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

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

Agentic AI is being heralded as the next step in the development of AI systems. Agentics, complex ensembles of different machine learning, data processing, and generative AI models, can provide new autonomous and proactive decision-making capabilities to organizations, participate in complex workflows, and, when needed, seek guidance from and provide insights to human users in natural languages. Collectively, we wish to explore how and why to design agentic systems to be situated within specific social and organizational contexts, the value of social theory and perspectives to this work, and the potential of this move to address critical issues with AI. Given the focus on social and organization context as essential to agentic design, we see this work as directly related to the ACM COMPASS 2025 theme “computing in place”. We seek to bring together scholars from the diversity of disciplines within ACM to develop research agendas, projects, and joint teaching initiatives that support the development of social agentic design and analysis.

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

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

This paper attempts to (re)theorize the nature and role of hope in collaborative and interventionist CSCW and HCI projects. Building on work in anthropology, STS, CSCW and HCI, and extended reflection on the 3Dprintability project - a multinational collaboration dedicated to the 3D printing of prosthetics in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia - it advocates for a more pluralistic and action-oriented understanding of hope built around moments of collaborative reopening, repetition and resetting. It then argues for a more robust and open-ended HCI method of hope that can change the way interventionist projects are conceived, documented, evaluated, and communicated, both in the HCI literature and in more public-facing accounts.

The miniaturization of electronic technologies, as well as advances in organic and material science, have contributed to the development of composite, smart, and computational materials that create promising narratives for the future of ubiquitous computing. The goal of this one-day studio is to develop tools to acquire a deeper conceptual and critical understanding of materiality in HCI. The studio will draw on strategies from a broad range of sources including critical making, speculative design, experiential prototyping, and indigenous ontologies, in order to map out key questions and concerns. The studio will give the participants the opportunity to discuss the concept of Critical Materiality as a framework for developing tangible, embedded, and embodied interfaces, by brainstorming narratives around the past lives, current uses, and the future imaginaries of materials. Participants will co-develop a shared vocabulary and theoretical framework for Critical Materiality as a strategy to be deployed in conceiving and implementing HCI artifacts and experiences. The studio will culminate in the design and production of a deck of cards that propose keywords, questions, concerns, and opportunities for Hybrid Materials within this Critical Materiality framework. The deck of cards will be made available during the conference and distributed online.

We reflect on our ongoing series of DIY Prosthetics Workshops intended to engage the public in critical discourse about technology and human augmentation through engagement with prosthetics. The goal of these workshops is to enhance understanding of prosthetic technologies through both conceptual and material exploration. We describe our efforts to capture the makings of our workshop in an open, modifiable “kit” comprising “three Ps:” prompts for reflection, parts for construction, and publics for participation.

The workshop will consider the ways in which authority is distributed throughout the design process, what kind of authority inheres in design, and also the ways that we design authority into processes and materials. We will explore the relationship between particular critical modes of making and the forms of authority that they construct.