Emancipatory HCI: Exploring the energy of transformation in participatory approaches

NordiCHI 2026 Workshop | Vaasa, Finland | October 3–4, 2026

This workshop draws on the notion of emancipatory HCI, understood as an approach to design and research that actively challenges systems of domination and supports agency, justice, and alternative futures. From this perspective, participation is revisited as a transformative practice, where emancipation is not a stable outcome but a dynamic force; a “pulse” that emerges, circulates, and at times dissipates within participatory processes.

The workshop creates space to reflect on tensions, ambivalences, and the conditions under which emancipatory practices can be sustained or reactivated in contemporary socio-technical contexts. Through embodied scenarios and collaborative mapping, participants will explore challenges and strategies for sustaining emancipatory engagement, particularly in contexts characterized by power asymmetries and institutional constraints, as well as by emerging technological conditions such as AI and data infrastructures. The workshop brings together researchers and practitioners across domains, to critically reflect on participation beyond normative assumptions of empowerment.

# Workshop Format

This full-day, in-person workshop combines discussion, collaborative mapping, and embodied exercises. Participants will:

  • Map experiences where participatory ambitions were challenged
  • Re-enact critical moments through role-play
  • Engage in collective sensemaking
  • Co-create a shared “emancipatory handbook”

# Topics of Interest

We invite contributions that engage with emancipatory approaches through, for example:

  • Participatory design as agonistic, conflictual, or confrontational practice
  • Emancipation, refusal, and non-participation
  • Feminist, intersectional, decolonial, crip, or activist perspectives on participation
  • Participation as care labor, affective work, or infrastructure
  • Emancipation inside and outside academia as participatory methodology
  • Unmaking, dismantling, or resisting technologies and institutions
  • Fatigue, burnout, and limits of emancipatory practices
  • Making publics, creating legitimacy, and designer/researcher positionality

# Join Us

We welcome researchers and practitioners working with participation, power, and transformative design practices. Bring your cases, dilemmas, and critical reflections  and help explore where emancipation can be found today.

Submit a 1–2 page position paper (PDF) describing a case where emancipatory ambitions were constrained, redirected, or neutralised.

Your submission may be academic or reflective in style and should:

  • Describe the original emancipatory intent
  • Reflect on what changed and why
  • Identify tensions, dilemmas, or power dynamics

# Important Dates

  • Submission deadline: September 5, 2026 (AoE)
  • Notification: September 15, 2026
  • Workshop: October 3 or 4, 2026

# Expected Outcomes

The workshop will generate both conceptual and practical outcomes. First, it will produce a shared conceptual framework around the notion of “emancipatory HCI,” articulating how participation is sustained, disrupted, or transformed in practice. Second, participants will collaboratively map challenges and strategies for sustaining emancipatory engagement, particularly in contexts shaped by power asymmetries and institutional constraints. Third, the workshop will result in a jointly authored publication (e.g., Interactions or a special issue) that advances discussions on emancipation in HCI. Finally, the workshop will foster a cross-disciplinary network of researchers and practitioners, to support future collaborations

# Organizers

The workshop organizers have extensive experience of organizing collaborative workshops in both educational and research settings such as PDC, CSCW and CHI.

Annika Olofsdotter Bergström is Assistant Professor of Media Technology at Södertörn University. Her research is situated at the intersection of game and play design, feminist technoscience, and participatory design, with a particular focus on public space and the making of publics. She explores how playful and embodied design practices can enable new forms of engagement with places, technologies, and social norms, examining how design interventions can reconfigure relationships between people, environments, and collective imaginaries.

Karin Hansson is Professor of Media Technology at Södertörn University. Her research examines participation, power, and democracy in digital systems, spanning critical design, feminist HCI, and CSCW. She has published extensively on technology-mediated participation and more recently on datafication and digital public infrastructures, including issues of digital violence and governance.

Sofia Lundmark is Associate Professor of Media Technology at Södertörn University. Her research focuses on design processes and practices, futuring, professional development, participatory approaches, and the role of media technologies in shaping public engagement and democratic processes. Drawing on perspectives from design studies, her research explores participation, empowerment and emancipation as transformative practices in the design and development of both private and public services and infrastructures in contemporary society.

Teresa Cerratto‑Pargman is Professor of Human–Machine Interaction at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on participatory design, digital infrastructures, and critical approaches to datafication, with an emphasis on how technologies shape participation, knowledge practices, and public engagement.