and emotional support, less is known about the motivations to personalize AI, its diverse usage, and the intricate relationship between AI and the student population, especially in the context of the Global South. Our study fills this gap with findings drawn from 21 semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds in Bangladesh, revealing usage as companionship, intimate partnership, worldbuilding, reminiscence of dead family members, and prioritization of AI over human relationships. These findings shed light accounting the local cultural norms on shaping AI adoption in Bangladesh, highlighting both opportunities and risks, and provide essential insights to inform necessary guidelines. We further connect our findings to the broader issues in Human-AI interaction and offer future research directions.

Rapid digitization across government services, financial platforms, and telecommunications has intensified the collection and processing of large-scale personal data in Bangladesh. In response, the state has introduced multiple regulatory instruments, including the Personal Data Protection Ordinance, the Cyber Security Ordinance, and the National Data Governance Ordinance in 2025. While these initiatives signal an emerging legal regime for data protection, little scholarly work examines how they operate collectively in practice. This paper presents a legal-institutional analysis of Bangladesh’s data protection regime through a systematic review of these three ordinances, mapping how they collectively structure personal data governance and where frictions arise in their translation into institutional and regulatory enforcement. Our findings reveal that this emerging regime is constrained by uneven regulatory capacity, limited institutional independence, and a misaligned legal assumption of individualized, autonomous data subjects. We further demonstrate how these frameworks invisibilize prevalent sociotechnical layers, such as mediated access via “human bridges” and informal data flows, rendering formal protections difficult to operationalize. This paper contributes to HCI scholarship by expanding the concept of data protection as a complex sociotechnical design problem shaped by the informal infrastructures of the Global South.

Driven by pragmatic, cost-related, and environmental factors, voice-based remote community engagement tools (such as Interactive Voice Response) are emerging as a key modality for engaging marginalized communities. These voice-based digital solutions offer new opportunities for distributed community engagement and empowerment, and the ability to capture, store, and access a wide range of different records (i.e., recordings, interactions and contextual metadata) associated with community engagements. This potential for large scale, distributed community record collection necessitates an understanding of inclusive and effective recordkeeping approaches for appraisal, documentation, preservation, and accessibility of different types of records (such as audio recordings, transcripts, reports, and observatory notes) related to voice-based community engagements. Through qualitative analysis of stakeholder focus group discussions with domestic workers (as marginalized community members) and NGOs working in the sector, we present valuable insights and recommendations for the development of recordkeeping approaches tailored to voice-based remote community engagement records.

The sex workers in the Global South represent a significant portion of the world sex industry. However, when compared to the relevant HCI literature on sex work and computing, there exists a noticeable gap in comprehending the experiences and circumstances of the sex workers in this region. This study fills the void by presenting the findings of a three-month-long ethnography with 25 legal sex workers in Daulatdia brothel, Bangladesh, revealing their struggles with stigma, low-tech literacy, and the emerging threats of online security, along with their skills and creativity to bypass those. Drawing on the previous literature on South Asian feminism, postcolonial computing, and critical urban studies, we demonstrate how these findings are deeply rooted in the country’s history and culture and propelled by a modernist vision of “development” that marginalizes such communities. Our discussion advances HCI’s discourse on sexuality, privacy, equity, and generates implications for design and policy changes.

The rise of gig economy platforms has highlighted the impact platform and algorithm design can have upon workers’ experiences. This paper reports on an extended series of collaborative design engagements with a private company and an international non-government organisation during the production of an Interactive Voice Response component for a gig economy platform. We present the findings of a design ethnography undertaken during this process, and discuss how design decisions reflect how each party’s values, motivations and assumptions are embedded within the final technology. There exists a need for simple methods to assist practitioners to surface and critically engage with the disparate values, priorities and assumptions held by the system’s stakeholders. We demonstrate that this can be done during the production of real-world systems through the application of constrained design as a values lever, and discuss how constraint-based values levers can support critical reflection, even in resource-constrained commercial development contexts.

This work addresses the challenges associated with cashless transactions and Mobile Financial Services (MFS) in the Global South. In our 19-months long interview study in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we engaged with 38 participants, including everyday users, bank employees, and policymakers, and investigated their experiences and perspectives associated with financial services. Our findings reveal a wide range of factors, naming intermediaries, terrorist assemblage, and re-skilling the existing employees that impede the mass adoption of cashless transaction services in Bangladesh. The findings from this study contribute to the ongoing discourse on the challenges and opportunities offered by the digitization of financial systems in Bangladesh. Our recommendations aim to improve the integration of the cashless systems within the societal context of Bangladesh and, more broadly, the Global South.

This note explores how various technology-mediated negative experiences and safety concerns of non-Western LGBTQ+ users, particularly from Bangladesh, hinder their continuing online interactions and self-presentation practices. Based on face-to-face and Skype semi-structured interviews (n=31), our initial results report that along with facing life-threatening harassing experiences online, Bangladeshi LGBTQ+ users also struggle with audience management and perceived privacy affordances that critically restrict their identity exploration and overall online participation, often forcing them to adopt fake/pseudo-identity online. These findings advocate for better design implications on safer social media participation, especially for LGBTQ+ users from non-Western contexts, and call for more attention to inclusive technologies.

Through Facebook "Group" feature, users often sensitize communionships, join different Facebook groups, and establish imagined communities with known people and strangers. In our interview study with 32 admins and users of Facebook groups, we explored the influential factors of such communionships, the challenges the Facebook group admins face while managing these communities, and how they resolve those. Our findings show that admins set rules for the entry and maintenance of the groups, monitor members' activities, and often limit their actions or mute them during conflicts. Thus, the members and admins of the groups together grow a sensibility of sovereignty within the community on Facebook. While the imagined sovereignty in Facebook groups is empowering, this empowerment may not be perceived and experienced evenly by everyone in such online communities. To explain this, we build on the concept of "Imagined Communities' by Benedict Anderson [16 ] and argue that there is a tension between Facebook admins' perceived sovereignty and other users' empowerment in practice. Our work joins the body of CSCW literature that aims at designing more sustainable and collaborative tools for specific communities on Facebook groups and other similar platforms.

Social interaction across multiple online platforms is a challenge for gender and sexual minorities (GSM) due to the stigmatization they face, which increases the complexity of their self-presentation decisions. These online interactions and identity disclosures can be more complicated for GSM in non-Western contexts due to consequentially different audiences and perceived affordances by the users, and limited baseline understanding of the conflation of these two with local norms and the opportunities they practically represent. Using focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews, we engaged with 61 Hijra individuals from Bangladesh, a severely stigmatized GSM from south Asia, to understand their overall online participation and disclosure behaviors through the lens of personal social media ecosystems. We find that along with platform audiences, affordances, and norms, participant skill/knowledge, and cultural influences also impact navigation through multiple platforms, resulting in differential benefits from privacy features. This impacts how Hijra perceive online spaces, and shape their self-presentation and disclosure behaviors over time. Content Warning: This paper discusses graphic contents (e.g. rape and sexual harassment) related to Hijra.

To protect under-represented and marginalized workers from the upcoming automation boom, it is imperative to critically examine the past technological breakthroughs and their impacts on workers. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, computer-aided newspaper production technology gradually started becoming popular in Bangladesh, making the traditional hot metal typesetting technology obsolete. The typesetters, who relied on manual labor and a very basic level of literacy, experienced mass layoffs and had to adapt to new technology to survive in their profession. In this work, we interviewed 17 typesetters from that period to understand their technology adoption dynamics. Our findings reveal that despite a few success stories, most of the typesetters failed to adopt and gradually went into oblivion, mainly because of local infrastructural issues. We connect our findings to broader issues of culture, politics, and economics and provide concrete suggestions and policy recommendations to protect more than six million workers who are vulnerable to technology-induced job displacement in the next 20 years in Bangladesh.

Facebook users often join Facebook groups to connect to the people with the same interest regardless of the fact that the other members take the same standing with them. Our study aims to investigate Bangladeshi users' motivation to join and strategies to manage their Facebook groups and identify the relevant challenges. In our ongoing work, we are conducting a survey and interviewing Facebook-group users to understand how Facebook groups are bringing the users of similar interest and agenda together on Facebook and providing the admins with imagined sovereignty. This poster presents some of our crucial findings. This set of findings will be useful in designing better tools for managing Facebook groups for empowering the admins and the users.

There has been a growing interest within CSCW community in understanding the characteristics of misinformation propagated through computational media, and the devising techniques to address the associated challenges. However, most work in this area has been concentrated on the cases in the western world leaving a major portion of this problem unaddressed that is situated in the Global South. This paper aims to broaden the scope of this discourse by focusing on this problem in the context of Bangladesh, a country in the Global South. The spread of misinformation on Facebook in Bangladesh, a country with a population of over 163 million, has resulted in chaos, hate attacks, and killings. By interviewing journalists, fact-checkers, in addition to surveying the general public, we analyzed the current state of verifying misinformation in Bangladesh. Our findings show that most people in the 'news audience' want the news media to verify the authenticity of online information that they see online. However, the newspaper journalists say that fact-checking online information is not a part of their job, and it is also beyond their capacity given the amount of information being published online every day. We further find that the voluntary fact-checkers in Bangladesh are not equipped with sufficient infrastructural support to fill in this gap. We show how our findings are connected to some of the core concerns of CSCW community around social media, collaboration, infrastructural politics, and information inequality. From our analysis, we also suggest several pathways to increase the impact of fact-checking efforts through collaboration, technology design, and infrastructure development.

Prior research on anonymous social media (ASM) has studied the issue of sexual harassment and has revealed its connections to stereotyping, aggression, interpersonal relationships, and mental health among others [16, 24, 60]. However, the characteristics of such harassment in the context of low and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the global south has not received enough attention in the literature. This paper presents our findings on the use of ASM in Bangladesh based on an anonymous online survey of (n= 291) participants and semi-structured interviews with (n= 27) participants. Our study shows a wide prevalence of sexual harassment on anonymous social networks in Bangladesh, the relationship between a closely-knitted communal culture and anonymous harassment, and the lack of infrastructural support for the victims. We also propose a set of design and policy recommendations for such anonymous social media to extend the current ICTD literature on ensuring a safer online environment for women, especially in an LMIC.

Strategies of hiding information over communication media have long been an interest of CSCW and related communities. Most of the studies in this area have focused on various computational means of data protection and their vulnerabilities, and occasionally on social practices situated in the West. However, communities in the Global South often have a rich trove of vernacular arts and crafts of hiding information that might be leveraged to design novel kinds of privacy-preserving technologies. In this paper, we present findings from our three-month long original ethnographic work with various communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh that reveal a wide range of culturally embedded techniques of hiding confidential and sensitive information from their 'others'. Our analysis demonstrates the dynamic nature of these techniques, the learning process associated with them, and their deep relationship with contextual politics that these communities are embedded in. We further connect our findings to the broader interests of CSCW around otherness, ethics, and democracy, and also discuss their implications for design.