Although the call to “study up” — directing the scholarly gaze towards elites — was made over half a century ago, HCI scholarship in this area remains underdeveloped. This paper demonstrates digital ethnography as a critical entry point, particularly for researchers from marginalised positionality facing refusals and deterrents when accessing elite social worlds. Drawing on 20 months of digital ethnography on Brahmin women food vloggers in Kerala, India, we show how caste-privileged cultural producers caste-code socio-technical practices of nichification, leverage platform affordances and constitute conservative caste enclaves in response to anxieties about threats to the prestige associated with Brahmin ways of life. These enclaves archive and circulate Brahmin food pedagogies, preserve caste customs and norms, guide younger Brahmin generations to remain connected to their roots, and seek recognition from wider publics. By foregrounding these dynamics, we expand methodological and political possibilities for “studying up” and critical caste and technology studies in HCI.

Diasporic Hong Kong communities are increasingly shaped by transnational repression, which is amplified through the sociotechnical systems within which they are embedded. In this context, risk is not merely a condition to be endured but a subjective, relational, and sociotechnical construct that modulates everyday social life and political organizing. Drawing on 11 semi-structured interviews with diasporic organizers in North America, we identify five interrelated forms of perceived risk — reputational harm, “Sam Tau” (滲透), infiltration, state surveillance, and non-state surveillance. These risks reveal how collective vulnerability emerges through both explicit repression and ambient uncertainty. In response, actors engage in boundary work — through gatekeeping, selective participation, and socio-technical vetting practices — to construct digital enclaves, maintain cohesion, and cultivate a risk-aware Hong Kong identity. This paper contributes to CSCW by extending existing scholarship on diasporic social movements, community moderation, and boundary maintenance, offering insights into how sociotechnical infrastructures are leveraged, and must be reimagined, for organizing under conditions of transnational repression.

Peer Reviewed

In August 2020, Alexander Lukashenko's re-election, amid widespread allegations of electoral fraud, marked the continuation of his uninterrupted presidency since Belarus's independence and triggered an unprecedented wave of mass protests in the country's history. In response, Lukashenko's adaptive authoritarian regime unleashed brutal repression and systemic human rights violations. In this context, the diasporic social movement community, leveraging information and communication technologies (ICTs), emerged as critical actors supporting the anti-regime social movement in their origin-homeland. Based on semi-structured interviews with 13 members of the North American Belarusian diasporic social movement community, this paper explores the role of ICTs in facilitating their political actions during the 2020 protests, as well as the factors that facilitated or hindered their participation and use of ICTs. Our study highlights that ICTs facilitated diaspora geopolitics from below by enabling ''social movement community,'' where otherwise disparate diasporic satellite publics converged around the common political goal of overthrowing the Lukashenko regime. However, the diasporic social movement community's use of ICTs was also fraught with ethical and moral complexities, navigating the ''proximity dilemma'' of remote participation and influencing a cause from a distance, while benefiting from socio-spatial privileges in their host country. Furthermore, the diaspora's ICT usage is shaped by the political regime, fear of transnational repression, and the geopolitical positions of both the origin-homeland and host country, as a consequence of adaptive authoritarianism in the Belarusian case. We discuss how CSCW can support decentralised, geographically dispersed diasporic organising with respect to social movements under varying authoritarian constraints.

The entry of on-demand ridesourcing digital labour platforms (OR-DLPs) in Kolkata, India, restructured the local taxi-cab service industry's economic geography and spatial practices. Notably, they eroded the significance of the spatial fixity of taxi stands operated by traditional trade unions, enmeshed in local society's partisan political dynamics. Therefore, OR-DLPs triggered a reconfiguration of the socio-spatial and political practices around the taxi-cab industry in the city. Globally, traditional trade unions have struggled to organise workers in informal work arrangements and DLPs. However, in Kolkata, the Kolkata Ola-Uber App-Cab Operator and Drivers Union has proved to be successful. They established hybrid and networked unionism through technological affordances, placing worker-organisers rather than external organisers at the centre of their organisational structure. Furthermore, they undertook tech-mediated resistance against the OR-DLPs, local bureaucracy (e.g. the police) and the state. We explore this context to examine the impact of OR-DLPs on labour geography, worker-organising and resistance practices, along with the revitalisation strategies of traditional trade unions in response. From a non-Western context, we expand the frame for CSCW and HCI scholars' ongoing efforts to design worker-centric technologies for resistance.