HCI and CSCW have a long-standing interest in the consequences of digital transformation for work practices. A key part of this is its impact on labour relations. While prior HCI studies have examined labour relations in domains such as platform work, few have looked at industrial settings. This paper presents an ethnographic study of works councils in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Germany. Works councils exemplify the principle of Co-Determination, which is the right of employees to participate in the design and management of their workplace and play a vital role in vetting new technologies whenever they imply changes in work practices. A number of issues confront works councils when they attempt to accomplish this, namely a lack of time, knowledge, and external support. We discuss these issues and consider their implications for both design and the constitution of workplace democracy in future industrial settings.

Forests across the world play a crucial role in the fight against the climate catastrophe as well as mass extinction that characterise the Anthropocene. However, they are also increasingly threatened by destructive human practices such as agriculture and mining, but also climate change itself. This article focuses on forests in Germany, which have been devastated in recent years by heat, drought and bark beetles. Hence, forests and associated forestry practices are in urgent need of adaptation to a different climate. Several digital applications have been developed to assist with this effort. Adaptation is complicated by the epistemological challenge of climate change, that the uncertainty of how exactly climate change will affect specific local sites, as well as future markets for forest products, poses. In this short paper we review how two applications address this uncertainty in their approach to supporting the climate adaptation of forests and draw out preliminary lessons for HCI research and design.

Within Participatory- and Co-Design projects, the issue of sustainability and maintenance of the co-designed artefacts is a crucial yet largely unresolved issue. In this paper, we look back on four years of work on co-designing tools that assist refugees and migrants in their efforts to settle in Germany, the last of which the project has been independently maintained by our community collaborators. We reflect on the role of pre-existing care practices amongst our community collaborators, and a continued openness throughout the project, that allowed a complex constellation of actors to be involved in its ongoing maintenance and our own, often mundane activities which have contributed to the sustainability of the results. Situating our account within an HCI for Social Justice agenda, we thereby contribute to an ongoing discussion about the sustainability of such activities.

In recent years HCI and CSCW work has increasingly begun to address complex social problems and issues of social justice worldwide. Such activist-leaning work is not without problems. Through the experiences and reflections of an activist becoming academic and an academic becoming an activist, we outline these difficulties such as (1) the risk of perpetuating violence, oppression and exploitation when working with marginalised communities, (2) the reception of activist-academic work within our academic communities, and (3) problems of social justice that exist within our academic communities. Building on our own experiences, practices and existing literature from a variety of disciplines we advocate for the possibility of an activist-academic practice, outline possible ways forward and formulate questions we need to answer for HCI to contribute to a more just world.

An increasing number of people around the world are forced to leave their homes due to the climate catastrophe, regional conflict or poverty. In their new host countries however, refugees and migrants are frequently met by a wide range of challenges, including wider societal participation. The difficulties migrants and refugees face have also increasingly become the topic of HCI and CSCW work. In this paper we report on a three year-long project, involving refugees, migrants and activist supporters in a co-design project to develop tools that aid the process of resettling. Several aspects have challenged equal participation in the project, including divergent motives, unequal power distribution and cultural heterogeneity. Despite these challenges the project outcomes are in use and maintained beyond the project runtime through voluntary actors. We reflect on this discrepancy between process and outcome drawing on the concept of care.

In this paper, we present an account of how FARC-EP ex-combatants are using digital technology in the process of reincorporating into Colombian society. We report findings showing how this technology mediates the difficult task of transitioning from a culture of opposition to civilian members and active political actors. Using the concept of social capital as a framework, we investigate the intersection between the use of digital tools and developing cultural and economic practices among these groups during this transitional period. Reflecting on the bonding and bridging aspects of social capital, we describe how ex-combatants draw on substantial social capital from their former lives as a guerrilla army in order to strengthen their position in these new circumstances, and their cautious and difficult creation of new social ties with wider Colombian society. We contribute to the CSCW discourse by discussing the crucial role digital tools, previously not available to these groups, play in sustaining, re-growing and building social capital of communities in post-conflict periods.

It is sometimes argued that there is hardly a place in the world in the 21st century left untouched by global capitalism [111, 112]. Even so, some places remain at the periphery, participating in this system without being fully absorbed by it. In this article, we take a detailed look at the economic life of such a “pericapitalist” [161] community in the Brazilian Amazon region. We detail how the community increasingly participates in global systems and supply chains, yet also organizes economic life around local and traditional values. We pay special attention to the role of digital technologies in the community, including mobile phones and internet. The contribution of the article is as follows: firstly, it provides a detailed analysis of the material practices of a community at the edge . Secondly, it draws attention to the heterogeneous nature of responses to global capitalism, formed from the relationship between specific material practices, new technology, and elements of cultural identity. Thirdly, it argues for an increased sensibility towards these different relations to capitalism when considering design implications. We argue that close attention to material practice goes some way towards resolving those tensions and, further, provides for an appeal to a more pluralistic views of culture and development [61].

Studying armed political struggles from a CSCW perspective can throw the complex interactions between culture, technology, materiality and political conflict into sharp relief. Such studies highlight interrelations that otherwise remain under-remarked upon, despite their severe consequences. The present paper provides an account of the armed struggle of one of the Colombian guerrillas, FARC-EP, with the Colombian army. We document how radio-based communication became a crucial, but ambiguous infrastructure of war. The sudden introduction of localization technologies by the Colombian army presented a lethal threat to the guerrilla group. Our interviewees report a severe learning process to diminish this new risk, relying on a combination of informed beliefs and significant technical understanding. We end with a discussion of the role of HCI in considerations of ICT use in armed conflicts and introduce the concept of counter-appropriation as process of adapting one's practices to other's appropriation of technology in conflict.