skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: How nonprofits use Facebook to craft infrastructure
We present findings from interviews with 23 individuals affiliated with non-profit organizations (NPOs) to understand how they deploy information and communication technologies (ICTs) in their civic engagement efforts. Existing research about NPO ICT use is often critical, but we did not find evidence that NPOs fail to use tools effectively. Rather, we detail how NPOs assemble various ICTs to create infrastructures that align with their values. Overall, we find that existing theories about technology choice (e.g., task-technology fit, uses and gratifications) do not explain the assemblages NPOs describe. We argue that the infrastructures they fashion can be explained through the lens of moral economies rather than utility. Together, the rhetorics of infrastructure and moral economies capture the motivations and constraints our participants expressed and challenge how prevailing theories of ICT use describe the non-profit landscape.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1822228
PAR ID:
10216147
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
First Monday
ISSN:
1396-0466
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. (, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)
    Past Information and Communication Technology (ICT) literature suggests that engaging in meaningful activities with ICTs may be related to socio-economic security, social inclusion, empowerment, and increased social capital. However, we identify a pervasive lack of understanding in existing literature, which raises an important research question: how can we build social capital where little social capital exists? We conducted a preliminary study to explore whether and if so, how, individuals in an economically distressed population with limited social capital use technologies to increase social capital and achieve socio-economic security. We contribute details about barriers affecting social capital (e.g., difficulties finding and making the right connections and an overall lack of trust within communities). We also suggest ways in which ICTs can assist populations that could benefit most from increased social capital and economic security. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; (, Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019)
    Search and rescue (SAR) operations are often nearly computer-technology-free due to the fragility and connectivity needs of current information communication technology (ICT). In this design fiction, we envision a world where SAR uses augmented reality (AR) and the surplus labor of volunteers during crisis response efforts. Unmanned aerial vehicles, crowdsourced mapping platforms, and concepts from video game mapping technologies can all be mixed to keep SAR operations complexity-free while incorporating ICTs. Our scenario describes a near-future SAR operation with currently available technology being assembled and deployed without issue. After our scenario, we discuss socio-technical barriers for technology use like technical fragility and overwhelming complexity. We also discuss how to work around those barriers and how to use video games as a testbed for SAR technology. We hope to inspire more resilient ICT design that is accessible without training. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, ACM Journal on Responsible Computing)
    Despite significant cultural strengths and knowledge, Indigenous people around the world experience substantial health inequities due to the historic and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism. As information and communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly used as part of health interventions to help bridge equity gaps, it is important to characterize and critically evaluate how ICT-facilitated health interventions are designed for and used by Indigenous people. This critical literature review queried articles from three archives focused on health and technology with the goal of identifying cross-cutting challenges and opportunities for ICT-facilitated health interventions in Indigenous communities. Importantly, we use the lens of decolonization to understand important issues that impact Indigenous sovereignty, including the incorporation of Indigenous Knowledge and engagement with data sovereignty. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; (, WIREs Water)
    Abstract Over the past two decades, scholars have invoked E. P. Thompson's and James Scott's concept of a “moral economy” to explain how people mobilize notions of justice to make claims to water. We draw together 20 years of literature to assess the state‐of‐the‐art present in research on moral economies for water. We trace the historical foundations of the moral economies concept and its relevance to water; define the three basic components of a moral economy for water—(1) shared understandings of justice, (2) normative economic practices, (3) social pressure mechanisms—and provide examples of how they manifest globally. We then discuss how moral economies for water can cycle through four basic states—balanced struggle, intensified reaction, mass revolt, and collapse and dissolution—at different scales. We also explore the implications of the moral economies framework for key areas of current research on water: water sharing, water commons, water markets, and biocultural outcomes, and discuss the ways in which the moral economies framework dovetails with recent advances in water research, especially the economics of water and development. We argue that the moral economies framework is a powerful explanatory tool for understanding the relationships between ideas of water justice, economic behaviors, and mechanisms of social enforcement that complements other methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives. We envision moral economies for water as a field that can facilitate a range of norm‐based analyses of economic behavior and water justice, including across scales—from local to global—and in broad, integrative, multiscalar, and cross‐disciplinary ways. This article is categorized under:Human Water > Water GovernanceHuman Water > Value of WaterHuman Water > Rights to Water 
    more » « less
  5. ; (, Journal of Health Psychology)
    Framing public-health behaviors as benefiting others, rather than the self, can increase behavior uptake in adults. However, there are mixed results on the effects of such messaging in a vaccination context, and it is unclear how children reason about the social and moral implications of vaccination. In this study, we present school-aged children ( N = 60) with hypothetical vaccine-like behaviors and manipulate whether they benefit the self or others, and whether they prevent low or high severity harm. We find that children readily endorse these behaviors when they prevent high severity harm, and that the beneficiary of the behavior does not impact children’s endorsement. Younger children thought vaccine-like behaviors were morally important regardless of who they protected; However, as children get older, they thought about the vaccine-like behaviors in moral terms when they protected others. We discuss potential implications for how communications about vaccination may impact children’s reasoning about others. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email