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Participatory Design scholars and practitioners have embraced speculative design approaches to challenge normative assumptions about sociotechnical futures and address the systemic lack of racial and class diversity in futuring. This paper draws upon a community-based participatory speculative design (PSD) project conducted with a group of working-class Detroiters, focusing on speculating about alternative community economies. We illustrate how PSD served as a process of ongoing “contamination” where the boundaries of community members’ visions of desired futures are opened up, troubled, and negotiated on the individual, alliance, and collective levels, thus forming new commons for collaboration and resistance across differences. For them, such contamination was a reflexive process aimed at identifying whose visions were excluded from their own and how community-held sociotechnical imaginary could emerge through collaboration. We argue that foregrounding contamination in PSD makes meaningful space for fostering reflexivity in knowledge production, while destabilizing and reassembling more inclusive sociotechnical futures. 

In Detroit, the largest Black-majority city in the United States, municipal authorities have deployed an array of surveillance technologies with the promise of containing crime and improving community safety. This article draws from a cross-sectional survey of over two thousand Detroit residents and multi-year community-based fieldwork in Detroit’s Eastside to examine local perceptions of policing surveillance technologies. Our survey reveals that respondents, notably those in more vulnerable positions, report higher perceived safety levels with policing surveillance cameras in their neighborhoods. However, when triangulating these results with insights from our fieldwork, we argue that these survey findings should not be taken as public support for surveillance. Alongside this seeming buy-in is a widely shared “better than nothing” imaginary among residents from impacted communities. “Better than nothing,” for the residents, is a pragmatic compromise and maneuver between being aware of the inherent flaws of surveillance technologies and settling for any available resource or hope. This notion of “better than nothing” unveils residents’ prolonged wait for digital justice and institutional accountability, which we show is where racialized infrastructural harm and exploitation are enacted along the temporal dimension. Our findings offer practical insights for counter-surveillance advocacy efforts. 

Economic crises such as the global recession and financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 and the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, have elevated new forms of economic cooperation. Supporting efforts in finding alternatives to capitalism requires understanding the role of design in imagining alternative economic futures and reaching those most harmed by current capitalistic models. Through a collaboration between a community organization in Detroit and a team of university researchers, we hosted and facilitated a five-week workshop series with Black and Brown working-class Detroiters where they collectively imagined alternative economic futures using speculative design. They proposed Community Capitalism, Childcare Collectives, and Village-Based Childcare as alternative economy concepts from the workshops and described their unique characteristics and traits of love, care, and inclusion. Aligning with generative justice frameworks, Detroiters prioritized sustainable families and communities. We contribute an understanding of technology’s role in the imagined economic futures, a discussion of what this means for community-involved governance, and a push for centering Afrofuturism in speculative design approaches to foster futures literacy. 

Noticing differently commits to stepping out of familiar reference frameworks while attending to oft-neglected actors, relations, and ways of knowing for design. Photovoice is an arts- and community-based participatory approach allowing individuals to communicate their lives and stories about pressing community concerns through photography. This paper bridges photovoice and the commitment to noticing in HCI and design through a photovoice project with Detroit residents on safety and surveillance. The photovoice process—alongside the production, reflection, and dissemination of photographs—makes residents’ everyday situations legible and sensible, allowing both community members and researchers to orient to and engage with multiple viewpoints, sensibilities, and temporal trajectories. This process confronts the invisibility of both the sociotechnical infrastructures (in our case, surveillance infrastructures) and minoritized communities’ relational ontologies. By advocating participatory noticing in design research, we show the opportunities for adopting arts- and community-based participatory approaches in decentering dominant ways of knowing and seeing, while at the same time fostering community capacity and relations for future potentialities. 

Participatory action research (PAR) approaches center community members’ lived experiences and can spur positive change around pressing challenges faced by communities. Even though PAR and similar approaches have been increasingly adopted in HCI research that focuses on social justice and community empowerment, public-facing events that are based on this research and center community members’ voices are less common. This case study sheds light on how to initiate and organize events that build on existing PAR efforts, and what practical challenges might exist in this process. Building on a photovoice research project, we—a collaborative team of university researchers and staff members of a community organization in Eastside Detroit—co-organized a community-based public-facing exhibition that featured community members’ photographic narratives of personal and communal safety and surveillance. In this case study, we reflect on the challenges we experienced in planning and holding the exhibition. We contribute a set of practical guidelines to help researchers facilitate community-based events when conducting participatory action research in HCI. 

Safety has been used to justify the expansion of today’s large-scale surveillance infrastructures in American cities. Our work offers empirical and theoretical groundings on why and how the safety-surveillance conflation that reproduces harm toward communities of color must be denaturalized. In a photovoice study conducted in collaboration with a Detroit community organization and a university team, we invited 11 Black mid-aged and senior Detroiters to use photography to capture their lived experiences of navigating personal and community safety. Their photographic narratives unveil acts of “everyday noticing” in negotiating and maintaining their intricate and interdependent relations with human, non-human animals, plants, spaces, and material things, through which a multiplicity of meaning and senses of safety are produced and achieved. Everyday noticing, as simultaneously a survival skill and a more-than-human care act, is situated in residents’ lived materialities, while also serving as a site for critiquing the reductive and exclusionary vision embedded in large-scale surveillance infrastructures. By proposing an epistemological shift from surveillance-as-safety to safety-through-noticing, we invite future HCI work to attend to the fluid and relational forms of safety that emerge from local entanglement and sensibilities. 

Today, teachers have been increasingly relying on data-driven technologies to track and monitor student behavior data for classroom management. Drawing insights from interviews with 20 K--8 teachers, in this paper we unpack how teachers enacted both care and control through their data work in collecting, interpreting, and using student behavior data. In this process, teachers found themselves subject to surveilling gazes from parents, school administrators, and students. As a result, teachers had to manipulate the student behavior data to navigate the balance between presenting a professional image to surveillants and enacting care/control that they deemed appropriate. In this paper we locate two nuanced forms of teachers' data work that have been under-studied in CSCW: (1) data work as recontextualizing meanings and (2) data work as resisting surveillance. We discuss teachers' struggle over (in)visibility and their negotiation of autonomy and subjectivity in these two forms of data work. We highlight the importance of foregrounding and making space for informal data workers' (in our case, teachers') resistance and negotiation of autonomy in light of datafication. 

Mentorship and other social and relational support have been vital to poverty alleviation and transformative change. It is crucial to understand the underlying factors in the success of mentoring models and subsequent programs to support them. Thus, we conducted a mixed-methods study consisting of longitudinal surveys of community participants followed by semi-structured interviews with 28 community members, eight mentors, and two coaches participating in a community-based mentorship program. Drawing from community-based participatory research in partnership with a non-profit located in a Midwestern United States (U.S.) city, we unpack how the program supported self-sufficiency and economic mobility among adults experiencing financial hardships. Through an infrastructural lens, we attend to individuals’ infrastructuring work in social support, flexibility, and trust to support a “village” model of community-based mentorship. Our results show how the village model differs from traditional mentorship models that assume dyadic, one-to-one, often didactic, and hierarchical relationships (e.g., expert and protégé, adult and child) and are used primarily in the workplace and educational settings. The village mentorship model advocates for less hierarchical and more balanced relationships in non-institutional settings and flexible communication and technological needs. We discuss new research opportunities and design strategies for rethinking technology-mediated mentorship to support poverty-stricken adults in the U.S. 

Social media has become an effective recruitment tool for higher-waged and white-collar professionals. Yet, past studies have questioned its effectiveness for the recruitment of lower-waged workers. It is also unclear whether or how employers leverage social media in their recruitment of low-wage job seekers, and how social media could better support the needs of both stakeholders. Therefore, we conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with employers of low-wage workers in the U.S. We found that employers: use social media, primarily Facebook, to access large pools of active low-wage job seekers; and recognize indirect signals about low-wage job seekers’ commitment and job readiness. Our work suggests that there remains a visible, yet unaddressed power imbalance between low-wage workers and employers in the use of social media, which risks further destabilizing the precarious labor market.