Peter Tolmie

This paper presents an ethnographic study of how Cuban citizens navigate and adapt to the country’s shifting digital landscape under economic precarity, international sanctions, and pervasive state surveillance. We frame these experiences through the lens of counter-appropriation, a concept that foregrounds how users creatively repurpose technologies in constrained environments. Drawing on fieldwork conducted across three phases (2017, 2019, and 2024), we trace the evolution of internet access in Cuba — from public Wi-Fi hotspots and restrictive access cards to widespread mobile data usage — and how users have responded through situated practices of counter-appropriation. While state surveillance and infrastructural limitations remain constant features of digital life in Cuba, our findings reveal a growing repertoire of workaround strategies that include peer-to-peer content sharing, Telegram bots, VPNs, unregistered SIM cards, and informal economic networks. These practices are embedded in broader negotiations of power, trust, and economic survival. By centering counter-appropriation, we conceptualize it as a situated socio-technical practice through which users repurpose technologies to meet everyday needs and to subtly resist and reshape the boundaries of control. Our contribution to CSCW lies in extending understandings of how digital infrastructures are used and navigated in politically and economically constrained settings, and in highlighting how collaborative, semi-visible forms of digital resilience constitute ongoing negotiations with power. By situating Cuba’s evolving use of connected technologies within broader global dynamics of control and appropriation, we offer a perspective on connectivity that foregrounds improvisation, inequality, and collective adaptation.

This paper presents a longitudinal case study of two volunteer-led computer clubs in Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank. Combining participatory action research, autoethnography, and follow-up interviews conducted ten years later, we examine how socio-technical infrastructures of learning were built and sustained under intertwined constraints. While the clubs were designed to support children’s engagement with technology, the most meaningful outcomes were reported by the volunteers, whose roles required navigating logistical, interpersonal, and political challenges in resource-constrained settings. Our findings position volunteers as infrastructural actors: they stitched together tools, partnerships, and routines to stabilize the clubs and create a durable social infrastructure. We identify the breadth of work and social structures implicated in volunteering and show how technology mediates these interdependencies. Recognition and care practices (such as debriefs, reflection rituals, acknowledgments) emerge as design requirements for sustaining participation, reflecting a shift from questions of access to recognition observed in feminist hackerspaces. Gendered trajectories reveal how women volunteers negotiated leadership and gained professional capital in male‑dominated contexts. Our longitudinal findings provide an empirical account of an uneven temporality of impact: durable benefits accrue to those performing infrastructural labor (volunteers), whereas short‑term beneficiaries (child participants) recall little after a decade.

The collection of articles assembled in this Research Topic (RT) offer a timely discussion of a fundamental principle upon which both scientific endeavor and higher education are founded: academic freedom. While there is no single accepted definition of academic freedom, most scholars accept there are three basic dimensions: the freedom to research in a scientifically agreed-upon and rigorous fashion; the freedom to express academic points of view; and the freedom to educate and to learn (Maassen et al., 2023). In this RT, the first and second of these dimensions are effectively grouped together around an interest in the latitude for scholars to explore, scrutinize, and enhance their area of expertise without imposed restrictions or boundaries, and how, on the basis of this, science may be advanced through constructive discourse. Arguments here have their foundations in notions of intellectual freedom that first arose in Ancient Greece and that were rearticulated in various forms in both the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment (Fuchs, 1963). Concerns about the future of academic freedom here have particularly revolved around the growth of nationalism and the changing nature of global geopolitics, with a concomitant effect upon notions of scholarly freedom (Maassen et al., 2023).The second concern is the liberty to disseminate accurate, research-based information upon which the ongoing advance of disciplinary understanding may be established. This principal has its foundations in the development of the new universities in Germany in the 19th Century (Fuchs, 1963). Here, a range of threats have been seen to be developing in recent years, including the relationship between different national policies and higher education (EPRS, 2024), and a shift towards 'managerialism' in universities (Tierney, 2001) context, the author argues that the "evolution of research ethics is intertwined with the pursuit of 75 social responsibility and justice" (p 14). This concern with the ethics of social justice and academic 76 freedom frames all of the three remaining papers in the collection. Each takes an institutional 77 perspective. Thus, Shield's article, Academic freedom: Can education resist the assault?, discusses 78 the current backlash in the United States against diversity, equity and inclusion programs and 79 activities in higher education. She makes the point that all signatories to the United Nations 80 Sustainable Development Goals, (SDG4 in particular), have pledged to support the call "to ensure 81 inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning for all" (p 2). Shields argues that academic freedom requires kind courageous that understands and challenges 83 inequities wherever they are found" (p 5). 84The two final papers in the collection raise the issue of institutional neutrality from different 85 perspectives. In The politics of institutional neutrality: Ambiguity, fear, and the effort to silence 86 higher education in the United States, Brewer and Young provide a critique of the institutional 87 neutrality stance as it relates to academic freedom. They focus particularly on the influence of the 88 fear that has spread across the US in the wake of governmental hostility to higher education. 89Detailing several acts of resistance by universities, they show that institutions are slowly reclaiming 90 their commitment to academic freedom, evidence-based inquiry and the public mission. They thus 91 make the case that "neutrality is not a fixed or political stance but rather a historically constructed 92 and ideologically charged framework, one that can be mobilized to suppress dissent, obscure power, 93and render invisible the broader societal responsibilities of the university" (p 10

It is well-known that moving from the rich kind of qualitative data generated in in-depth qualitative studies predicated on ethnographic approaches to actual design, a core aspect of Grounded Design (GD), is challenging. Although there have been a number of efforts to develop ways of making it easier, Design Case Study (DCS) being one of those, the descriptions of these approaches tend to either only focus on certain parts of the process or to remain too high level to provide clear practical guidance to those who are looking to undertake such work. In this article, we carefully analyse the two initial phases of a specific DCS that led to the successful design of a cyber-physical production system to look in detail at how a combination of different user-centred methods have facilitated the realisation of a GD project. We take care, in particular, to explicate the whole study-to-design pipeline, so that others who are interested in learning how to carry out such projects can see how the different parts of the process are interconnected and can be performed. We specifically contribute a set of sensitising questions to help researchers and practitioners with its realisation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are increasingly embedded in everyday tasks of various professions, yet LLMs' outputs often remain unreliable, ambiguous, or misleading. This paper explores how users identify and repair troubles to make LLMs make things right in situated interactions of various contexts. Using an ethnomethodological lens, we examine 21 real-world chat transcripts across diverse work contexts. Our analysis reveals a broad repertoire of repair practices, including factual corrections, stylistic refinements, implicit signals, and strategic reframings. The findings challenge the view that users’ repair work on LLM outputs is merely a response to system failure. Instead, our findings present a taxonomy of repair work of both users and conversational agents, comprising 6 types of repair initiators (errors, dissatisfactions, apologies, shortcomings, implicit signals, and contextualization), 3 stages of repair elements (6 types of trouble classification, 3 types of trouble specification, and 7 types of trouble management), and 3 types of repair processes (incremental, grounding, and validating). These repair categories demonstrate the core of human-agent collaboration: meaning and correctness are not pre-given but are achieved through situated work for all practical purposes. By treating trouble as an ordinary part of collaborative work, we highlight the need to design for user repair interaction alongside improving model reliability. These findings contribute to ongoing debates in HCI and CSCW around the accountability, intelligibility, and co-construction of meaning in human-AI interaction regarding LLMs applications.