Shaowen Bardzell

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s Food Traceability Rule, promulgated as part of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), requires agri-food supply chain stakeholders (stakeholders) —including farmers, fishers, retail workers, and others—to maintain detailed tracking records beginning in January 2026. Through this Rule, the FDA envisions a “New Era of Tech-Enabled Traceability,” in which standardized, harmonized tracking data serve as a foundational public health infrastructure, enabling more rapid identification and removal of potentially contaminated food and ultimately reducing the risk of foodborne illness. Despite this promising vision, we observe that the Rule reconfigures agri-food stakeholders into data laborers by mandating stringent data-collection, formatting, and reporting requirements. In this paper, we examine the tensions and burdens that arise from such reconfiguration. Leveraging Data Feminism as an orientation to attend to how data-driven policy implementation disproportionately burdens smaller, under-resourced stakeholders who lack the infrastructural and financial capacity to comply, we analyze 1,198 public comments submitted to Regulations.gov in response to the proposed Rule. Our qualitative document analysis reveals three key tensions: (1) the individual labor, financial, and educational burdens stakeholders experience as they are reconfigured into data workers; (2) moments where data tracking becomes infeasible due to infrastructural limitations, cultural contexts, and situated production practices; and (3) instances where the Rule’s intended flexibility instead introduces confusion and burden due to its ambiguity. This work contributes to CSCW by providing an empirical account of how data-driven policy reconfigures stakeholders as data producers. We demonstrate that those reconfigured as data workers under data-driven governance must be recognized as meaningful policy partners rather than merely as actors subjected to compliance obligations. We further suggest that CSCW can play a critical role in uncovering their yet invisible burdens, supporting their capacity to voice concerns through participatory democratic mechanisms, and aiding their ability to “make-do” under imposed data works.

This study examines how parents of LGBTQ+ individuals in South Korea navigate the emotional rupture fueled by fear, isolation, and disorientation after learning their children’s queer identity, encounter queer-related (mis)information as a way of coping with this emotional toll, and come to listen to queer realities relationally. Through this process, we highlight how parents reconstruct their identities as supportive parents, which reshapes their informating practices, making them more critical in assessing queer-related (mis)information, developing strategies to protect themselves from harmful narratives, and actively challenging misinformation to support others navigating similar experiences. This work contributes to CSCW by (1) foregrounding parents of LGBTQ+ individuals, an underrepresented yet critical stakeholder group in Queer HCI; (2) demonstrating how identity reconfiguration following a trauma-healing process could transform informating practices; and (3) arguing that addressing misinformation requires attention beyond individual fact-based discerning to account for its relational, cultural, and emotional dimensions. Further, we invite CSCW scholars to reconsider the balance between abstracting and humanizing information, explore future design possibilities for parents of LGBTQ+ children, and reflect on the role of researchers as participants in collective research communities fueled by care.

Amid growing environmental concerns, more-than-human (MtH) design has gained traction in HCI as a means of attending to relational entanglements between humans and the wider ecological world. This work is vitally important, but draws largely on (and is perhaps limited by) Western philosophical traditions. In this workshop, we seek to explore beyond Western ontologies in MtH design by engaging with longstanding practices and epistemologies such as Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Eastern philosophies like Daoism. These non-Western knowledge traditions have long embodied relational worldviews grounded in lived, place-based practices of interdependence with the more-than-human world. We aim to share stories and philosophies of multispecies entanglements, discuss the ethics of drawing from these knowledge systems in HCI, and imagine new ways these situated understandings can inform design. In doing so, we seek to expand the ethical, epistemological, and design imaginaries of MtH work toward more pluralistic, culturally grounded forms of interactivity.