Awards
Congrats to Nathan Matias, who received the Rise25 Award from the Mozilla Foundation. The award recognizes visionaries reshaping the digital future.
Conference Participation
Nathan Matias is organizing a panel for the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) conference: “Divesting from Big Tech: Alternative Possibilities for Research and Futuring in Social Computing.” With increasing public concern over the power of large technology companies and public gaffes with respect to once-trusted corporate infrastructures, the panelists show what we gain and lose analytically, practically, and in terms of sociotechnical futuring when CSCW practitioners look beyond the Big Tech ecosystem. This panel brings together people working on questions of social computing and distributed collaboration outside of Big Tech companies—whether by fostering community work and activism, crafting legislation, seeking alternative funding streams, leading unionization or federated ventures, or promoting alternative ways of interacting digitally.
Media Coverage
Lee Humphreys was interviewed by The Forum, on public radio KQED in San Francisco in the segment, “Call Me, Maybe: How Communication Etiquette Is Changing.” In the interview, Lee discussed intergenerational differences of mobile phone etiquette.
Publications
Jiawei Liu and Jeff Niederdeppe published “Effects of Social Comparison Framing of Racial Health Disparities and Behaviors” in Human Communication Research. The authors examined the effects of public health messages that feature cancer risk comparisons and screening rate comparisons between Black Americans and White Americans. Findings suggest that communicating cancer risk and screening rate comparisons between racial groups may not be an effective way of promoting cancer screening and racial health equity and may incur unintended consequences in some cases.
J. Nathan Matias (with Jonathan Zong) published “Data Refusal from Below: A Framework for Understanding, Evaluating, and Envisioning Refusal as Design” in ACM Journal on Responsible Computing. Amidst calls for public accountability over large data-driven systems, feminist and indigenous scholars have developed refusal as a practice that challenges the authority of data collectors. Because refusers work to reshape socio-technical systems, the authors argue that refusal is an act of design, and that design-based frameworks and methods can contribute to refusal. Their framework is designed to help scholars and activists describe, evaluate, and imagine new forms of refusal.
Andrea Stevenson Won (with Donna Davis) published “Your Money or Your Data: Avatar Embodiment Options in the Identity Economy” in Convergence. Her article examines how avatar embodiment options reflect the economic motivations of different platforms.
