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Critical and Sustainable Computing

This subcommittee welcomes HCI research connected to themes of social justice, global sustainability, critical-reflective research practice, artful and aesthetic experiences, and critical computing-—all in pursuit of meaningful alternatives to the status quo. We encourage papers that explore how computing and computing research contributes to fair and just relations between individuals, social groups, and whole societies, locally and globally—all in the pursuit of fulfillment and flourishing. Submissions should feature any combination of one or more of the following:

  • Commitments to diversity/inclusion, sustainability, survivance, and social justice
  • Communication of perspectives from marginalized and unheard persons, populations, Nations
  • Attention to structural processes of power and control that produce and reproduce racialized, gendered, sexist, ableist, and colonial/postcolonial forms of violence, vulnerabilities, and exclusions
  • Challenges to and/or new analyses of received knowledge and paradigms including critical and progressive accounts of alternative epistemologies, decolonial practices and theories, indigenous knowledges, and Majority Worlds perspectives
  • Environmental justice, inter-generational justice, more than human worlds, technology and its implications in the climate crisis
  • Explications of values and needs from diverse users and their communities
  • Low-energy or zero carbon technologies and ways of life
  • The pursuit of artful experiences and aesthetic ways of being and doing
  • A robust and open politics
  • The prominent use of philosophy and other theory
  • The fostering of empathy, imagination, appreciation, and perception as community values

The subcommittee is epistemologically pluralistic, welcoming of a range of perspectives, approaches, and contributions that might take interpretivist, empirical, activist, political, ethical, critical, and/or pragmatic approaches to both societal challenges and how HCI research frames itself in relation to them. As a part of that commitment, we also champion diverse forms of scholarly expression in the CHI community, such as critical essays, research through design, practice-based research, design fictions, and commentaries.

Subcommittee Chairs

  • Rob Comber, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
  • Michael Muller, IBM Research, USA

Contact: critical@chi2023.acm.org

Associate Chairs

  • Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, University of Toronto, Canada
  • Aloha May Ambe, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
  • Nazanin Andalibi, University of Michigan, USA
  • Karla Badillo-Urquiola, University of Notre Dame, USA
  • Eric P. S. Baumer, Lehigh University, USA
  • Rosanna Bellini, Cornell Tech, USA
  • Nicola Bidwell, International University of Management, Namibia
  • Mark Blythe, Northumbria University, UK
  • Margot Brereton, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
  • Emeline Brulé, University of Sussex, UK
  • Patrick Carrington, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
  • EunJeong Cheon, Syracuse University, USA
  • Clara Crivellarom, Newcastle University, UK
  • Elina Eriksson, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
  • Shion Guha, University of Toronto, Canada
  • Lone Hansen, Aarhus University, Denmark
  • Azra Ismail, Georgia Tech, USA
  • Steven Jackson, Cornell University, USA
  • Naveena Karusala, Harvard University, USA
  • Marina Kogan, University of Utah, USA
  • Cayley MacArthur, University of Waterloo, Canada
  • Naja Holten Møller, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Maryam Mustafa, Lahore University, Pakistan
  • Tonya Nguyen, UC Berkeley, USA
  • Kathleen Pine, Arizona State University, USA
  • Noopur Raval, UC Irvine, USA
  • Jennifer Rode, University College London, UK
  • Chiara Rossitto, Stockholm University, Sweden
  • Samar Sabie, Cornell University, USA
  • Saiph Savage, Northeastern University, USA
  • Katie Seaborn, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
  • Bryan Semaan, Colorado University, USA
  • Ranjit Singh, AI on the Ground, Data & Society Research Institute, USA
  • Cleidson de Souza, Federal University of Pará, Brazil
  • Angelika Strohmayer, Northumbria University, UK
  • Kentaro Toyama, University of Michigan, USA
  • Morgan Vigil-Hayes, Northen Arizona, USA
  • Dhaval Vyas, University of Queensland, Australia
  • Elizabeth Watkins, Intelligent Systems Research (ISR), Intel Labs, Santa Clara, USA
  • Marisol Wong-Villacres, Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral, Ecuador

Example Papers

  • Ali Alkhatib. 2021. To Live in Their Utopia: Why Algorithmic Systems Create Absurd Outcomes. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445740
  • Madeline Balaam, Rob Comber, Rachel E. Clarke, Charles Windlin, Anna Ståhl, Kristina Höök, and Geraldine Fitzpatrick. 2019. Emotion Work in Experience-Centered Design. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’19), 602:1-602:12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300832
  • Shaowen Bardzell. 2010. Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design. 1301. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753521
  • Eli Blevis. 2018. Seeing What Is and What Can Be: On Sustainability, Respect for Work, and Design for Respect. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173944
  • Marianela Ciolfi Felice, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, and Madeline Balaam. 2021. Resisting the Medicalisation of Menopause: Reclaiming the Body through Design. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–16. Retrieved June 15, 2021 from https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445153
  • Christina Harrington and Tawanna R Dillahunt. 2021. Eliciting Tech Futures Among Black Young Adults: A Case Study of Remote Speculative Co-Design. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445723
  • Maria Håkansson and Phoebe Sengers. 2013. Beyond being green: simple living families and ICT. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’13), 2725–2734. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2481378
  • Nusrat Jahan Mim. 2021. Gospels of Modernity: Digital Cattle Markets, Urban Religiosity, and Secular Computing in the Global South. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445259
  • Silvia Lindtner and Seyram Avle. 2017. Tinkering with Governance: Technopolitics and the Economization of Citizenship. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1, CSCW: 70:1-70:18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134705
  • Elizabeth Kaziunas, Michael S. Klinkman, and Mark S. Ackerman. 2019. Precarious Interventions: Designing for Ecologies of Care. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW: 113:1-113:27. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359215
  • Ann Light, Alison Powell, and Irina Shklovski. 2017. Design for Existential Crisis in the Anthropocene Age. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T ’17), 270–279. https://doi.org/10.1145/3083671.3083688
  • Noopur Raval and Paul Dourish. 2016. Standing Out from the Crowd: Emotional Labor, Body Labor, and Temporal Labor in Ridesharing. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW ’16), 97–107. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2820026
  • Yolande Strengers, Jathan Sadowski, Zhuying Li, Anna Shimshak, and Florian “Floyd” Mueller. 2021. What Can HCI Learn from Sexual Consent? A Feminist Process of Embodied Consent for Interactions with Emerging Technologies. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445107
  • Kaiton Williams. 2015. An Anxious Alliance. Aarhus Series on Human Centered Computing 1, 1: 11–11. https://doi.org/10.7146/aahcc.v1i1.21146