Cindy Kaiying Lin

The concept of “infrastructure” is used in multiple, sometimes even contradictory ways within CSCW scholarship. Prior work has identified a set of “narrow” uses that apply the term to technical/physical systems, such as networked computing, and a set of “broad” uses that refer to entities or processes that provide support to other things. In this paper, we offer three patterns of use that parse the different kinds of analytical work that infrastructure does for CSCW : "making work visible," which uses infrastructure to reveal invisible labor, "making platforms critical," which interrogates the increasing embeddedness of platforms in everyday life, and "making users publics," which bridges CSCW’s classic user group and other collective publics. In all three cases, the openness and ambiguity of infrastructure bridges between classic CSCW methods and other scholarship on labor, platforms, and publics, while a persistent meta-pattern – what we term infrastructure’s technomoral imperative – cuts across these uses, encoding normative commitments around visibility, obligation, and public good. While different patterns of use manage the risks of infrastructure differently, the term’s interdisciplinary meanings have allowed it to function as a kind of bridging term, similar to "information" in the natural sciences, which helps traffic ideas across disciplines.

Trauma, an emotional response to events with lasting impacts, is a significant public health issue influencing technology interactions. This paper focuses on the sixth principle of trauma-informed care—Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues—by exploring multiple timescales of trauma and generational impacts through two ethnographic vignettes: a trauma-informed healthcare design project in Chicago and environmental advocacy in Borneo, Indonesia. We integrate feminist temporality to understand temporal contingencies in cultural contexts to inform future trauma-informed design and computing work. Our contributions include detailed ethnographic accounts that shift the focus from trauma as an individual event to a historically and communally felt phenomenon, advancing CSCW scholarship by incorporating historicist sensibilities and feminist theorizations of temporality.

Within Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), efforts to digitalize work contribute to continual economic growth by, e.g., enhancing work productivity and mediating workflows of capitalist firms to accumulate more and evermore capital at the expense of the marginalization of workers who are pushed to the margins, rendering their work poorly compensated and undervaluing essential care and reproductive work. Extending the growing call to move beyond growth politics and toward post-growth, this panel brings researchers, designers, and practitioners together to engage in a critical dialogue on how CSCW and HCI principles can be adjusted and harnessed to cultivate futures to enhance human and ecological wellbeing rather than perpetuating unsustainable growth, where work does not fuel endless consumption but meet human needs and nurture sustainable livelihoods. This panel aims to nurture the Post-growth HCI Collective to work together, in solidarity, to resist the commodification and drive for infinite capital accumulation in/through digital technologies for the betterment of CSCW, HCI, and the broader computing community.