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.

Online social media platforms have become central to communication and information exchange, however, they also serve as fertile ground for hate speech, offensive language, and bullying targeting individuals and communities.Such content undermines online safety and inclusion, underscoring the need for reliable detection systems-especially in lowresource languages with limited moderation tools.For Bangla, existing work provides valuable resources and models, however, they are mostly single-task (e.g., binary hate/offense) with narrow coverage of key dimensions such as type, severity, and target.We address these gaps by introducing the first multi-task Bangla hate-speech dataset, BanglaMultiHate, one of the largest manually annotated dataset to date.Using this resource, we performed a comparative study across different baselines, monolingual pretrained models, and LLMs under zeroshot, few-shot, and LoRA fine-tuning settings.Our findings show that while LoRA-tuned LLMs rival BanglaBERT, culturally grounded pretraining remains crucial for robust performance.Overall, BanglaMultiHate establishes a stronger benchmark for hate speech detection in low-resource contexts.All data 1 and scripts 2 are released for reproducibility.

This paper examines how non-resident Bangladeshis mobilized during the 2024 quota-reform turned pro-democracy movement, leveraging social platforms and remittance flows to challenge state authority. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we identify four phases of their collective action: technology-mediated shifts to active engagement, rapid transnational network building, strategic execution of remittance boycott, reframing economic dependence as political leverage, and adaptive responses to government surveillance and information blackouts. We extend postcolonial computing by introducing the idea of “diasporic superposition," which shows how diasporas can exercise political and economic influence from hybrid positionalities that both contest and complicate power asymmetries. We reframe diaspora engagement by highlighting how migrants participate in and reshape homeland politics, beyond narratives of integration in host countries. We advance the scholarship on financial technologies by foregrounding their relationship with moral economies of care, state surveillance, regulatory constraints, and uneven international economic power dynamics. Together, these contributions theorize how transnational activism and digital technologies intersect to mobilize political change in Global South contexts.

Peer review determines which scholarship is legitimized; however, review biases often disadvantage scholarship that diverges from the norm. Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) lacks a systemic inquiry into how such biases affect underrepresented Global South (GS) scholarship. To address this critical gap, we conducted four focus groups with 16 HCI researchers studying the GS. Participants reported experiencing reviews that confined them to development research, dismissed their theoretical contributions, and questioned situated knowledge from GS communities. Both as authors and reviewers, participants reported experiencing the epistemic burden of over-explaining why knowledge from GS communities matters. Further, they noted being tokenized as “cultural experts” when assigned to review papers and pointed out that the hidden curriculum of writing HCI papers often gatekeeps GS scholarship. Using epistemic oppression as a lens, we discuss how review practices marginalize GS scholarship and outline actionable strategies for nurturing equitable epistemological evaluation of HCI scholarship.

This paper investigates data repair practices through a six-month-long ethnographic study in Bangladesh. Our interviews and field observations with data repairers and related stakeholders found that, alongside the scarcity of high-precision machinery and access to advanced software, data repair work is constrained by cross-language learning resources and the protective nature of documenting, curating, and sharing the experiences and knowledge among local peers. Repairers turning to external resources such as foreign forums and LLMs also revealed their frustrating experiences and the postcolonial ethical tensions they encountered. We noted that both anticipated technical labor and the emotionality of data were taken into account for pricing the data repair job, which contributed to their market sustainability strategies. Engaging with repair, infrastructure, and data poverty discourse, we argue that data repair practices represent a crucial challenge and opportunity for HCI in advancing global efforts toward data equity.

Women’s entrepreneurship is a key driver of socio-economic empowerment in the Global South, yet patriarchal sociocultural contexts limit entrepreneur’s autonomy and, despite increasing attention to gender issues in HCI, shifting digital infrastructures cause privacy, security, and logistical challenges. We conduct 15 interviews with women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh who rely on digital technology, offering insight into who they are, their business and supply chains, technology use, and the gendered challenges of balancing work with family. We present women’s accounts of navigating in-person and online harassment and crime, including through payment platforms, and banking tools that legally enforce gender discrimination. We discuss how digital technology design must adapt to these pervasive issues and propose digital interventions to support developing their businesses and achieving financial independence. Our work contributes to understanding how HCI can take a transformative role in overcoming barriers and advancing mechanisms for women’s financial empowerment in the Global South.

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.

Language operates as a mechanism of both marginalization and resistance, especially for minority communities navigating insensitive and harmful speech online. As content moderation increasingly depends on large language models (LLMs), concerns arise about whether these systems can recognize culturally insensitive speech–language that disregards or marginalizes the cultural and religious perspectives of historically underrepresented communities, often through implicit erasure, misrepresentation, or normative framing, rather than overt hostility. Focusing on Bangladesh’s Hindu and Chakma communities – the country’s largest religious and Indigenous ethnic minorities, respectively – this paper investigates the epistemic limits of LLM-based moderation systems and explores methods for incorporating minority perspectives. We co-created a culturally grounded corpus of insensitive speech with community members and integrated their narratives into moderation pipelines using retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Our tool, Mod-Guide, improves LLM sensitivity to minority viewpoints by leveraging contextual cues derived from lived experience. Through mixed-method evaluations involving both minority and majority participants, we demonstrate that RAG-enhanced moderation responses are more contextually accurate and perceived differently across ethnic lines. This work advances research in human-computer interaction, AI ethics, and social computing by foregrounding restorative justice and hermeneutical inclusion in the design of content moderation systems.

This paper examines how algorithmic accountability in Canada's visa system is articulated institutionally and experienced by applicants across borders. We analyzed Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC)'s Algorithmic Impact Assessment (AIA) for the temporary resident visa (TRV) triage system using the algorithmic decision-making adapted for the public sector (ADMAPS) framework and analyzed Reddit discussions among applicants using a mixed-methods approach. We show that while institutional artifacts emphasize transparency, procedural safeguards, and bounded impacts, applicants engage in collective sensemaking to interpret opaque decisions, often relying on peer knowledge amid uncertainty. We identify three asymmetries between how institutional accountability is structured and how people perceive the process: epistemic asymmetry in access to decision logic, jurisdictional asymmetry in exposure shaped by geopolitical positioning, and temporal--relational asymmetry in how waiting and uncertainty are experienced. We emphasize why it is important to shift attention from institutional design to the uneven distribution of experiences with public-sector algorithmic governance. Together, these contributions demonstrate how algorithmic governance systems in the context of transnational migration produce structured asymmetries not captured by institutional disclosure frameworks, and how extending ADMAPS can account for those uneven translations of accountability.

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.

Mobile broadband is the dominant mode of Internet access across the Global South, yet independent quality assessment remains fundamentally limited. Crowdsourced platforms capture only where motivated users run speed tests, while standard administrative aggregation collapses communities with vastly different connectivity realities into a single metric — together rendering marginalized communities invisible to measurement. We construct iQoE, a normalized broadband quality index derived from crowdsourced data, and show that measurement density correlates strongly with wealth while national progress narratives obscure deep spatial inequality. To reach communities iQoE cannot see, we propose a mixed-methods approach: a lightweight Android app paired with a diary study in Korail — Bangladesh's largest urban slum — triangulated against network planner interviews. We seek SIGCOMM community feedback on measurement design for underserved urban contexts in the Global South.

Stories about overcoming personal struggles can effectively illustrate the application of psychological theories in real life, yet they may fail to resonate with individuals' experiences. In this work, we employ large language models (LLMs) to create tailored narratives that acknowledge and address unique challenging thoughts and situations faced by individuals. Our study, involving 346 young adults across two settings, demonstrates that personalized LLM-enhanced stories were perceived to be better than human-written ones in conveying key takeaways, promoting reflection, and reducing belief in negative thoughts. These stories were not only seen as more relatable but also similarly authentic to human-written ones, highlighting the potential of LLMs in helping young adults manage their struggles. The findings of this work provide crucial design considerations for future narrative-based digital mental health interventions, such as the need to maintain relatability without veering into implausibility and refining the wording and tone of AI-enhanced content.

Collaboration and community building are crucial for equitable participation in research, especially in disability and accessibility research fields.Engaging with communities of disabled individuals helps understand their unique challenges, expectations, and needs, which should be reflected in assistive technology design.However, a gap exists between research in resource-rich societies and the practices of low-resource settings, where socio-economic and infrastructural constraints are often overlooked.Conversely, the innovation and sustainable solutions in these settings are often

The reference to assumptions in how practitioners use or interact with machine learning (ML) systems is ubiquitous in HCI and responsible ML discourse.However, what remains unclear from prior works is the conceptualization of assumptions and how practitioners identify and handle assumptions throughout their workflows.This leads to confusion about what assumptions are and what needs to be done with them.We use the concept of an argument from Informal Logic, a branch of Philosophy, to offer a new perspective to understand and explicate the confusions surrounding assumptions.Through semi-structured interviews with 22 ML practitioners, we find what contributes most to these confusions is how independently assumptions are constructed, how reactively and reflectively they are handled, and how nebulously they are recorded.Our study brings the peripheral discussion of assumptions in ML to the center and presents recommendations for practitioners to better think about and work with assumptions.

The web experience in developing regions remains subpar, primarily due to the growing complexity of modern webpages and insufficient optimization by content providers. Users in these regions typically rely on low-end devices and limited bandwidth, which results in a poor user experience as they download and parse webpages bloated with excessive third-party CSS and JavaScript (JS). To address these challenges, we introduce the Mobile Application Markup Language (MAML), a flat layout-based web specification language that reduces computational and data transmission demands, while replacing the excessive bloat from JS with a new scripting language centered on essential (and popular) web functionalities. Last but not least, MAML is backward compatible as it can be transpiled to minimal HTML/JavaScript/CSS and thus work with legacy browsers. We benchmark MAML in terms of page load times and sizes, using a translator which can automatically port any webpage to MAML. When compared to the popular Google AMP, across 100 testing webpages, MAML offers webpage speedups by tens of seconds under challenging network conditions thanks to its significant size reductions. Next, we run a competition involving 25 university students porting 50 of the above webpages to MAML using a web-based editor we developed. This experiment verifies that, with little developer effort, MAML is quite effective in maintaining the visual and functional correctness of the originating webpages.

Informed by the previous HCI and CSCW scholarship on residual mobility -- a concept that transcends mere geographical relocation to encompass socio-cultural and communal disruptions -- this study probes the unique religious and spiritual challenges faced by the Hindu migrants from the Indian subcontinent in Canada. Through interviews with 20 participants, we investigate the role of technology in navigating a diverse religious landscape in professional environments, coping with changing religious materiality, and passing down traditions to the next generation. Our work identifies the community's proactive use of social media and videoconferencing for religious festivals and connection with their religious community. The findings raise several implications for CSCW research on supporting residual mobility experiences of the Hindu migrants, including effective organization of religious event information, virtual support for material aspects of religious rituals, and fostering online environments that enable pluralistic spiritual engagement.

Traditional interventions for academic procrastination often fail to capture the nuanced, individual-specific factors that underlie them. Large language models (LLMs) hold immense potential for addressing this gap by permitting open-ended inputs, including the ability to customize interventions to individuals' unique needs. However, user expectations and potential limitations of LLMs in this context remain underexplored. To address this, we conducted interviews and focus group discussions with 15 university students and 6 experts, during which a technology probe for generating personalized advice for managing procrastination was presented. Our results highlight the necessity for LLMs to provide structured, deadline-oriented steps and enhanced user support mechanisms. Additionally, our results surface the need for an adaptive approach to questioning based on factors like busyness. These findings offer crucial design implications for the development of LLM-based tools for managing procrastination while cautioning the use of LLMs for therapeutic guidance.

The importance of history as an HCI method has been gaining increasing attention in HCI literature. However, the mainstream historical sources (books, documentaries, etc.) and methods often risk (re)producing western colonial biases potentially providing a narrow one-sided perspective on history and detaching “sanitized facts” from people’s emotional accounts. While oral history and similar alternative methods are often used as a countermeasure, their applicability has remained underexplored in HCI, especially in a sensitive context, such as migration. We build on the rich body of social science work on collective memory to introduce a complementary way of navigating the past of the migrant families, and also reveal the corresponding challenges to advance this literature. Our interview study with 17 migrant families highlights how the politics of remembrance, family dynamics, and postmemory shape the past stories of migrant families. We discuss how these findings inform the HCI literature on migration, design, and postcolonial computing.

This paper joins the growing body of HCI work on critical AI studies and focuses on the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) tools in Bangladesh. While the West has started to examine the limitations and risks associated with these tools, their impacts on the Global South have remained understudied. Based on our interviews, focus group discussions (FGD), and social media-based qualitative study, this paper reports how popular text-to-image GAI tools (ex., DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Firefly) are affecting various image-related local creative fields. We report how these tools limit the creative explorations of marginal artists, struggle to understand linguistic nuances, fail to generate local forms of art and architecture, and misrepresent the diversity among citizens in the image production process. Drawing from a rich body of work on critical image theory, postcolonial computing, and design politics, we explain how our findings are pertinent to HCI’s broader interest in social justice, decolonization, and global development.

Though ML practitioners increasingly employ various Responsible ML (RML) strategies, their methodological approach in practice is still unclear. In particular, the constraints, assumptions, and choices of practitioners with technical duties–such as developers, engineers, and data scientists—are often implicit, subtle, and under-scrutinized in HCI and related fields. We interviewed 22 technically oriented ML practitioners across seven domains to understand the characteristics of their methodological approaches to RML through the lens of ideal and non-ideal theorizing of fairness. We find that practitioners’ methodological approaches fall along a spectrum of idealization. While they structured their approaches through ideal theorizing, such as by abstracting RML workflow from the inquiry of applicability of ML, they did not systematically document nor pay deliberate attention to their non-ideal approaches, such as diagnosing imperfect conditions. We end our paper with a discussion of a new methodological approach, inspired by elements of non-ideal theory, to structure technical practitioners’ RML process and facilitate collaboration with other stakeholders.

Lack of interfaith communication often gives rise to prejudice and group-based conflict in multi-faith societies. Nurturing this communication via interfaith learning may reduce this conflict by fostering interfaith empathy. HCI has a dearth of knowledge on interfaith coexistence and empathy building. To address this gap, we present the design, implementation, and usability of Cohabitant: a virtual reality (VR) application that promotes interfaith learning and empathy. Cohabitant’s design is theoretically underpinned by Allport’s intergroup contact theory and informed by insights from a participatory workshop we ran with members of three religious groups: Christians, Hindus, and Muslims. Our evaluation study, combining quantitative and qualitative data from 30 participants, suggests that Cohabitant may enhance general interpersonal empathy, but falls short for ethnocultural empathy. We discuss the possible design and policy implications of using this kind of VR technology for interfaith learning and empathy building.

Although listening to community voice is a core value in HCI4D, we have limited methods to capture the community voice of marginalized groups within disadvantaged communities. Working with NGOs and 24 marginalized women farmers in Bangladesh, we promoted psychological safety and empowerment through our configuration of the process. Our stakeholders decided to record and produce a radio-style audio recording that presented their counter-collective narratives for development projects. We reflect on this process using the Benefits of Community Voice framework to document rich insights into community contexts, lived experiences, local knowledge, and building trust and buy-in and through interviews with three NGO workers. We discuss the fundamental need of stakeholders for a safe place to share, the value of letting stakeholders guide method selection, the significance of counter-collective narratives, the benefits of participatory audio to hear community voices for democratizing and sustaining development and design implications of our work for HCI4D.

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.

While content moderation in online platforms marginalizes users in the Global South at large, users of certain identities are further marginalized. Such users often come from Indigenous ethnic minority groups or identify as women. Through a qualitative study based on 18 semi-structured interviews, this paper explores how such users' experiences with hate speech online in Bangladesh are shaped by their intersectional identities. Through a civics-oriented approach, we examined the spectrum of their legal status, membership, rights, and participation as users of online platforms. Drawing analogies with the concept of citizenship, we develop the concept of usership that offers a user-centered metaphor in studying moderation and platform governance.

Despite significant research on online harm, polarization, public deliberation, and justice, CSCW still lacks a comprehensive understanding of the experiences of religious minorities, particularly in relation to fear, as prominently evident in our study. Gaining faith-sensitive insights into the expression, participation, and inter-religious interactions on social media can contribute to CSCW's literature on online safety and interfaith communication. In pursuit of this goal, we conducted a six-month-long, interview-based study with the Hindu, Buddhist, and Indigenous communities in Bangladesh. Our study draws on an extensive body of research encompassing the spiral of silence, the cultural politics of fear, and communication accommodation to examine how social media use by religious minorities is influenced by fear, which is associated with social conformity, misinformation, stigma, stereotypes, and South Asian postcolonial memory. Moreover, we engage with scholarly perspectives from religious studies, justice, and South Asian violence and offer important critical insights and design lessons for the CSCW literature on public deliberation, justice, and interfaith communication.

This paper explores how interactive applications can help mitigate the adversity of facing cultural differences between migrants and the host community, and between migrants of diverse backgrounds to foster intercultural exchange. Based on literature about situated cognition, immersive theater, and affordance, we designed and built Be Our Guest: an augmented reality application where a user is invited to the houses of people from different cultures and is asked to help with one of their cultural rituals around simple everyday objects. We detail the various phases we took to collect the cultural stories and construct the application. We then report the results of a user study with the developed application. Our findings show that participants were easily immersed in the augmented space due to the app’s narrative, visuals, and interactive nature. Moreover, they enjoyed exploring cultural rituals, including their own, and felt more confident connecting with people from other cultures.

International program development is a complex process involving many stakeholders. Current international practice affords limited, if any, opportunities for direct community-led input into the program commissioning process, resulting in programs that may not meet the specific needs of communities on the ground. Community voice is one source of data that could help focus the design of effective development programs and interventions. However, development programs are primarily formulated based on representative and often quantitative data conducted by experts from outside the community. Through a participatory video production process with disadvantaged women farmers in rural Bangladesh, we explore the opportunities for including meaningful community voices in these institutionalized processes. We present practical design implications for how community-generated voices can act as rich data, establishing confidence, community bonds and senses of accountability to inform early stages of project development, and to specifically augment and contextualize other data sources.

While people’s perceptions of targeted ads have been studied extensively from a Western perspective (e.g., North America, Europe), we know little about users’ perceptions in the South Asian region. We interviewed 40 participants from two South Asian countries, Bangladesh and India, to explore their perceptions and practices regarding targeted ads on social media platforms. Participants identified emerging ad types, such as influencer-based ads and soft ads, through articles. In addition, participants often outweighed discounts over product quality when viewing ads. We also observed novel user mental models of targeted ads based on mobile app permissions and excessive AI usage. Participants often preferred ad control over transparency. While most participants rarely used ad settings, some controlled ads by changing mobile app permissions or muting ads on social media platforms. Participants also raised concerns about fraudulent targeted ads and privacy violations due to device sharing. We present potential design ideas to mitigate these concerns.

Information communication and visualization practices reflect two centuries of developments of conventions and best practices which may not be reflective of global audiences’ methods for conveying information. Contrasting between rural traditional visual culture and contemporary HCI and data-visualization, we argue that an understanding of traditional practices for information visualization is required for building rich data-narratives and making data-driven systems more accessible and culturally situated. Our ten-month ethnographic study investigates how rural Bangladeshi communities construct narratives through visual media. 1 Our observation, interviews, and FGDs (n=54) expose how participants convey risk management, decision-making, and monetary management practices to their peers. We find that villagers used a rich network of polysemic symbols and abstractions to manifest subjectivity, factuality, consequence, situatedness, and uncertainty; varied visual attributes for constructing narratives; and emphasized material relations among components in visuals. These findings inform the design of future systems for decision support in a culturally situated manner.

Scholarly work interrogating time and temporality in CSCW predominantly focuses on the temporal coordination of work in high-resource settings and is usually based in Global North. This paper aims to complicate and complement this scholarship by investigating the temporal entanglements of digital humanitarian work with refugees and asylum seekers in Turkey during COVID-19. We interviewed 22 humanitarian workers to understand their experiences and concerns as well as strategies they employed to support refugees and immigrants at a distance. The data reveal the complex temporal, informational, and infrastructural dimensions of technologically-mediated refugee support work, challenging the trope of "pivot to remote work", as popular in western countries. Our findings contribute to the CSCW research on the theory of anticipation work and its relationship with the concept of collaborative rhythms to explicate the relational and situated aspects of the temporal experiences of humanitarian workers in low-resource settings.

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.

While the presence of religious content is rapidly increasing over digital media, the HCI literature on digital media production has remained mostly limited by its focus on secular contents and analyses. Hence, the production, politics, and impact of such religious videos from the Global South have remained understudied in HCI. In this paper, we shed light on this topic through our nine-month-long ethnographic study on the production, sharing, and consumption of Islamic sermon videos (locally known as Waz) in Bangladesh. We report how faith, informal learning, local collaboration, creativity, and care play crucial roles in creating Islamic sermon videos and their proliferation online. We discuss how the sermon videos create a religious counterpublic in Bangladesh. We further discuss how such faith-based media production makes important lessons pertinent to the national grassroots politics in the Global South, politics of social media platforms, and HCI4D scholarship.

The challenge of designing against child sexual abuse becomes more complicated in conservative societies where talking about sex is tabooed. Our mix-method study, comprised of an online survey, five FGDs, and 20 semi-structured interviews in Bangladesh, investigates the common nature, location, and time of the abuse, post-incident support, and possible combating strategies. Besides revealing important facts, our findings highlight the need of decentering the design from the victims (children and/or guardians) to the community. Hence, building on the theory of transformative justice, we prototyped and evaluated ‘ShishuShurokkha’ – an online tool that involves the whole community by allowing anonymous bystander reporting, visualizing case-maps, connecting with legal, medical, and social support, and raising awareness. The evaluation of ShishuShurokkha shows the promise for such a communal approach toward combating child sexual abuse, and highlights the needs for sincere involvement of the government, NGOs, the legal, educational, and religious services in this.

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.

Efficacy of the traditional individualistic viewpoint towards mental health is questionable, particularly in the context of the Global South countries. Past works in psychology have rarely incorporated people’s background and surroundings in dealing with mental health. In contrast, we argue that many mental health problems of people living in the Global South countries are rooted in underdevelopment. Analyzing 1,000 call data of a telephone crisis helpline in Bangladesh, we found that 91% of the cases where callers shared their problems were impacted by failure to meet one of the 17 sustainable developed goals proposed by United Nations. Challenges towards ensuring gender equality, good health and well-being, quality education, and decent work and economic growth among a few others were causing mental health problems among callers. Our findings demonstrate the need to revise support behavior models followed by helplines in the Global South and advocate for a shift in viewing mental health problems from an individualistic to a social approach.

In this paper, we study popular microcelebrities from the Global South to understand their strategies and practices on Facebook. Unlike traditional celebrities who gain their reputation through different types of physical performance, these microcelebrities attain their status by presenting themselves in a favorable way to their online followers. We conducted interviews with 19 microcelebrities from Bangladesh and analyzed our data using actor-network theory (ANT) and Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis (DA) of human interaction. We discuss the complex socio-technical ecosystem of the microcelebrity and the roles of non-human actors, such as platforms and local internet infrastructure along with human actors’ practices. We explain the microcelebrities’ experience with the process of microcelebritification–the process of being a microcelebrity on social media through impression management, and becoming opinion leaders in local sociopolitical discourses as part of their online identity. Our paper contributes to the emerging literature on microcelebrities by highlighting the process viewed in the context of the Global South.

While information and communication technology for development (ICTD) researchers have prioritized advocating for community voices in innovation design and development, we have limited insights into how community voices are incorporated by the high-level decision-makers who fund and initiate development projects and programs in the Global South. Indeed, understanding local communities’ voices (expressions of needs, challenges, and priorities) in tailoring effective development projects for sustainable development is widely considered an unmet goal. Using a qualitative survey of eight decision-makers (including grantmaking donors, central governments and INGOs) we explored a number of key factors, including national and global political climates, insider-outsider interactions, and evidence-based approaches that influence the high-level decision making process, workflows, and perceptions of community voice in project commissioning within Bangladesh’s public health nutrition development arena. Our findings reveal the tensions that arise among high-level decision-makers, and highlight the challenges associated with connecting with communities during development project design and implementation. We suggest broader implications and design opportunities for inventive project commissioning approaches to bridge the gap between communities and decision-makers. Our findings are of potential value for ICTD and HCI4D researchers interested in sustainable innovation and understanding and participating in the complex workflows of the project commissioning process in sustainable global development.

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.

Emerging techniques developed by AI researchers promise to offer the capacity to support disaster risk management (DRM), through making data collection or analysis practices faster, less costly, or more accurate. However, in every socially consequential domain in which AI tools have been applied, these technologies have been demonstrated to have some degree of negative consequences. This paper explores an attempt to convene technical experts in the area of DRM to discuss potential negative impacts, their approaches toward mitigating these impacts as well as identifying some of the overarching challenges. In doing so, we contribute new findings about a domain that has received relatively little attention from critical and ethical AI researchers, and the opportunities and limitations that are presented by working with domain experts to evaluate the social consequences of emerging technologies.

Research on public speaking has recently made fair progress within the CSCW scholarship that mostly focuses on training speakers to gain popularity. Core to this research is the idea of a universal set of skills that makes a public speech successful in terms of popularity. However, a strand of research has also shown skepticism to this simplistic conceptualization of the speaking context. We join this discussion by presenting a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses of Islamic preaching videos on YouTube. These videos are created from Islamic sermons -- a form of Islamic religious public speaking in Bangladesh. By exploring the topics of discussion by the preachers and by analyzing the performances of the preachers during the sermons, we demonstrate how those are situated in their social, political, and religious context. Based on our findings, we discuss how the public speaking scholarship of CSCW and related fields could benefit from studying such public speeches in non-secular contexts of the Global South. Further, we discuss how the role of such religious sermons could contribute to the development discourse within CSCW.

Financial technology (FinTech) platforms often exclude certain countries from their services due to global political conflicts. As a result, immigrants from these neglected countries struggle with transferring money to and from their homeland through formal mechanisms. Instead, they get involved in informal transnational transactions that, while flexible, are often risky and full of hassles. We looked into this issue through an online survey (n=127) and engaged with multiple stakeholders (n=16), including the Iranian immigrant community in Canada, to co-design an application called ?Kabootar' that matches senders and receivers of money across borders. In this application, a sender-receiver pair is matched with a pertinent pair sending money in the opposite direction. By facilitating two intra-national transactions in local currencies instead of two relatively complicated inter-national transactions, the need for money to cross borders is eliminated while staying within the boundaries of the law. Our user study (n=13) revealed several tensions in users trusting such informal transnational transactions. This work contributes to CSCW, HCI, and social computing's growing scholarship in personalized and collaborative computing technologies by advocating for a novel design approach based on collaboration and informality and extends their scope to the domain of FinTech for politically marginalized communities.

Historically, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) researchers in the Global South have advocated for a community-based approach to technology design and development. However, even with this "bottom-up" emphasis, the sustainability and scalability of the resulting innovations remain major challenges, and are poorly understood. To address this gap, we take the case of Bangladesh as a typical Global South context in which development work is carried out by a complex intertwined network of stakeholders across governments, NGOs, donors, and industries. To better understand the current development landscape and its priorities for digital technologies, we conducted interviews with 14 influential decision-makers in Bangladesh who play significant roles in the development of nutrition strategies. Our findings highlight a disconnect between the Bangladesh government's "digital mandate" and the reality of digital innovation practice within the nutrition development sector. Our paper contributes to the debate on factors that affect decision-making processes. We explore the dynamics of diverse actors and institutions who are intended to participate in, but can act as obstacles to sustained bottom-up innovations. Our findings expand understanding of institutional priorities, the dynamics of intermediaries, techno-solutionism, postcolonialism, bureaucracy, competition, and other important topics in CSCW scholarship. We suggest understanding the factors that guide the decision-making process of digital innovation practices in terms of four dimensions: internal, external, vertical, and horizontal. Consequently, we recommend CSCW and HCI researchers become mediators to connect decision-makers and communities and bring their voices in ICT innovations for global development. Finally, we offer recommendations for proactive engagement with decision-making stakeholders, enabling researchers to design community-centered sustainable digital innovations for development.

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.

This article presents a thorough discussion of the trajectories of international migration research in HCI. We begin by reporting our survey findings of 282 HCI-related publications about migration from nine digital libraries between 2010–2019, summarizing how this research stream has evolved, the geographies and populations it encompasses, and the methodologies it utilizes. We then augment these findings with data from interviews with 11 skilled researchers who reflect on their working experience in this area. Our analysis reveals how the domain has evolved from the European migrant crisis to a more global agenda of migration and points towards a shifting focus from addressing immediate needs to acknowledging more complex political and emotional aspects of mobility. We also uncover the critical role of academic, local, and international politics in migration research in HCI. We discuss these findings to explore future opportunities in this area and advance HCI research discourse with the marginalized populace.

While the growth of financial technologies (FinTech) is making the flow of money faster, easier, and more secure, such technologies are often unable to serve many countries due to the global political environment. Despite its severe impact, this issue has remained understudied in the HCI literature. We address this gap by presenting our findings from a three-month-long ethnography with the Iranian community in Toronto, Canada. We present their struggles in transferring money to and from their home country - a process that entails financial loss, fear, uncertainty, and privacy breaches. We also outline the informal workarounds that allow this community to circumvent these challenges, along with the associated hassles. This paper contributes to broadening the scope of FinTech in the HCI literature by connecting it with the politics surrounding transnational transactions. We discuss the design implications of our findings and their contribution to the broader interests of HCI in mobilities and social justice.

Women in the global south often seek justice to their online harassment through unveiling the harassers and the screenshots of their sent harassment texts and visual contents before the relevant authorities. Nevertheless, such evidence is often challenged for their authenticity. Our survey (n=91) and interview (n=43) with Bangladeshi online gender harassment victims revealed the depth of the problem, and we set design goals to collect evidence from Facebook Messenger with ensured authenticity. Building on the ‘shame-based model’ of gender justice [12], we designed ‘Unmochon’, a tool that captures authentic evidence and shares with victims’ intended group. Our user-study (n=48) revealed that diminishing authenticity problem may still leave the victim and online gender justice entangled with mob-sentiment, hegemonic legal consciousness, and several privacy aspects. Our findings open up a new discussion on how HCI-design should address online gender justice in such a complex social setting.

HCI research predominantly uses scientific rationality to explain users’ behaviors, decisions, and interactions with statistical models based and data-driven systems. However, such interactions are often more diverse in real life, and may straddle beyond scientific and economic rationality. Building on a ten-month ethnography at seven Bangladeshi villages, we explore the social and cultural factors that influence the online betting practices among the villagers. We describe how bets harmonize with users’ faith, hunch, and cultural practices, along with statistical recommendations. Drawing on a rich body of social science work on gambling, we contribute to the HCI scholarship in rationality, justification, and postcolonial computing. Finally, we present such betting as an under-appreciated site for HCI that contradicts with the ideological hegemony of statistical rationality, and recommend a smooth integration of AI system with the “other” rationalities of the Global South.

Inability to read and understand the information on medicine packaging is a problem for many people across the world, especially in the Global South. As a solution to this, many of them reportedly often memorize the names and looks of their medicines. However, they often fail to distinguish between registered and unregistered/duplicate medicines and consume them without realizing, which further deteriorates their health conditions and even may lead to death. They frequently seek help from family members and friends to supervise their medicine intake, however, such helpers might still struggle to distinguish between registered and duplicate medicines if the texts written on the medicine’s packaging seem similar. To address this problem, we designed an android mobile-phone application, ‘Oshudh Poro’ scans medicine packaging, captures images of its unique registry number, matches the number to a database of registered medicines in the country, retrieves the relevant details upon finding the medicine as registered, converts them to Bengali audios and plays the details aloud. Thus, the users know which medicine are they taking, whether it is registered or unregistered and its details. Thus, low-literate users would gain more autonomy in managing their personal medication. We argue that this application would lead wellbeing-HCI to more sustainable design solutions as the application is built on existing skills of users and integrates only the existing features available to the intended users. Thus, our design contributes to wellbeing-HCI, sustainability research, and HCI4D.

COVID-19 disrupted the existing ecosystem of technology repair and recycle in Bangladesh as visiting repair workshops became difficult and most repairers and e-waste workers had to temporarily close their businesses. Consequently, users were left with very few choices for fixing or recycling their devices. Based on our interviews with 30 repair and e-waste workers and 21 users of electronic devices we capture various aspects of this disruption and the corresponding coping mechanisms. This paper reports how the repair and e-waste worker communities adopted various changes to their work, provided remote services, and yet faced a decline in their business. On the other hand, end-users learned to fix their devices, collaborated with each other, and negotiated with partially broken devices to address this challenge. We further discuss the broader implications of our findings for HCI scholarship in HCI4D, resilience, and sustainability.

HCI has a dearth of knowledge in understanding how religiosity, spirituality, and ideological values and practices shape the notion of privacy and guide information practices worldwide. In this paper, we fill this gap by reporting our findings from an eight-month-long ethnographically informed study in Bangladeshi Islamic communities. We report how the Islamic spirit of purdah, amanah, gheebat, riya, and buhtan represent the notion of privacy and guide privacy practices among “pious” Bangladeshi Muslims. We further discuss how sacred values generate norms and customs associated with privacy and surveillance. Finally, we recommend how a nuanced understanding of divine interests, identity performance, family surveillance, and spatial privacy norms help designing for inclusive privacy in the Global South. This paper makes a novel contribution to HCI by providing a new analytical perspective to understand privacy and design privacy-preserving technologies and tools for regions where religiosity, spirituality, and sacred values play a dominant role.

A large number of mobile phone applications have been built and deployed to combat COVID-19, offering various services to users, including virus information, contact tracing, and symptom monitoring among others. At the same time, the privacy and security vulnerabilities of user data over these apps have become a big concern in many places. To examine this issue, we conducted a mixed-method study with a combined approach of app analysis and an online survey to understand the privacy vulnerabilities of such apps and get an overview of user perceptions around this issue. In addition, we considered the notion of privacy in two different socio-economic contexts (Global North and Global South) to specify similarities and differences in app-specific privacy functionalities (data practices, functional requirements, regulations, etc.) and identify factors that impacted users’ decision to use such apps (such as trust, preferences, concerns, motivations, etc.). Thus, this paper presents two diverse sets of opinions from these two geographic regions (including 27 countries), which provide a broader understanding of how the privacy concerns around COVID-19 are connected to various economic, political, and social factors. Furthermore, our analysis of 39 apps provides a deep insight into what many COVID-19 apps are lacking to ensure proper privacy practices and how those issues are entangled with various contextual challenges.

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.

Online app search optimization (ASO) platforms that provide bulk installs and fake reviews for paying app developers in order to fraudulently boost their search rank in app stores, were shown to employ diverse and complex strategies that successfully evade state-of-the-art detection methods. In this paper we introduce RacketStore, a platform to collect data from Android devices of participating ASO providers and regular users, on their interactions with apps which they install from the Google Play Store. We present measurements from a study of 943 installs of RacketStore on 803 unique devices controlled by ASO providers and regular users, that consists of 58,362,249 data snapshots collected from these devices, the 12,341 apps installed on them and their 110,511,637 Google Play reviews. We reveal significant differences between ASO providers and regular users in terms of the number and types of user accounts registered on their devices, the number of apps they review, and the intervals between the installation times of apps and their review times. We leverage these insights to introduce features that model the usage of apps and devices, and show that they can train supervised learning algorithms to detect paid app installs and fake reviews with an F1-measure of 99.72% (AUC above 0.99), and detect devices controlled by ASO providers with an F1-measure of 95.29% (AUC = 0.95). We discuss the costs associated with evading detection by our classifiers and also the potential for app stores to use our approach to detect ASO work with privacy.

Most scholarly discussions around ridesharing applications center on the experiences of the drivers and the riders (passengers), and thus the role of the owners of the cars, if they are different from the drivers, remain understudied. However, in many countries in the Global South, the car owners are often different from the car drivers, and the tensions between them often shape the experience with these ridesharing apps in those countries. In this paper, we address this issue based on our interview-based study in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which incorporates semi-structured interviews of 31 Uber drivers and 10 car owners. From our interviews, we identify the contract models that facilitate the partnership between prospective Uber drivers without a car and car owners seeking to rent their cars for Uber, describe the tensions between these two parties, provide a nuanced cultural portrayal of their negotiation mechanisms, and highlight the reasons for which the driver or the owner leaves Uber. Our analysis reveals how the local adoption of sharing economy amplifies existing inequalities and disrupts the prevailing social dynamics. We also connect our findings to the broader interests of CSCW around work, privacy, power and discuss their implications for design and policy formulations.

India's #MeToo movement began in late-2018, and was largely a platform for some privileged women sharing their accounts of sexual harassment. Beyond issues of access to digital technology, our paper investigates why various sections of India's female and LGBTQ+ population chose not to engage with the #MeToo movement. Focusing on experiences with sexual harassment, we conducted 44 qualitative interviews with middle-class working women, feminist and queer activists, academics, and other stakeholders working against gender-based violence, to understand their perspectives on #MeToo. Our paper explores why some survivors bypass the legal infrastructure to speak out against sexual harassment using #MeToo, while others choose not to participate despite having access to social media platforms. Using the lens of infrastructure, we outline the imbrication of social media movements with existing social norms and legal infrastructures. Further, we highlight how infrastructural politics are connected to patriarchy, colonialism, caste, class, and gender struggles.

This paper joins the growing body of work in postcolonial computing in HCI, and critically examines the impacts of online social media on the urban architecture in the Global South. Based on our nine-month long ethnography at eight residential areas in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this paper reports how online fame drives local users to produce digital images of their houses mimicking various Western standards, which in turn, brings changes to the organization, aesthetics, and functions of domestic spaces. This paper also describes how such digital image mediated transformations to local architecture are diminishing traditional spaces, altering their usual functions, and limiting the movement of many women inside their home. Drawing from a rich body of literature in postcolonialism, critical image theory, architecture, and Islamic feminism, we explain how these practices demonstrate a subaltern experience of using social media in the Global South. We further discuss design implications to both HCI and architecture to address these issues, and connect our findings to the broader agendas of HCI around social justice and global development.

Current research in HCI with immigrants predominantly focuses on their practical needs and little attention is given to their cultural identities. As such, we aim to understand how newcomers reflect their cultural values within domestic settings. We explore this by provoking memories immigrants associate with physical spaces inside their homes. Hence, we built "Our Home Sketcher": a paper-based home drafting tool that allows novice users to design their homes by sketching and implicitly expressing their space, light, and privacy preferences. The collected drawings are then fed into a computer algorithm that produces 3D models of the sketched houses. This process of design acts as an artifact-driven storytelling for heritage sharing and rapport building within migrant communities. We engage 13 Middle Eastern newcomers in Canada with the tool and use Halbwachs' [44] theory of collective memory to frame how home sketching provokes former experiences. Our findings show a strong longing for reclaiming the past, narrating space-related oral history, and designing beyond current limitations.

This paper describes a mobile-based care system (mCARE), which is a novel tool to routinely and systematically collect behavior and developmental parameter children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) from the low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) like Bangladesh. It is the first clinical decision support system for the ASD children in LMICs that has been proved efficient to assist them in data-driven decision making by using a remote Experience Sampling Method (ESM). Unlike other ESM, instead of taking a report from patients, mCARE introduce caregivers as the reporter. mCARE has deployed Value Sensitive Design (VSD) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in its design process as well as Fogg's Behavior Model (FBM) to assist caregivers in developing and sustain the habit of logging data regularly over a long period. mCARE has accumulated its goal by implementing three tools: mCARE-APP, mCARE-SMS, and mCARE-DMP. The successful completion of the project using this mCARE can ensure the overall quality of care (QoC) of ASD in LMICs, including Bangladesh. The usability and cost-benefit analysis have also shown the potential of mCARE to be scaled to serve a large population in Bangladesh and beyond.

While the sole purpose of undergraduate education is not to prepare the students for the industry, it is certainly one of its important objectives. In this work, we investigate how well the Bangladeshi software and IT-related undergraduate education prepares the students for the software industry. We conducted semi-structured interviews of twenty practitioners from the Bangladeshi software industry. During the interviews, these practitioners provided commentary on where they believe the undergraduate education system falls short, and provided their suggestions for improvement. Based on the themes discovered from the interviews, we created a survey where more than two hundred practitioners participated. The results of our work suggest that most of the practitioners believe that, while some aspects of the undergraduate education are fine, the undergraduate education system leaves its graduates largely unprepared for the software industry. In this paper, we summarize and present the practitioners' opinions on some key areas including but not limited to updating of syllabi, internships as part of the curricula, the nature, length and evaluation process of undergraduate projects, pedagogical issues, and academic practices.

With a rapid increase in the use of digital technologies, people in the Global South including Bangladesh are exposed to a wide-range of smartphone applications (termed as apps in this paper), which offer a variety of features and services. However, privacy leakage through apps has increasingly become a major concern in Bangladesh, where the app collecting users' sensitive information without their consent was reported in news media for privacy violation. Our study with 32 participants from varying age, literacy level, and profession in Dhaka, Bangladesh unveils the perceptions of people around data collection and sharing by the app reported in privacy leakage news. All of our participants were aware of information leakage through the app they use, where they possess varying perceptions around providing personal information, like a sense of benefit, necessity and contribution, indifference, fear, or (no) authority over data collection. Our analysis reveals the relation between users' privacy perceptions, local infrastructure, and social practices in Bangladesh, where we identify the situated challenges that interfere with people's understanding of privacy notice. Our results lead to a discussion on how people's privacy perceptions are influenced by rapid urbanization and the opportunities offered by digitization in Bangladesh. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations to develop situated and sustainable strategies to enhance privacy awareness and practices in the social setting of Bangladesh, and Global South.

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.

We present a study of recent advances in computer vision (CV) research for the Global South to identify the main uses of modern CV and its most significant ethical risks in the region. We review 55 research papers and analyze them along three principal dimensions: where the technology was designed, the needs addressed by the technology, and the potential ethical risks arising following deployment. Results suggest: 1) CV is most used in policy planning and surveillance applications, 2) privacy violations is the most likely and most severe risk to arise from modern CV systems designed for the Global South, and 3) researchers from the Global North differ from researchers from the Global South in their uses of CV to solve problems in the Global South. Results of our risk analysis also differ from previous work on CV risk perception in the West, suggesting locality to be a critical component of each risk's importance.

This paper joins a growing body of work within ICTD and related fields studying the privacy challenges in the Global South. While most of the existing work in this area has focused on uses of technology in personal and home settings, a large part of computing in the Global South centers around public places, such as commercial Digital Service Centers (DSCs). In this paper, we present the findings from a six-month-long ethnography studying 19 Digital Service Centers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We find that infrastructural limitations, local power politics, lack of knowledge, and insufficient protection mechanisms lead to privacy vulnerabilities for the customers of these centers. We apply the lens of informal markets to analyze these vulnerabilities and connect our findings to the broader concerns of ICTD around development, ethics, and postcolonial computing and discuss potential design and policy implications around these issues.

Migration, forced mobility, and refugee studies in ICTD and related disciplines have been predominantly focused on the victims' immediate needs, including shelter, food, healthcare, language, and information. This line of work has mostly been devoid of the political background of migration and the victims' future hopes and aspirations, and hence fails to address many pressing issues associated with their long-term settlement. We address this gap in ICTD literature by drawing on our two years long ethnography with the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. We build on a rich body of literature on development sociology and philosophy to demonstrate how the refugees infrastructure their hope through various artful practices of solidarity, leadership, and negotiation, and how ICT plays an important role in and around each of these practices. We discuss how our study further contributes to the ongoing discourse in ICTD around aspiration, hope, design, and empowerment.

Stigma, a critical challenge for social justice, has not received much attention in ICTD literature. Most existing designs that aim to combat stigma draw on an 'information and awareness' approach that is often inadequate to address stigma's deeper roots. To address this gap, we have conducted an interview and design study in five special needs schools1 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, involving twenty-nine parents and nine teachers. Based on our study, we present how the primary caretakers of children with autism face the stigma associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and how misogyny, economic apprehension, and misinformation generate this stigma. Drawing from a range of scholarly work in sociology and psychology, we demonstrate how those factors are rooted in the colonial history and contemporary social hierarchy of Bangladesh. Based on our participatory design sessions, we introduce and analyze potential design directions and connect our findings to the politics of inclusion and social justice in the context of the developing world.

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.

A series of events in October 2017 led to the initiation of an unprecedented global feminist movement over various social media platforms, where using the hashtag #MeToo (or some variants of it), women across the world publicly shared their untold stories of being sexually harassed. We conducted an anonymous online survey (n=180) and an interview study (n=30) to understand the participation of Bangladeshi women in this movement. Our study concurs that while Bangladeshi women, who are regular users of social media, supported the spirit of this movement; did not participate in it, even though they had many bitter experiences. Our analysis shows that their non-participation was largely influenced by a cultural difference, patriarchy, perceived futility and lack of hope, and a reliance on alternatives. We discuss how our findings of women's use of technology platforms, which is conditioned and limited by male-dominated and conservative Bangladeshi society, relates to the broader issues in feminism that the GROUP community is interested in.

While persuasion has often been considered an important design tool for achieving sustainable behavior, a growing scholarship is criticizing it for its narrow focus on individuals and an overarching economic worldview. This criticism is often based on the limitations of economic-rationales that many persuasive design efforts hold and cannot fully capture the values of people who reside outside the modern scientific world - especially where values originate from and are shaped by religiosity and spirituality. We join this discourse and argue that such a narrow view of persuasion sidelines the theological roots. Based on our six-month long ethnography with the Islamic communities in a Bangladeshi city, Kushtia, we describe how 'motivation' and 'habit' are built there - two of the basic components of persuasion. Drawing from a rich body of literature on the sociology of religions and theology, we highlight how Islamic values are closely tied to the idea of persuasion and reflect a vision of sustainable living. We further discuss how such a deeper understanding of religious values can help design for sustainable living and broaden the scope of CSCW literature in the various domains.

There is a risk that modern practices of information communication and visualization in human-computer interaction can sideline communities due to their prioritization of scientific rationality. Such ideological hegemony can complicate interactions with data and computers, especially for low-literate communities in the global south. Through a six-month long ethnographic study with Nakshi-Katha makers, Hindu Idol makers, and witchcraft practitioners, we investigated how rural practitioners use their own forms of representation and narrative in record keeping, social and religious storytelling, and information mediated decision making. We find that traditionally developed approaches towards presenting and communicating information often make use of concrete units to represent entities and connect to designers' cultural practices and the physical location. Further, we identify how medium has significant influence in meaning-making. Often these strategies and conventions are passed down through generations within the community. In this paper, we discuss how this rural tradition differs from the modern information communication practices, discussing how an understanding of traditional practices for representing information can be useful in developing more accessible, and culturally appropriate modern tools and technologies for the people of rural Bangladesh and similar communities.

In October 2017, there happened the uprising of an unprecedented online movement on social media by women across the world who started publicly sharing their untold stories of being sexually harassed along with the hashtag #MeToo (or some variants of it). Those stories did not only strike the silence that had long hid the perpetrators, but also allowed women to discharge some of their bottled-up grievances, and revealed many important information surrounding sexual harassment. In this paper, we present our analysis of about one million such tweets collected between October 15 and October 31, 2017 that reveals some interesting patterns and attributes of the people, place, emotions, actions, and reactions related to the tweeted stories. Based on our analysis, we also advance the discussion on the potential role of online social media in breaking the silence of women by factoring in the strengths and limitations of these platforms.

Black Hat App Search Optimization (ASO) in the form of fake reviews and sockpuppet accounts, is prevalent in peer-opinion sites, e.g., app stores, with negative implications on the digital and real lives of their users. To detect and filter fraud, a growing body of research has provided insights into various aspects of fraud posting activities, and made assumptions about the working procedures of the fraudsters from online data. However, such assumptions often lack empirical evidence from the actual fraud perpetrators. To address this problem, in this paper, we present results of both a qualitative study with 18 ASO workers we recruited from 5 freelancing sites, concerning activities they performed on Google Play, and a quantitative investigation with fraud-related data collected from other 39 ASO workers. We reveal findings concerning various aspects of ASO worker capabilities and behaviors, including novel insights into their working patterns, and supporting evidence for several existing assumptions. Further, we found and report participant-revealed techniques to bypass Google-imposed verifications, concrete strategies to avoid detection, and even strategies that leverage fraud detection to enhance fraud efficacy. We report a Google site vulnerability that enabled us to infer the mobile device models used to post more than 198 million reviews in Google Play, including 9,942 fake reviews. We discuss the deeper implications of our findings, including their potential use to develop the next generation fraud detection and prevention systems.

People in South Asia frequently share a single device among multiple individuals, resulting in digital privacy challenges. This paper explores a design concept that aims to mitigate some of these challenges through a 'tiered' privacy model. Using this model, a person creates a 'shared' account that contains data they are willing to share and that is assigned a password that will be shared. Simultaneously, they create a separate 'secret' account that contains data they prefer to keep secret and that uses a password they do not share with anyone. When a friend or family member asks to check their device, the user can tell them the password for their shared account, with their private data secure in the secret account that the other person is unaware of. We explore the benefits and trade-offs of our design through a three-week deployment with 21 participants in Bangladesh, presenting findings that show how our work aids digital privacy while also exposing the challenges that remain.

While repair work has recently been getting increasing attention in HCI, recycling practices have still remained relatively understudied, especially in the context of the Global South. To this end, building on our eight-month-long ethnography, this paper reports the electronic waste (`e-waste', henceforth) recycling practices among the e-waste recycler (`bhangari') communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In doing so, this paper offers the work of the bhangaris through an articulation of their hands and their uses. Drawing from a rich body of scholarly work on social science, we define and contextualize three characteristics of the hand of a bhangari: knowledge, care, and skills and collaboration. Our study also highlights the pains and sufferings involved in this profession. By explaining bhangari work through the hand, we also discuss its implications for design, and its connection to HCI's broader interest in sustainability.

While Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on health and well-being is increasingly becoming more aware and inclusive of its social and political dimensions, spiritual practices are still largely overlooked there. For a large number of people around the world, especially in the global south, witchcraft, sorcery, and other occult practices are the primary means of achieving health, wealth, satisfaction, and happiness. Building on an eight-month long ethnography in six villages in Jessore, Bangladesh, this paper explores the knowledge, materials, and politics involved in the local witchcraft practices there. By drawing from a rich body of anthropological work on witchcraft, this paper discusses how those findings contribute to the broader issues in HCI around morality, modernity, and postcolonial computing. This paper concludes by recommending ways for smooth integration of traditional occult practices with HCI through design and policy. We argue for occult practices as an under-appreciated site for HCI to learn how to combat ideological hegemony.

While a growing body of literature in HCI is focusing on the initial needs of the refugees soon after their migration, most challenges associated with the long-term process of their integration with the host communities using technology have still remained understudied. This work builds on a 3 year-long fieldwork with the refugees in Canada, extended observations, and interviews with 26 participants (19 refugees, 4 refugee sponsors, and 3 refugee workers) to illustrate how refugees encounter various challenges in accessing necessary services in Canada through its computerized infrastructures. This paper documents the intricacies and nuances of this problem extended over their struggles in obtaining information, getting social support, learning new technologies, securing their digital activities, and the gender dynamics associated with these activities. Our analysis generates several design implications to address these issues. Moreover, we discuss the challenges' entanglement with some of the broader concerns in HCI regarding infrastructure, inclusion, and mobility.

In October 2017, an unprecedented social media movement started where women from all around the world publicly shared their untold stories of being sexually harassed using the hashtag #MeToo (or some variants of it). While this movement raised voices against sexual harassment across the globe, many women in South Asia did not participate in this movement. In this paper, we present our study on non-participation of many Bangladeshi women in this movement through an anonymous online survey (n = 180), and an in-depth interview study (n = 30). Our study shows that many Bangladeshi women, despite being supportive of the movement, did not participate in this movement because of several social, cultural, and infrastructural reasons. We use transnational feminism as a theoretical framework to explain their non-participation. We further discuss how the lessons learned from this study help us better understand the participation, functioning, and impact of social media movements.

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.

Previous Information and Communication Technology and Development (ICTD) research has shown that rural women's access to digital technologies in many Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), including Bangladesh, is challenging because of a number of reasons, including Techno-Phobia. With a view to mediating access for rural women, we designed an one-button communication box, and documented rural women's user-experiences with it. Drawing upon our discovery of the set of gender specific and culturally contextual problems, this paper also discusses several design and policy interventions to ensure a better Information and Communication Technology (ICT) access for the rural women in Bangladesh.

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.

The intersection of Islam and gender affect technological and social interactions for Muslim women in significant ways and remains an understudied domain for CSCW and related fields. Building on 73 qualitative interviews with low-income women in Punjab, Pakistan, we analyze the complexity of family relationships and the subsequent dynamics of authority around technology uptake and usage by women within non-Western contexts, and, specifically, within the Islamic world. We argue that a Pakistani woman's experience with technology depends on many factors, including gendered roles, generational differences in a family, and wider socio-cultural and religious influences against the backdrop of a culturally conservative and patriarchal society. Our paper highlights the rich family dynamics, including key life events, that transform the roles of both Muslim women and their relatives. Our work is intended to inform scholars, practitioners within development agencies and industry, and other individuals studying technology and development about household dynamics that influence Muslim women's use of technology to encourage them to consider these dynamics during design and implementation processes for technological inclusion.

This paper analyzes the processes and challenges of technology repair in remote, low-income areas far from standard ICT repair infrastructure. Our sites of study are the fishing and farming villages of Dibut, Diotorin, and Dikapinisan in Aurora Province, Philippines, located in coastal coves against a mountain range. Residents are geographically isolated from urban areas, with the nearest peri-urban center of Baler a boat trip of several hours away, infeasible in some sea conditions. Unlike prior work in more connected rural areas, there are no local repair shops and device repair is uncommon, despite frequent breakage due to harsh conditions for electronics. The scarcity of local electronics repair limits technology access and leads to accumulation of e-waste. While prior work demonstrates that local electronics repair capability does arise in many rural areas around the world, we must also acknowledge that the successful emergence of this infrastructure depends on the intersection of many structural conditions and cannot be taken for granted. We present the material hardships of achieving local repair in terms of seams between heterogeneous urban and rural infrastructures, which illustrate the cove communities' marginality with respect to many forms of public infrastructure. However, intermittent and informal repair infrastructures based on trust relationships emerge to patch these seams in remote settings. We show how trust affects the way people dynamically construct repair infrastructure and why, based on their remoteness and the resulting value propositions of repair. Networks of trust between repairers, their clients, suppliers, fellow repairers, and certifying or training institutions crucially facilitate the movement of resources and expertise across the Philippines, but also reinforce the marginality of residents and repairers in the coves. Despite these structural challenges, local people are able to maintain a robust ecosystem for rural electrical line repair, from which we generalize the model of training grounds as a strategy for sustaining local communities of repair experts.

This paper discusses the issues that arise while designing better wellbeing support for a low-income rural population in Bangladesh. Through a four-month long ethnographic study, we explored how people in 13villages in southwestern Bangladesh accessed healthcare. Over the course of our fieldwork, we asked the participants about the existing healthcare services available to them and how they interacted with different ICT-based wellbeing support systems. Our findings show that insufficient resources, schedules, and the distant location of government-supported healthcare facilities were major challenges for the villagers. We also found that villagers' limited knowledge and mistrust of care-providing infrastructure block them from the benefits of available ICT-based supports and resources. Drawing on our findings from the field, we discuss possible alternative design directions for improving wellbeing support for rural Bangladeshis.

With the rapid growth of ICT adoption in the Global South, crimes over and through digital technologies have also increased. Consequently, governments have begun to undertake a variety of different surveillance programs, which in turn provoke questions regarding citizens' privacy rights. However, both the concepts of privacy and of citizens' corresponding political rights have not been well-developed in HCI for non-Western contexts. This paper presents findings from a three-month long ethnography and online survey (n=606) conducted in Bangladesh, where the government recently imposed mandatory biometric registration for every mobile phone user. Our analysis surfaces important privacy and safety concerns regarding identity, ownership, and trust, and reveals the cultural and political challenges of imposing biometric registration program in Bangladesh. We also discuss how alternative designs of infrastructure, technology, and policy may better meet stakeholders' competing needs in the Global South.

Local informal markets or bazaars play a central role in embedding the adoption, consumption, and reproduction of digital technologies within the economic and cultural fabric of the Global South. This paper presents ethnographic accounts of informal ICT markets in two sites, one in India and the other in Bangladesh, and assesses how technology consumption unfolds within local practices. Building on social practice theory, this paper depicts the role of materiality, relationships, and situated knowledge in the functioning of a bazaar. We discuss how this knowledge expands our understanding of the evaluation of technology and technical expertise, and the persistence of these informal spaces despite the uptake of corporatized technology marketplaces. We argue that the bazaar represents a special kind of local voice that enriches the HCI scholarship in postcolonial computing.

We present a study of internet use and its forced non-use in Bangladesh. In light of current initiatives by state and industry actors to improve internet access and bridge the 'digital divide' for under-served, under-resourced, and underrepresented communities across the world, we offer a situated, qualitative perspective on what the current state of internet use looks like for select social groups in Bangladesh. We analyze how a state-imposed ban attempted to affect the nonuse of particular web-based services and how the affected populations found or did not find workarounds in response. We also discuss takeaways for researchers as well as industry and state actors studying and working towards more equitable access to the internet in the 'developing' world.

The fifth Sustainable Development Goal instituted by the United Nations in 2015 presents a call for gender equality, targeting the elimination of "discrimination, violence, and exploitation against women". We present an analysis of recent conversations within the Information and Communication Technology and Development (ICTD) community aiming to identify ways in which the community might approach conceptualizing, designing, and deploying ICTs to address vital concerns in this regard. We also articulate ways to frame and address key challenges moving forward through more holistic and sustainable approaches, greater engagement with diverse stakeholders, and evolved methodological toolkits.

Prior research on technology use in the Global South suggests that people in marginalized communities frequently share a single device among multiple individuals. However, the data privacy challenges and tensions that arise when people share devices have not been studied in depth. This paper presents a qualitative study with 72 participants that analyzes how families in Bangladesh currently share mobile phones, their usage patterns, and the tensions and challenges that arise as individuals seek to protect the privacy of their personal data. We show how people share devices out of economic need, but also because sharing is a social and cultural practice that is deeply embedded in Bangladeshi society. We also discuss how prevalent power relationships affect sharing practices and reveal gender dynamics that impact the privacy of women's data. Finally, we highlight strategies that participants adopted to protect their private data from the people with whom they share devices. Taken together, our findings have broad implications that advance the CSCW community's understanding of digital privacy outside the Western world.

This paper contributes to the growing literature on peer-to-peer (P2P) applications through an ethnographic study of auto-rickshaw drivers in Bengaluru, India. We describe how the adoption of a P2P application, Ola, which connects passengers to rickshaws, changes drivers work practices. Ola is part of the 'peer services' phenomenon which enable new types of ad-hoc trade in labour, skills and goods. Auto-rickshaw drivers present an interesting case because prior to Ola few had used Smartphones or the Internet. Furthermore, as financially vulnerable workers in the informal sector, concerns about driver welfare become prominent. Whilst technologies may promise to improve livelihoods, they do not necessarily deliver [57]. We describe how Ola does little to change the uncertainty which characterizes an auto drivers' day. This leads us to consider how a more equitable and inclusive system might be designed.

This paper examines the question of "values in repair" -- the distinct forms of meaning and care that may be built into human-technology interactions through individual and collective acts of repair. Our work draws on research in HCI and the social sciences and findings from ethnographic studies in four sites -- two amateur "fixers" collectives' in Brooklyn and Seattle, USA and two mobile phone repair communities in Uganda and Bangladesh -- to advance two arguments. First, studies of repair account for new sites and processes of value that differ from those appearing at HCI's better-studied moments of design and use. Second, repair may embed modes of human interaction with technology and with each other in ways that surface values as contingent and ongoing accomplishments, suggesting ongoing processes of valuation that can never be fully fixed or commoditized. These insights help HCI account for human relationships to technology built into the world through repair.

This paper presents an analysis of the privacy issues associated with the practice of repairing broken digital objects in Bangladesh. Historically, research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), and related disciplines has focused on the design and development of new interventions or technologies. As a result, the repair of old or broken technologies has been an often neglected topic of research. The goal of our work is to improve the practices surrounding the repair of digital artifacts in developing countries. Specifically, in this paper we examine the privacy challenges associated with the process of repairing digital artifacts, which usually requires that the owner of a broken artifact hand over the technology to a repairer. Findings from our ethnographic work conducted at 10 repair markets in Dhaka, Bangladesh, show a variety of ways in which the privacy of an individual's personal data may be compromised during the repair process. We also examine people's perceptions around privacy in repair and its connections with broader social and cultural values. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for future research to strengthen the repair ecosystem in developing countries. Taken together, our findings contribute to the growing discourse around post-use cycles of technology in ICTD and HCI.

ICTD benefits from being a broad multidisciplinary field that unites researchers from a wide range of domains attempting to understand the role of ICTs in the context of social, economic and political development. As a new field of study, however, ICTD continuously grapples with epistemological differences and varying (and often evolving) notions of what counts as development, and there still exists a significant gap in outlining where the current boundaries of this field lie. In this paper we present "Missing Pieces," an ongoing research project with the primary aim of uncovering the constitution, development, growth and impact of ICTD. Through in-depth quantitative and qualitative analyses of the distribution of participation in and impact of ICTD research across places, people, institutions, organizations and funding agencies, this project will look beyond just trends, and instead focus on finding the missing pieces, i.e. what, or rather who is being left out.

This paper explores discrepancies between the founding assumptions of mobile and ubiquitous computing in the western world, and the starkly different experiences of mobility and infrastructure to be found in many post-colonial environments. Based on a field study of forced mobility and technology use among populations displaced by the Hatirjheel waterfront development project in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we make two basic arguments. First, we point to the partial nature of assumptions around mobility that frame the imagination of mainstream HCI research, and argue that different and heretofore residual experiences of mobility must also be accounted for in post-colonial and other marginal computing environments. Second, we document four forms of infrastructural experience -- dispossession, reconstitution, collaboration, and repair -- that characterize real-world engagements with infrastructure in such settings. We conclude with implications for HCI research and design, and reflections on how HCI researchers might better account for such experiences in their work.

Practices of technology repair in developing country contexts play crucial and often overlooked roles in supporting ICTD goals of access and sustainability. They also constitute complex and neglected sites of technical skill, knowledge, and learning. Building on original ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the explicit, tacit, and social knowledges that shape practice and expertise in the mobile phone repair markets of urban Bangladesh. We document forms of learning and collaboration central to the production and innovation of repair skills and knowledge, and show how these processes operate at the intersection of global knowledge flows and local efforts to access, contextualize and situate that knowledge. We conclude by arguing for repair as an underappreciated site of third-world technical practice and expertise, and reflecting on how ICTD research might better take such practices into account.

Acts of technology maintenance and repair constitute important and often overlooked moments in the operation of complex interactive systems. They also provide fresh insight on a series of problems -- innovation, learning, and sustainability -- long core to HCI concern. This paper builds on original ethnographic fieldwork in the repair markets of Dhaka, Bangladesh to advance three basic arguments: first, that repair activities in such locations reveal novel and significant forms of craft-based knowledge and innovation; second, that repair work is embedded in local and transnational flows that connect local practices to global networks and institutions; and third, that taking repair work seriously can cast new light on problems of learning and sustainability in the design and operation of complex interactive systems. We conclude with observations that relate our repair-based findings back to problems in interactive systems research and design.

Public sexual harassment has emerged as a large and growing concern in urban Bangladesh, with deep and damaging implications for gender security, justice, and rights of public participation. In this paper we describe an integrated program of ethnographic and design work meant to understand and address such problems. For one year we conducted surveys, interviews, and focus groups around sexual harassment with women at three different universities in Dhaka. Based on this input, we developed "Protibadi", a web and mobile phone based application designed to report, map, and share women's stories around sexual harassment in public places. In August 2013 the system launched, user studies were conducted, and public responses were monitored to gauge reactions, strengths, and limits of the system. This paper describes the findings of our ethnographic and design-based work, and suggests lessons relevant to other HCI efforts to understand and design around difficult and culturally sensitive problems.

Autism is a complex developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life. This is the result of a neurological disorder that affects the functioning of human brain. Children diagnosed with autism often are self-absorbed and seem to exist in a private world where they are unable to successfully communicate and interact with others. Sometimes they have difficulties in developing speaking skills and understanding what others say to them. Lack of fluency in the speech is one of the most frequently found problems with autistic children. The traditional methods for increasing fluency were found to be monotonous and hence, not much successful during our three months of observations over the participants of Autism Welfare Foundation (AWF) at Dhaka. Therefore, we developed an interactive computer game for the autistic children for improving the fluency in their speech. Our game produced encouraging results over a participant during three months of observation. In this paper, we describe our project and the outcomes.

Autism is a general term used to describe a group of complex developmental brain disorders known as Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD). It is a life-long disability that prevents people from understanding what they see, hear, and sense. This results in severe problems with social relationships, communications, and behavior. Autism is typically diagnosed between the ages of two and six, although variations of ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders) can sometimes be diagnosed earlier or later [1]. Children with learning disability such as autism who have serious impairments with social, emotional and communication skills require high degree of personalization in using the educational software developed for them. In this paper we present a personalized game based on digital story-telling concept that helps the children of age ranging from 9 to 14 years old with autism to understand the use of money. It also teaches the autistic children the social behavior appropriate while shopping. The game is developed on BYOB (Build Your Own Block, an advanced offshoot of the game engine Scratch).

Autism is a disorder of neural development which affects about one in every 150 kids on average. One of the major complexities regarding autistic children in social communication is the speech disorder. The problems related to speech disorder fall into different categories and unintelligibility in speech is one of them. Although there is no definite medicine or treatment for autism, doctors, therapists, and special teachers can help kids with autism overcome many difficulties by different physical and psychological therapies. In this paper we have demonstrated our newly developed interactive computer game which will be helpful in increasing intelligibility in the speeches of autistic children and can be used as a therapy besides the traditional approaches. During our five months of intervention with the autistic children of Autism Welfare Foundation (AWF) at Dhaka, we checked the effectiveness of this therapy and got some encouraging results.