Dipto Das

HCI/CSCW scholarship has actively investigated harms that are perpetuated when historical, political, and social realities are sidelined within techno-scientific development and research. One such emerging site of investigation is caste, where scholars have shown how narratives of casteless-ness are portrayed through lack of engagement with realities of caste in the world of computing. There is emerging work examining the relationship between caste and technology, such as social media and generative AI, but there is little effort to conceptualize caste within HCI/CSCW. While scholars have informally described this site of investigation as ‘Caste Computing’, yet there exists no manifesto as to what it means or what its goals/values are? Therefore, in order to understand and define Caste Computing as a field within HCI/CSCW research, we plan to gather diverse scholars, practitioners, and activists to initiate conversation around four themes: a) what is caste?, b) what is/is not caste computing?, c) what does caste as lens/framework/analytical category looks like to investigate various technologies?, and d) what is the future agenda of caste computing? This workshop provides a platform to complicate and critique the relationship between caste and techno-scientific assemblages to build anti-caste futures.

This paper examines how non-resident Bangladeshis mobilized during the 2024 quota-reform turned pro-democracy movement, leveraging social platforms and remittance flows to challenge state authority. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we identify four phases of their collective action: technology-mediated shifts to active engagement, rapid transnational network building, strategic execution of remittance boycott, reframing economic dependence as political leverage, and adaptive responses to government surveillance and information blackouts. We extend postcolonial computing by introducing the idea of “diasporic superposition," which shows how diasporas can exercise political and economic influence from hybrid positionalities that both contest and complicate power asymmetries. We reframe diaspora engagement by highlighting how migrants participate in and reshape homeland politics, beyond narratives of integration in host countries. We advance the scholarship on financial technologies by foregrounding their relationship with moral economies of care, state surveillance, regulatory constraints, and uneven international economic power dynamics. Together, these contributions theorize how transnational activism and digital technologies intersect to mobilize political change in Global South contexts.