Social media platforms are celebrated for their capacity to empower those with marginalized or disenfranchised identities and support them to create counterpublics. We focus on one such group, Muslim Americans, and ask how visible Muslim Americans, such as journalists, activists, and aspiring politicians, use social media to craft counter-narratives, reclaim control of their stories, and mitigate the harm directed at them. Through a series of 19 interviews, we found that visible Muslim Americans' ability to craft and sustain counter narratives is largely hampered by sustained online harm (e.g. harassment). We found that these public figures were harmed repeatedly over long periods of time and through the weaponization of platform affordances such as replying, tagging, and hashtag takeovers, as well as the weaponization of their gender and identity. Our findings shed light on the serious limitations of social media to provide a safe platform for counterpublics to engage externally with wider publics. Finally, we discuss the limitations of content moderation as the dominant framework for addressing harm online and suggest alternative paths forward based on restorative and transformative justice.

Why do social computing projects aimed at alleviating social inequality fail? This paper investigates this question through a qualitative interview study with 25 individuals working to address the problem of wage theft in the United States (US) context. Our analyses uncover failures at three levels or scales of interaction: one, failures at the individual level of technology adoption; two, relational failures (i.e., the anti-labor worker/employer dynamic in the US); and three, institutional or macro-level failures. Taken together, these various failings point to larger, structural forces that negatively fate pro-labor projects’ trajectories – i.e., capitalism. Capitalism's incarnations in the US play a significant and at times harsh grip in steering the path of social computing design projects. In this paper, we untangle the relationship between capitalism and social computing, providing an analytic framework to tease apart this complex relationship, the lessons learned from our empirical data, as well as ways forward for future, pro-labor, social computing projects.

While there is growing concern around justice and equity, they mean different things in different socio-political and cultural contexts. Additionally, it can be difficult to make sense of how to incorporate the more abstract concept of justice into our research practices. This paper discusses prefigurative design as a framework for more just research practices to challenge inequity, particularly in community-based collaborations. I draw from past fieldwork with activist organizations and radical organizing literature to explore opportunities for how to engage with justice as academics, identifying three main opportunities for intervention through research: social relationships, resource distribution, and counter-institutions. I offer these contributions in the spirit of generative critique, in hopes that other researchers with similar concerns will iterate on these practices to commit to more just and equitable scholarly impacts.

This paper examines the strategies of cycling advocates when deploying digital tools in their advocacy work as they support and create better cycling infrastructure and policies. Over the course of two years, we interviewed and conducted design-based fieldwork in two large U.S. cities with individuals and advocacy organizations, learning about the goals, motivations, and constraints that inform their work in their respective urban homes. Our design-based investigation and fieldwork advance a deeper, situated understanding of the role that computing technology plays when engaging across multiple sites of advocacy work. From this, we add detail to the connections across resources, identities, and issues and continue to advance the emerging area of digital civics, which seeks to design tools that support relational civic interactions across multiple categories of civic actors.

Community engagement is to cities what user experience is to computing: it signifies a large category that simultaneously speaks to general qualities of interaction and to specific ways of doing that interaction. Recently, digital civics has emerged as a research area with a comprehensive approach to designing for civic encounters where community engagement is a primary concern for designing systems and processes that support broad civic interaction. In short, over the past year, we worked with municipal officials, service providers, and city residents to design a community engagement playbook detailing best practices for city-scale engagement. The playbook, as well as the collaborative process that produced it, provides a roadmap for thinking through the kinds of systems that might populate the design space of city-scale digital civics. This paper details our design-led research process and builds on emerging literature on designing for digital civic interaction.

Social computing-or computing in a social context-has largely concerned itself with understanding social interaction among and between people. This paper asserts that ignoring material components-including computing itself-as social actors is a mistake. Computing has its own agenda and agencies, and including it as a member of the social milieu provides a means of producing design objects that attend to how technology use can extend beyond merely amplifying or augmenting human actions. In this paper, we offer examples of projects that utilize the capacity of object-oriented publics to both analyze the conditions and consequences around existing publics and engage with matters of concern inherent to emerging publics. Considering how computing as an actor contributes to the construction of publics provides insight into the design of computational systems that address issues. We end by introducing the idea of the object ecology as a way to coordinate design approaches to computational publics.

In this paper we examine the way Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) support forms of community activism that operate outside formal political and institutional channels. We have done fieldwork with local housing justice activists in order to gain insight into the way ICTs play a role in complementing forms of civic engagement that challenge, rather than work with, institutional authority. We argue that ICTs are instrumental in supporting and shaping three alternate information practices' situating, codification, and scaffolding? that each serve the goals of direct democratic engagement. We also show how local activist communities engage in these three practices through their varied use of ICTs, including the ways they provide mechanisms for informal but politically significant? and legitimate? civic engagement.

We are in the midst of a new era of experimentation that blends social and mobile computing in support of digital democracy. These experiments will have potentially long lasting consequences on how the public is invited to partic-ipate in governance by elected as well as professional offi-cials. In this paper, we look at how data from a purpose-built smartphone app we deployed were incorporated into a three-day urban planning event. The data collected were meant to help inform design decisions for new cycling in-frastructure and to provide an alternate means for partici-pating in the planning process. Through our analysis, we point to three distinct roles the data played at the event-as authority, as evidence, and as ambivalent. Each role demonstrates the challenge and potential for turning to crowdsourced data as a form of participation and as a re-source for urban planning.