This paper examines how children’s capacity to imagine educational futures is shaped by the conditions under which participatory speculative design is introduced. Drawing on workshops with 47 eighth-grade students in India, we explore how scaffolding influences engagement with emerging technologies and future-oriented thinking. Across two sessions, students encountered generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), virtual reality, and a social robot, engaging in design fiction and scenario drawing. Our findings show that rather than generating distant fantasies, speculative design enabled a critical examination of students’ existing educational contexts. With careful scaffolding, children articulated transformative visions that challenged exam-centric schooling and prioritized emotional well-being; without it, imaginaries remained anchored to present constraints. We contribute to Child-Computer Interaction research by framing scaffolding as a decolonial intervention essential for future-making in high-pressure pedagogical environments. Specifically, we propose affective scaffolding and agency-preserving design as frameworks to bridge emotional gaps and ensure human-centric innovation in the Global South.

When conducting research in community-based settings, it is natural for conflict to arise as the practices, motivations, and imaginaries of researchers and local stakeholders converge. As designers, the question, then, is: “In what ways can we engage with conflict to arrive at constructive outcomes?" In this paper, we employ ethnography and a mapping workshop with an environmental research group facing conflicts at a contested ecological site. We unpack some of the ways in which local conflicts over data, mapping, and technologies around community-managed forests are intertwined with broader socio-political, historical, and value-based contestations. We find that conflict serves as a critical site for negotiating community engagement and configuring collaboration. Accordingly, we provide strategies for surfacing, navigating, and staying with conflict in contested settings. For community-based researchers, this requires resisting the natural tendency to seek an immediate resolution to the conflict, thereby creating room to deepen attachments to matters of concern.

Entrepreneurs in resource-constrained communities often lack time and support to translate ideas into actionable business plans. While generative AI promises assistance, most systems assume high digital literacy and overlook community infrastructures that shape adoption. We report on the community-centered design and deployment of BizChat, an AI-powered business planning tool, introduced across four workshops at a feminist makerspace in Pittsburgh. Through log data (N=30) and interviews (N=10), we examine how entrepreneurs build resilience through collective AI literacy development—encompassing adoption, adaptation, and refusal of AI. Our findings reveal that while BizChat lowered barriers to accessing capital by translating ideas into "business language," this ease raised questions about whether instant AI outputs undermine sensemaking essential to planning. We show how peer support helped entrepreneurs navigate this tension. We contribute design implications, including productive friction, communal scaffolds, and co-optability, for strengthening resilience amid technological change.

Socially Responsible Computing (SRC) education entails the infusion of Computer Science (CS) education with interwoven attention to ethical, social, and political issues to position students to reflect and take action individually and collaboratively to create a more just world. Our approach to SRC supports students to explore computing design/development in early CS courses with a communal goal orientation (in contrast to agentic/individualized), shown to improve achievement and retention for students with identities that are minoritized in CS. Grounded in our own experiences as co-developers and implementers of this pedagogical transformation and as co-facilitators of a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) across six minority-serving institutions in California, we share how we use an iterative design and implementation process modeled from social design experimentation as research and development method. Initial results are presented as a set of promising practices for incorporating SRC into introductory CS courses: 1) choose the domain mindfully; 2) design for synergy with technical material; 3) scaffold for inclusivity; 4) structure with a framework; 5) avoid othering SRC elements; and 6) reuse and build on existing resources. We share how these promising practices guide our efforts; how they can address challenges and concerns for new and continuing SRC implementers; and the ways in which we have and will continue to test and co-design this approach.

Abstract Pregnant women in the Global South face significant challenges due to lack of resources and informational gaps. In this paper, we take an assets-based lens to examine the experiences of pregnant women in a low-resource setting in Ghana, focusing on the role of information and technology in prenatal care. Through interviews and co-design workshops, we sought to understand the perspectives of multiple stakeholders including pregnant women, their family members, and healthcare professionals. We highlight the complexities involved in making decisions during pregnancy, including the challenges arising from the tensions between traditional healthcare practices and modern Western health services. We discuss opportunities in digital maternal health where we argue for the importance of attending to local needs and values and advocate for recognising community strengths and integrating rural care practices as valuable assets in prenatal intervention design. Our work aims to bridge some of the gaps between the theoretical understanding of digital health and the practical realities of prenatal care in low-resource settings.

Community-based design efforts rightly seek to reduce the power differences between researchers and community participants by aligning with community values and furthering their priorities. However, what should designers do when key community members' practices seem to enact an oppressive and harmful structure? We reflect on our two-year-long engagement with a non-profit organization in southern India that supports women subjected to domestic abuse or facing mental health crises. We highlight the organizational gaps in knowledge management and transfer, which became an avenue for our design intervention. During design, we encountered practices that upheld caste hierarchies. These practices were expected to be incorporated into our technology. Anticipating harms to indirect stakeholders, we resisted this incorporation. It led to a breakdown in our relationship with the partner organization. Reflecting on this experience, we outline pluralistic pathways that community-based designers might inhabit when navigating value conflicts. These include making space for reflection before and during engagements, strategically repositioning through role reframing or appreciative inquiry, and exiting the engagement if necessary.

Traditional history education often fails to cultivate historical empathy due to rigid curricula and limited opportunities for personalized, emotionally resonant engagement. We explore the potential of LLM-based historical personas to address these gaps by enabling students to engage in real-time, conversational interactions with simulated historical figures. A formative study with teachers and students surfaced key challenges and expectations around AI-mediated historical dialogue, informing the development of Baseline and Experimental HistoChat, AI persona systems featuring differing prompting strategies. A subsequent user study showed that these interactions fostered deeper inquiry, curiosity, and emotional engagement-while also revealing key limitations. From a CSCW perspective, this work expands the role of AI from task assistant to epistemic partner, contributing to ongoing discourse on how dialogic systems can support meaning-making, empathy, and co-constructed learning in educational settings. Our findings yield valuable insights into the impact of tailored AI interactions on personalized and empathetic history education.

Social media platforms have transformed global communication and interaction, with TikTok emerging as a critical tool for education, connection, and social impact, including in contexts where infrastructural resources are limited. Amid growing political discussions about banning platforms like TikTok, such actions can create significant ripple effects, particularly impacting marginalized communities. We present a study on Nepal, where a TikTok ban was recently imposed and lifted. As a low-resource country in transition where digital communication is rapidly evolving, TikTok enables a space for community engagement and cultural expression. In this context, we conducted an online survey ( N=108 ) to explore user values, experiences, and strategies for navigating online spaces post-ban. By examining these transitions, we aim to improve our understanding of how digital technologies, policy responses, and cultural dynamics interact globally and their implications for governance and societal norms. Our results indicate that users express skepticism toward platform bans but often passively accept them without active opposition. Findings suggest the importance of institutionalizing collective governance models that encourage public deliberation, nuanced control, and socially resonant policy decisions.

Challenges faced by formerly incarcerated individuals in the United States raise questions about our society’s ability to truly provide second chances. This paper presents the outcomes of our ongoing collaboration with a non-profit organization dedicated to reentry support. We highlight the multifaceted challenges individuals face during their reentry journey, including support programs that prioritize supervision over service, unresponsive support systems, limited access to resources, financial struggles exacerbated by restricted employment opportunities, and technological barriers. In the face of such complex social challenges, our work aims to facilitate our partner organization’s ongoing efforts to promote digital literacy through a web application that is integrated into their existing processes. We share initial feedback from the stakeholders, draw out four implications: supporting continuity of care, promoting reflection through slow technology, building in flexibility, and reconfiguring toward existing infrastructure, and conclude with a reflection on our role as partners on the side.

Given the potential for technology to inflict harm and injustice on society, it is imperative that we cultivate a sense of social responsibility among our students as they progress through the Computer Science (CS) curriculum. Our students need to be able to examine the social complexities in which technology development and use are situated. Also, aligning students' personal goals and their ability to achieve them in their field of study is important for promoting motivation and a sense of belonging. Promoting communal goals while learning computing can help broaden participation, particularly among groups who have been historically marginalized in computing. Keeping these considerations in mind, we piloted an introductory Java programming course in which activities engaging students in ethical and socially responsible considerations were integrated across modules. Rather than adding social on top of the technical content, our curricular approach seeks to weave them together. The data from the class suggests that the students found the inclusion of the social context in the technical assignments to be more motivating and expressed greater agency in realizing social change. We share our approach to designing this new introductory socially responsible computing course and the students' reflections. We also highlight seven considerations for educators seeking to incorporate socially responsible computing.

Neoliberal capitalism - the favoring of privatization, marketization, and deregulation of public resources - is hegemonic in education. It shapes our institutions and everyday life, including educational practices. The increasing push for market driven computing curriculum and large tech companies' involvement in research grants and educational programs are some examples of neoliberal influences in CS education. It is not only industry and industry-backed not-for-profits such as Code.org that reify neoliberal agendas, but in many cases, our very own communities, educational institutions, and curricula. Thus, a critical and reflective examination of our educational practices is necessary. In this Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session, we aim to conduct reflections and discussions on the role and influence of neoliberal capitalism in computing education. We will explore 1) the influence of deregulation, 2) public-private partnerships, 3) state-subsidized corporate wealth accumulation, and 4) centralization on pedagogy, research, and academic "success". We will discover reflective questions and practices that could help us critically examine our roles and responsibilities as computing educators and professionals. Eventually, we hope to begin a larger conversation and form a community to develop collective strategies and pedagogical ideologies to resist neoliberal influences, reimagine alternatives, and repair damages caused by neoliberal computing education.

We present a new high-quality validated image caption rating (VICR) dataset. How well a caption fits an image can be difficult to assess due to the subjective nature of caption quality. How do we evaluate whether a caption is good? We generated a new dataset to help answer this question by using our new image caption rating system, which consists of a novel robust rating scale and gamified approach to gathering human ratings. We show that our approach is consistent and teachable. 113 participants were involved in generating the dataset, which is composed of 68,217 ratings among 15,646 image-caption pairs. Our new dataset has greater inter-rater agreement than the state of the art, and custom machine learning rating predictors that were trained on our dataset outperform previous metrics. We improve over Flickr8k-Expert in Kendall's $W$ by 12\% and in Fleiss' $\kappa$ by 19\%, and thus provide a new benchmark dataset for image caption rating.

This paper details our collaborative approach in capturing a holistic understanding of parental technology use through an assets-based framework. We steer the focus away from the design of technology as the central force of technological innovation, and instead support participants to reflect and describe intimate details that highlight specific use-contexts of technology in their lives. We leverage a group of foreign graduate student mothers' self-described unique strengths to gain an in-depth account of their lived experiences with technology. As research participants and co-authors, our collaborators elicit intimate narratives about meaningful events in their lives, bringing social and cultural aspects of their lived experience to the forefront, and thus providing broader context of their use of technology. We detail and reflect upon our approach of promoting user agency by creating an affinity group, fostering a safe and intimate space for research engagement, and describe the implications of using our adapted research methodology in intimate settings. We conclude by highlighting the various ways in which technology facilitates foreign student parenting, as well as the ways in which it serves as a temporary band-aid solution, prompting consideration of larger social issues.

Investigators in fields such as journalism and law enforcement have long sought the public's help with investigations. New technologies have also allowed amateur sleuths to lead their own crowdsourced investigations - that have traditionally only been the purview of expert investigators - with mixed results. Through an ethnographic study of a four-day, co-located event with over 250 attendees, we examine the human infrastructure responsible for enabling the success of an expert-led crowdsourced investigation. We find that the experts enabled attendees to generate useful leads; the attendees formed a community around the event; and the victims' families felt supported. Additionally, the co-located setting, legal structures, and emergent social norms impacted collaborative work practice. We also surface three important tensions to consider in future investigations and provide design recommendations to manage these tensions.

The field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has long recognized a socio-technical gap complicating the design of technologies that can sustainably meet social needs. In response, a growing body of research advocates for assets-based design, an approach that seeks to build upon what the individuals and community already have. The emphasis on positioning assets rather than needs at the center of the process can complicate designers' decisions on what activities to foster, how to conduct them, and what outcomes to expect. In this paper, we reflect on two different assets-based design endeavors with vulnerable populations. Our reflections present assets-based design as an ongoing process that prioritizes the formation and evolution of a collective of assets-based thinkers who continually learn about their assets and ways to use them to attain desirable change. From that reflection, we contribute three methodological commitments for assets-based design to the growing CSCW scholarship on supporting vulnerable communities to attain emancipatory transformations: (1) embedding trust-building elements throughout the journey; (2) facilitating the formation of an interdependent collective; and (3) making moves towards incremental transformations. Further, we contribute a discussion on the change of perspective that entails for researchers and designers interested in undertaking assets-based design. In particular, we underscore the need to recognize the value of work before the work, to see technology as an intermediary rather than an inevitable end, and embrace impact in the shape of slow incremental transformation.

In Nepal, sex-trafficking survivors and the organizations that support them have limited resources to assist the survivors in their on-going journey towards reintegration. We take an asset-based approach wherein we identify and build on the strengths possessed by such groups. In this work, we present reflections from introducing a voice-annotated web application to a group of survivors. The web application tapped into and built upon two elements of pre-existing strengths possessed by the survivors — the social bond between them and knowledge of crafting as taught to them by the organization. Our findings provide insight into the array of factors influencing how the survivors act in relation to one another as they created novel use practices and adapted the technology. Experience with the application seemed to open knowledge of computing as a potential source of strength. Finally, we articulate three design desiderata that could help promote communal spaces: make activity perceptible to the group, create appropriable steps, and build in fun choices.

We present reflections based on qualitative analysis of data from the CHEM+C Project which promotes computational thinking (CT) in classrooms through integration with science classes. The curriculum utilizes multiple representations, requiring students to work with physical phenomena, chemical equations, digital simulations, and modifiable code-based representations. Much CT focus on abstraction naturally emphasizes (1) extraction of a set of features from an object or process, and (2) finding commonality between objects and processes. But Rosen encourages us to think about abstraction as also including the production of new concepts or actions. Integrating CT into science offers the possibility of enhancing this aspect of abstraction. Changing the representational affordances available to the students allows them to take their CT thinking beyond learning-to-abstract towards learning-through-abstraction. This perspective moves computation from an internally focused exercise into the expression of valued ideas in a computational medium.

This note presents an analysis of videos containing narrative stories of eight women in Nepal who had experienced domestic violence. The analysis highlights multifaceted issues and dependencies that coerced the survivors1 to stay in the abusive environment. Further, we present cases where the legal system failed to support the survivor because it overlooked the survivor's unique and complex situation. We contrast those cases with agency-supporting cases where the survivors had more control and could decide when and how they wanted to engage resources. We argue that designed systems, whether they be technologies or public policies, need to support the survivor's agency rather than seeing them as victims needing to be saved.

We report on an initial ethnographic exploration of the situation of sex-trafficking survivors in Nepal. In the course of studying trafficking survivors in a protected-living situation created by a non-governmental organization in Nepal, we adapted photo-elicitation to hear the voices of the survivors by making the technique more communal. Bringing sociality to the forefront of the method reduced the pressure on survivors to assert voices as individuals, allowing them to speak. We make three contributions to research. First, we propose a communal form of photo-elicitation as a method to elicit values in sensitive settings. Second, we present the complex circumstances of the survivors as they undergo rehabilitation and move towards life with a "new normal". Third, our work adds to HCI and CSCW literature on understanding specific concerns of trafficking survivors and aims to inform designs that can support reintegration of survivors in society. The values that the survivors hold and their notion of future opportunities suggest possession of limited but important social capital in some domains that could be leveraged to aid reintegration.

There is a growing need to use computers to formulate problems and their solutions across domains. It has thus become imperative that students across the globe be able to work with computing to express themselves. However, teaching computer science in a traditional way may not be possible in all settings. We studied a method to integrate computational thinking, the ability to express problems and their solutions to a computing device, into an existing science classroom with the goal of deepening learning in both science and computational thinking in a low-resource setting in Nepal. In this note, we present findings from the study. The proposed curricular method acknowledges local differences and presents a way to adapt to those differences through adaptable multiple layers of activities and representational variability. We hope that interested educators and development practitioners would try our method in classrooms.

A good understanding of the practices followed by software development projects can positively impact their success - particularly for attracting talent and on-boarding new members. In this paper, we perform a cluster analysis to classify software projects that follow continuous integration in terms of their activity, popularity, size, testing, and stability. Based on this analysis, we identify and discuss four different groups of repositories that have distinct characteristics that separates them from the other groups. With this new understanding, we encourage open source projects to acknowledge and advertise their preferences according to these defining characteristics, so that they can recruit developers who share similar values.