This multi-sited critical ethnography investigates how Mexican farmers’ knowledge practices are reclassified as they circulate between smallholder farms in Mexico and greenhouses in Canada. These farmers are recognized as skilled at home and reclassified as ‘unskilled’ in Canada, a shift reinforced by surveillance technologies and managerial control. From this empirical work, we introduce the prism of labour. The prism traces how knowledge practices, skill classifications, and sociotechnical systems interrelate to form labour infrastructures, and provides a lens for analysis and intervention to consider how these infrastructures are formed, stabilized, and contested. Our contributions are threefold: we provide novel empirical research on migrant farm workers in HCI, introduce the prism as an analytic and intervention tool, and show how migration reorganizes expertise through classification, producing hybrid knowledge practices that reshape how technologies are adopted.

Universities in North America often frame accessibility as an individual responsibility, emphasizing individualized accommodations for disabled students. However, these systems do not always align with students’ access needs, leaving them to take on additional labour. At a Canadian university, we interviewed 13 student activists and leaders of disability-related groups. We investigate how disabled students collectively address access frictions that emerge from institutional infrastructure; adopting community practices that work with, within, and around the university to address gaps. Using the concept of ’routine infrastructuring’, we demonstrate how student groups leverage technologies to mobilize and negotiate access needs through informal and formal practices as collective care infrastructure. We introduce the concept of ’counteractive frictions’, which are produced collectively to disrupt and provoke negotiation with institutions. We call for scholars and designers to rethink ’infrastructuring’ as adapting and maintaining, which masks the politics and generative potentialities of friction to re-imagine disability futures.

This study is based on a community-led participatory soil health workshop with 34 Caribbean temporary farmworkers in Ontario, Canada. Working with two migrant community leaders as co-designers and facilitators, we centered this farmworker community as leaders of their own digital agricultural education by leveraging artifacts like tomato plants as transnational boundary objects for dialogical learning between farmworkers’ existing agricultural knowledge, and soil science principles and digital sensing instruments. We find that: (1) community-led facilitation produced unplanned but generative knowledge translation work to center farmworker perspectives; and (2) participants engaged with soil sensing principles and tools selectively, integrating new knowledge based on their own contexts and values. Through this work, we offer four workshop design insights for community-led digital education, showing how infrastructural concepts like boundary objects and infrastructural inversion can function as pedagogical tools whose force depends on dialogical conditions that begin from participants’ existing knowledge and values. We also leverage the concept of selective appropriation to consider how participants negotiate technological adoption in agricultural contexts under infrastructural constraint. Across these contributions, our aim is to support communities to build epistemic agency, which we define as a liberatory force that enables community participants to evaluate new knowledge on their own terms, in relation to their own worlds.

This mixed method study situated in Ontario, Canada, investigates how migrant farmworkers’ experiences with agricultural technologies (agtech) affect their attitudes, conditions, and expectations of work, and how workers envision technologies serving as supportive interventions. Through a survey and interviews, we identify that surveillance and tracking agtech (chequeadoras) affect workers, imparting negative health and safety consequences. Workers’ interactions with chequeadoras reveal three major impacts: performance expectations engender stress, surveillance causes fears of disciplinary action, and performance tracking heightens competition. These impacts demonstrate how chequeadoras erode workers’ capacity to build sociality and solidarity. In response to these impacts and to support workers’ desired workplace changes, which aim for safer environments with technical skill development opportunities, we examine tactics from HCI, critical design, and migrant justice movements. Our findings lead us to contemplate what qualifies as agtech and how we may support marginalised workers with divergent opinions regarding workplace technologies, and desired collective change.

Care work has long been relegated to private households and small communities, however, with the entry of digital marketplaces, it is becoming part of public economic spheres. While care work has been generally devalued and understudied, it is a complex practice embedded in a network of economic transactions, social relations, material conditions, and socio-cultural norms. This paper explores the care giving networks among migrant house-cleaners guided by Tronto’s ‘care ethics’ and Puig de la Bellacasa’s ‘matters of care’. We interviewed 19 Latino house-cleaners in Toronto to understand their care practices and networks. Our analysis identifies gaps in our participants’ care networks. We create a new term, lateral care, to explicate the digital communities of care practice our participants formed. We conclude with implications for the future design of technologies for labor economies that attend to concerns of care.

Digital upskilling and remote work are frequently presented as pathways for displaced communities who face political, economic crises and employment barriers. The viability and stability of available energy infrastructures for these communities is critical to the long-term success of these proposed job trajectories. In this paper, we investigate how 17 Syrian refugees living in Lebanon navigate their local unstable energy infrastructures to conduct digital gig work and receive digital training. We found that digital gig work and training are workarounds to the political and social inaccessibility of local labor markets for refugees and that participants rely on a series of material energy strategies to optimize their electricity access. We argue that to support refugees conducting digital gig work and training, we must recognize and account for ecological, social, and technological limitations and frailties in the development of technological solutions and draw our attention to how infrastructures are perpetually undergoing processes of breakdown, repair, and renewal. We argue that this attention to ongoing transformation and renewal creates new opportunities for productive and creative reconfiguration as well as modes through which CSCW may intervene in unstable energy contexts. From this perspective, we emphasize the importance of better resourcing displaced communities with information regarding energy access and supporting them in establishing and strengthening their own visions for alternative energy systems and employment pathways.

This paper explores the interplay between identity, collective action, and digital marketplaces among Latino house-cleaners in Toronto. Domestic work, such as house-cleaning, has traditionally been devalued, gendered, and delegated to marginalised immigrant populations. The informal nature of house-cleaning work, also introduces precarity, vulnerabilities and potential avenues of exploitation. Drawing on 19 interviews with Latino house-cleaners, the paper underscores how identity shapes experiences and strategies in the labour markets. We find that Latino house-cleaners prefer to use asynchronous digital marketplaces, such as social media commerce groups and online classified advertisement websites, as the platforms provides flexibility and control over their labour outcomes. The paper further delves into how group identities online - such as being Latino and women - foster collective action and solidarity. The paper provides insights on how we can support the needs support the challenges and needs of immigrant domestic workers in technology-mediated labour markets.

Agriculture is foundational for food security on our planet. Considering climate change and other pressures on food production, HCI scholars have increasingly begun to examine how the field should approach agricultural innovation. We conducted a literature review of HCI research through the lens of competing future visions for good food systems : a “conventional” vision of profit-oriented production, and an “alternative” which prioritizes sustainability and community-led practices. Leveraging the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, we provide an empirical analysis of how HCI and adjacent applied computing projects align with these competing visions for agriculture. This review reveals, amongst other findings, a prioritization of the perspectives of the Global North and a need for more careful attention to the constraints and aspirations of subsistence farmers. Finally, we note the limits of the conventional-alternative binary that shapes much of contemporary HCI research focused on agriculture and offer opportunities for transcending this framing.

Fears of climate change and the escalating impacts of environmental damage are growing, and recent papers in the area of Sustainable HCI have called for urgent, non-linear solutions to these problems. Speculative design, along with related approaches including design fiction, have been taken up as means of navigating the "wicked problems" that structure contemporary nature/society relations. We conduct a survey of speculative design papers published in ACM venues between 2008 and 2021, assessing fundamental questions such as who is involved in the process, how is sustainability framed, and how is speculation used. Our evaluation of this body of work yielded mixed results; we find both promising trends as well as notable and problematic limitations in how the HCI community is taking up speculative practice in this domain. We build upon this evaluation to offer four provocations to designers seeking to use speculative practice in support of sustainability goals.