Social Networking Sites (SNS) provide a platform for engaging youth in activism (e.g., by helping mobilize civic action). While youth typically employ casual approaches to online activism (i.e., quick actions, such as broadcast posts to advertise social justice events), more strategic practices (i.e., those that are more creative and informed) can increase the likelihood of successful online campaigns. However, little work has examined how youth activists can be supported to use SNS more strategically. To address this research gap, we conducted interviews with youth activists, exploring how youth made sense of social network visualizations and their perspectives on how such tools could support their activism efforts. Our findings characterize how participants made inferences about followers? identities based on their hashtag use, and how they used those inferences in outreach decisions. We conclude with design implications for future research in this area.

Social Networking Sites (SNS) offer youth activists and youth empowerment organizations (where adults help youth address community issues) opportunities for civic action. Impression management is critical to youth empowerment organizations' work online, as they attempt to influence the opinions of their audience. However, there is a dearth of research characterizing online impression management in the context of youth empowerment organizations. To address this research gap, we conducted a qualitative study investigating the use of SNS in a youth empowerment organization. Using Goffman's dramaturgical model, we characterized how youth tried to hack SNS algorithms, and their desire to better identify their audience. Our findings reveal how youth use SNS to create authentic images and connections with their audience. On the other hand, we discuss adults' desire to convey a curated organizational image and challenges that arose. We conclude with design implications for tools that support impression management online for youth activists.

Throughout the world, organizations empower youth to participate in civic engagement to impact social change, and adult-youth collaborations are instrumental to the success of such initiatives. However, little is known about how technology supports this activism work, despite the fact that tools such as Social Networking Applications (SNAs) are increasingly being leveraged in such contexts. We report results from a qualitative study of SNA use within a youth empowerment organization. Using the analytical lens of object-oriented publics, our findings reveal opportunities and challenges that youth and staff face when they use SNAs. We describe the illegibility of youth outreach efforts on SNAs, and how this illegibility complicated staff attempts to hold youth accountable. We also characterize how youth and staff differed in what they felt were socially appropriate uses of SNA features, and tensions that arose in the co-use of these tools. We conclude with implications for the design of collaborative technologies that support youth-led activism in organizational contexts.

Individual empowerment is defined as an increased sense of confidence and control over one's life. Empowerment is critical in low-income communities, and can be facilitated through the development of social, financial and human capital. We present a qualitative study of a community program that seeks to empower low-income neighborhood residents through a mobile application that connects them to local resources. Our findings highlight how the application and offline socio-organizational mechanisms worked in tandem to create gateways for capital building-sparking connections (to people and opportunities) that residents leveraged with varying motivations and outcomes. We also discuss how the interplay of newly-developed financial, social, and human capital contributed to residents' sense of empowerment and impacted their families. We contribute to CSCW by extending an existing community informatics framework, characterizing the value of sociotechnical systems that holistically build social, financial, and human capital amongst neighborhood residents.

Social networking applications (SNAs) have been touted as promising platforms for activism: they provide a platform by which voices can be heard and collective action mobilized. Yet, little work has studied the suitability of existing SNAs for enabling youth advocacy efforts. We conducted an intensive 5-week qualitative study with 10th graders to understand how existing SNAs support and inhibit youth advocacy. We contribute to the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by explicating several themes regarding the barriers youth face when using SNAs for advocacy, features in existing SNAs that are not suitable for youth advocacy, and the peer pressure youth perceive when advocating for serious issues in these environments. We conclude with recommendations for how existing SNA features could be reformed to better support youth advocacy.

Our work contributes to the growing body of CSCW research examining how technology can encourage wellness. In a 10-week participatory design study, we examined how technology can help teens overcome intra-personal and social barriers to healthy eating and positive relationships (the wellness topics of greatest interest to our participants). Our findings revealed teens' desire for expressive technology that helps them initiate dialogue, negotiate conflicts, and restrict communication with family, and their desired degree of engagement with tools promoting healthy eating (passively to actively involved in behavior change). Our analysis further yielded crosscutting themes: the importance of examining issues of self-efficacy, locus of control, and socio-ecological context in the design of health technology. We use our findings to contribute new directions for CSCW research: developing a nuanced perspective on the psychology of change, designing for varying levels of self-efficacy and locus of control, and problematizing the persuasive technology research agenda.