Call for paper
The workshop themed in HCI invites researchers and practitioners to critically examine how humans are represented, categorized, and governed through data-intensive systems, and how people develop situated forms of critical data literacy to navigate, negotiate, and challenge these conditions. The workshop aims to create a space within HCI for discussing how data-driven and AI-mediated systems affords participation, visibility, care, and vulnerability, and how alternative approaches to design might better support plural and context-sensitive understandings of human life.
The workshop is open to researchers and practitioners working across HCI, CSCW, interaction design, critical data studies, feminist technology studies, AI ethics, media studies, design research, and related fields. We particularly welcome contributions that explore how data practices influence experiences of visibility, participation, refusal, care, identity, and governance in digital systems.
We encourage submissions that engage critically and creatively with the workshop themes, including empirical studies, conceptual reflections, design cases, speculative design proposals, methodological discussions, and practice-based explorations. Contributions may address, for example:
- how humans are represented and made legible in data-intensive systems,
- practices of critical data literacy, refusal, avoidance, or strategic invisibility,
- alternative and justice-oriented approaches to designing data infrastructures, or
- ethical and political tensions surrounding participation, compliance, and visibility in AI-mediated systems.
Authors are invited to submit a 2–4 page position paper following the ACM single-column format as a PDF file. We encourage diverse forms of contribution, including research findings, conceptual provocations, speculative proposals, and design-oriented reflections. We especially welcome submissions that can stimulate discussion, collective reflection, and interdisciplinary exchange during the workshop.
Submissions will be reviewed by the workshop organizers based on their relevance to the workshop themes, originality, and potential to contribute to constructive and forward-looking discussions. Accepted participants will be invited to give a very short presentation during the workshop and to engage in collaborative discussions and activities throughout the day.
Workshop Themes and Topics of Interest
Authors may wish to address, but are not limited to, the following three broad themes:
- Critical data literacy and the datafied human
- How are humans represented, categorized, and made legible through data-intensive systems?
- How do data practices produce assumptions about stability, autonomy, visibility, safety, and compliance?
- What forms of critical data literacy are needed to interpret, question, and contest data-driven representations of people?
- Visibility, invisibility, and participation in data-intensive systems
- How do platform infrastructures, algorithmic systems, AI-mediated publics, and regulatory frameworks produce who becomes visible, searchable, categorized, or actionable?
- How do marginalized actors negotiate participation through partial visibility, pseudonymity, proxy action, analogue practices, or strategic withdrawal?
- How can systems support democratic participation without requiring full exposure, full compliance, or full legibility?
- Designing plural and justice-oriented data infrastructures
- How can HCI design methods be used to investigate and challenge assumptions in data-intense paradigms?
- What would it mean to design for plural, partial, contextual, or contested representations of humans?
- How can speculative design, collective mapping, and case-based reflection help imagine alternative data futures?
- Refusal, resistance, and alternative data practices
- How do practices of refusal, avoidance, and non-use challenge dominant assumptions about participation in data systems?
- When does refusal become a form of care, repair and protection as well as political action?
- How can HCI recognise and support resistance, non-compliance, and alternative engagements with data infrastructures?
Preliminary Schedule
Time
Activity
09:00-10:30
Welcome and short individual presentations
10:30-11:00
Coffee
11:00-12:30
Collective mapping (partly based on themes identified pre-workshop)
12:30-13:30
Lunch
13:30-15:00
Method-oriented discussions
15:00-15:30
Coffee
15:30-17:00
Speculative design activity and final thoughts
Organizers
Maria Normark (main coordinator)
Associate professor of HCI at Uppsala University. Her research focuses on critical and feminist perspectives in HCI, with interests in sustainability, datafication, civic engagement, and emerging digital technologies. Her current research examines how digital infrastructures shape participation, visibility, and human experiences in increasingly data-driven societies.
Mattias Jacobsson
Assistant professor at the Department of Media Technology at Södertörn University. His research is situated within human–computer interaction and interaction design, focusing on how design can contribute to social change in areas such as health, lifestyle, and environmental sustainability. In recent years, his work has explored activism and collective action through digital infrastructures.
Karin Hansson
Professor of media technology at Södertörn University. Her research spans critical design, feminist HCI, and computer-supported cooperative work, with a focus on participation, power, and democracy in digital systems. In recent years, she has expanded her work to address datafication and digital infrastructures in public sector contexts, including issues of digital violence and governance.
Pernilla Josefsson
Associate professor of media technology at Södertörn University whose research focuses on digitalization, e-learning, and social media in relation to education and technology-enhanced learning. Her work explores how digital and multisensory technologies can support inclusive learning environments, and in recent years she has examined AI literacy and the use of generative AI in teaching and learning practices.
Martin Jonsson
Professor of media technology at Södertörn University whose research focuses on human–computer interaction, particularly tangible interfaces, ubiquitous computing, and embodied design practices. In recent years, he has also engaged with artificial intelligence, examining how generative machine learning can support creative design and programming practices.
Chiara Rossitto
Associate Professor of HCI at Stockholm University. Her research explores sustainability, social change, and the politics of design. She is principal investigator of a project funded by the Kamprad Family Foundation examining how encounters with laws and regulations can inform design for environmental sustainability