There is an increasing interest in telling serious stories with data. Designers organize information, construct narratives, and present findings to inform audiences. However, many of these practices emerge from modern information visualization rhetoric and ethical frameworks which may marginalize communities with low digital and media literacy. In a ten-month-long ethnographic study in three Bangladeshi villages, we investigated how these communities use entertainment and cultural practices, namely Puthi, Bhandari Gaan, and Pot music, to instruct, communicate traditional moral lessons and recall history. We found that these communities embrace polyvocality and multiple ethical frameworks in their performances, construct narratives combining factuality, emotionality, and aesthetics, and adapt their performances to changing technology and audience needs. Our findings provide HCI, visualization, and ethical data practitioners with implications for the design of accessible and culturally appropriate ways of presenting data narratives in data-driven systems.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness in the Global South is often framed as a matter of infrastructure gaps or policy ambition. Drawing on a multi-method qualitative study of 35 university programs, 59 stakeholder interviews, and curriculum benchmarking in Bangladesh, we reconceptualize AI readiness as a sociotechnical condition shaped by material infrastructures, human capacity, and curricular governance. Our findings reveal how GPU scarcity, limited faculty upskilling, opaque mentorship networks, entrenched gender disparities, and the near absence of Responsible AI instruction collectively constrain institutional capacity. Using concepts from Science and Technology Studies, including blackboxing, nested infrastructures, strain, and path dependency, we show that readiness deficits are not isolated shortcomings but outcomes of layered bureaucratic systems, historical lock-in, and global market dependencies. We further argue that AI education in Bangladesh is shaped by postcolonial dynamics that privilege global labor alignment over locally grounded innovation. We contribute an infrastructural reframing of AI readiness for HCI and ICTD, empirical evidence of institutional and epistemic barriers in a Global South context, and actionable design and policy pathways for building equitable, human-centered AI ecosystems.

Reproductive well-being education in the Global South is often challenged as many communities perceive many of its contents as misinformation, misconceptions, and language-inappropriate.Our ten-month-long ethnographic study (n=41) investigated the impact of sociocultural landscape, cultural beliefs, and healthcare infrastructure on Bangladeshi people's access to quality reproductive healthcare and set four design goals: combating misinformation, including culturally appropriate language, professionals' accountable moderation, and promoting users' democratic participation.Building on the model of 'Distributive Justice,' we designed and evaluated 'Socheton, ' a culturally appropriate AI-mediated tool for reproductive well-being that includes healthcare professionals, AIlanguage teachers, and community members to moderate and run the activity-based platform.Our user study (n=28) revealed that only combating misinformation and language inappropriateness may still leave the community with a conservative mob culture and patronize reproductive care-seeking.This guides well-being HCI design toward being culturally appropriate in the context of reproductive justice with sensitive marginalized communities. CCS Concepts• Human-

This paper presents the understanding of the rural perception of toleration on Facebook by Bangladeshi users. In a three-year long ethnographic study with villagers in 12 rural areas in Jessore, Bangladesh, we investigated the three major aspects of toleration: decorum, civility, and certainty. Our findings informed that these factors influenced rural villagers’ interaction on social media. We found that to address these concerns, rural people often adopt their own framework where they co-existed with their own opinion along with the parties whose opinions were disagreeable to them. Here, the major concerns were unpredictable behavior of social media algorithms, conflicts of ideologies and cultural values, and mismatching language skills while using Facebook collectively and collaboratively within the family. We also found that the practice of toleration and associated factors influenced users’ interaction with other users both online and in the physical world. Building on our findings, we argue that understanding different conceptualizations of toleration is essential to have a safer digital space for marginalized rural communities. Our study contributes to HCI’s and ICTD’s understanding of disagreement and conflicts by bringing in the concept of toleration and helps design better appropriate Facebook experience for the users in rural Bangladesh and other similar communities.

Marginalized communities’ access to and use of ICT have long been a concern in HCI4D and social computing. Many works in this domain have pointed out that the challenges to access to ICT often go beyond limited computing resources and skills and frequently include many other socio-cultural factors. In this paper, we report three of the factors that arose while studying rural Bangladeshi women’s access to ICT: stigma, rumor, and superstition. Through an eight-month-long mix-method study with 23 rural women in Jessore, we explored the forms of fear and resistance to use computing devices prevalent among this population, particularly among the women we studied. We report how their stigma, rumors and superstitions often entangled with each other and created a gender-specific resistance to women’s ICT use. This paper further discusses how this resistance was connected to a weak economy and insufficient legal and educational infrastructure in the rural community. We extend the discussion to implications for design, policy, patriarchy, and other social practices to address these human factors in HCI4D and social sustainability scholarship.