About the Workshop

Motivation & Goal

The stated goal of this workshop is to investigate the implications for the design and development of ubiquitous technologies in non-Western contexts. However, we also aim through the workshop to expand our current scholarly vocabulary for the conceptualization of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in addressing the interplay of local and global phenomena.

Our critical questions are located in a conversation that is already taking place within the Ubicomp community. At Ubicomp 2009, the workshop “Globicomp” brought together researchers studying ubiquitous technologies in the “developing world” and marginalized users in the developed world for a collection of high quality papers aimed at special issue publication. The efforts of this workshop were also addressed by papers in the main conference program, which focused on design for communities in India (Sambasivan et al. 2009) or in South America (Wyche et al. 2009). Such work echoes a concern in the broader HCI community about the importance of considering “ICT4D” (e.g. Burrell and Anderson 2008, Irani et al. 2010, Lindtner et al. 2009, Sambasivan 2009, Wyche et al. 2009).

In contrast, this workshop aims to examine interactions with ubiquitous technology in a transnational context. After all, technologies such as mobile phones, social networking applications and the internet writ large permit crossings between national and socioeconomic borders, generating hybrid user practices and identities. As such, we take inspiration from theorists of the global (Appadurai 1996, Ong 1998, Schein 1998, Smith 2001), who focus on flows across boundaries, hybridity and the transnational. Recent work in Ubicomp is beginning to address this trend, examining how pervasive technologies such as multiplayer gaming or social network sites are deployed and appropriated in transnational contexts (Burrell and Anderon 2009, Lindtner et al. 2009, Philip 2008, Shklovski 2010). This workshop aims to deepen the conversation, to develop a language and toolset appropriate for the study of ubiquitous technologies in transnational spaces, and to engage a wider community of researchers working in this area.

This workshop aims to broaden the scope of Ubicomp research and to bring into the fold researchers engaged with these critical questions who might otherwise not consider themselves as working within the design space of Ubiquitous Computing: such as researchers and theorists working in areas of human computer interaction, anthropology, media studies, sociology, science and technology studies and social geography. We also hope to engage technology designers and developers currently working in non-Western contexts. We believe that their work, as well as that of the Ubiquitous Computing community, will be greatly enriched by this exchange, and by the eventual products of the exchange, as released in the edited volume.

References:

Appadurai, A. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Burrell, J. (2010) Evaluating Shared Access: social equality and the circulation of mobile phones in rural Uganda. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 15(2): 230-250.

Burrell, J. (2008) Problematic Empowerment: West African Internet Scams as Strategic Misrepresentation. Information Technology and International Development, 4(4):15-30.

Burrell, J. and K. Anderson (2008). "I have great desires to look beyond my world:" trajectories of information and communication technology use among Ghanaians living abroad. New Media and Society, 10(2):203-224.

Irani, L., Vertesi, J., Dourish, P., Phillip K., Grinter, R. 2010. Postcolonial Computing: A Lens on Design and Development. In Proceedings of CHI (Atlanta, GA, USA, April 10-15, 2010). CHI ’09. ACM, New York, NY.

Lindtner, S., Mainwaring, S., Dourish, P., and Wang, Y. Situating Productive Play: Online Gaming Practices and Guanxi in China. In INTERACT 2009. 2009, 328-341.

Ong, A. Flexible Citizenship. The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Duke University Press, 1998.

Philip, K. (2008) Producing Transnational Knowledge, Neo-liberal Identities, and Technoscientific Practice in India. In Tactical Biopolitics, Eds. Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, Boston: MIT Press, 2008.

Sambasivan, N., Rangaswamy, N., Cutrell, E., and Nardi, B. 2009. Ubicomp4D: infrastructure and interaction for international development--the case of urban Indian slums. In Proceedings of Ubicomp '09.

Schein, L. 1998. Forged Transnationality and Oppositional Cosmopolitanism. In Smith, M.P. and Guarnizo, L.E. (eds) Transnationalism from Below. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, pp. 291-308.

Shklovski, I. (2010) Social Ties for the Soul: How Russians Reconnect with the Past on Social Network Sites. Proc. International Communication Association 2010.

Smith, M.P. Transnational Urbanism. Locating Globalization. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

Wyche, S.P., Aoki, P.M., and Grinter, R.E. (2008). "Re-Placing Faith: Reconsidering the Secular-Religious Use Divide in the United States and Kenya." Proc. ACM SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08), Florence, Italy, p.11-20.

Wyche, S. P., Magnus, C. M., and Grinter, R. E. 2009. Broadening Ubicomp's vision: an exploratory study of charismatic Pentecostals and technology use in Brazil. In Proceedings of Ubicomp '09.