The DUB Shorts format focuses on sharing a research paper in a 15 to 20-minute talk, similar to traditional conference presentations of a paper. Speakers will first present the paper, then participate in Q&A.
DUB shorts will be conducted using Zoom, via an invitation distributed to the DUB mailing list. Participants who are logged into Zoom using a UW account will be directly admitted, and participants who are not logged in to a UW account will be admitted using a Zoom waiting room.
Speakers interested in presenting a DUB Short should submit our form:
University of Michigan
Yes: Affirmative Consent as a Theoretical Framework for Understanding and Imagining Social Platforms
Affirmative consent is the idea that someone must ask for, and earn, enthusiastic approval before interacting with someone else. For decades, feminist activists and scholars have used affirmative consent to theorize and prevent sexual assault. In this paper, we ask: Can affirmative consent help to theorize online interaction? Drawing from feminist, legal, and HCI literature, we introduce the feminist theory of affirmative consent and use it to analyze social computing systems. We present affirmative consent’s five core concepts: it is voluntary, informed, revertible, specific, and unburdensome. Using these principles, this paper argues that affirmative consent is both an explanatory and generative theoretical framework. First, affirmative consent is a theoretical abstraction for explaining various problematic phenomena in social platforms—including mass online harassment, revenge porn, and problems with content feeds. Finally, we argue that affirmative consent is a generative theoretical foundation from which to imagine new design ideas for consentful socio-technical systems.
Human Centered Design & Engineering
Embracing Four Tensions in Human-Computer Interaction Research with Marginalized People
Human-Computer Interaction has a long history of working with marginalized people. We sought to understand how HCI researchers navigate work that engages with marginalized people and considerations researchers might work through to expand benefits and mitigate potential harms. 24 HCI researchers, located primarily in the United States, participated in an interview, survey, or both. Through a reflexive thematic analysis, we identified four tensions—exploitation, membership, disclosure, and allyship. We explore the complexity involved in each, demonstrating that an equitable endpoint may not be possible, but this work is still worth pursuing when researchers make certain considerations. We emphasize that researchers who work with marginalized people should account for each tension in their research approaches to move forward. Finally, we propose an allyship-oriented approach to research that draws inspiration from discourse occurring in tangential fields and activist spaces and pushes the field into a new paradigm of research with marginalized people.