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Community-collaborative approaches (CCA) have been proposed as more equitable ways to engage communities in research, as they urge researchers to commit to long-term relationships with community members than with other participatory methods. However, the normative structures of HCI and computing research can present challenges in pursuing CCA for the researchers and community partners involved. This paper offers insights into: i) how research and relation impact each other, and ii) how we can conceptualize research as a mode of relation. We present our findings from eighteen semi-structured interviews with community-collaborative researchers in computing and HCI. We then ground our paper in theories of relation and relationality from Caribbean thought, Black studies, and Indigenous scholarship to apply a conceptual framework of relation to our findings. Through this work, we aim to interrogate what it means to center relationality in CCA, beyond and within the development of scientific research. 

The aftermath of industry-wide mass layoffs has led to an increasingly discontent and disillusioned tech workforce. Our empirical study with 29 laid off tech workers presents critical reflections on tech work and the tech industry in the aftermath of mass layoffs. Through weekly creative reflection activities over 5 weeks as well as focus groups, we find that tech workers experience alienation and unfulfillment with their work. Tech workers expressed conflicted emotions in assessing their attachment to tech work as a site of labor, oscillating between discomfort with the current status of the tech industry and lack of agency in choosing alternatives. We argue that tech workers are embroiled in cruelly optimistic relationships with tech work, and trace the implications of this on conflicting sociotechnical imaginaries shaping tech work, affective attachments in the tech industry, and tech worker resistance and organizing. 

In this paper, we seek to understand how grassroots activists, operating within the hegemony of data-centrism, are often disempowered by data even as they appropriate it towards their own ends. We posit that the shift towards data-driven governance and organizing, by elevating a particular epistemology, can pave over other ways of knowing that are central to social movement practices. Building on Muravyov's [102] concept of ''epistemological ambiguity,'' we demonstrate how data-focused activism requires complex navigations between data-based epistemologies and the heterogeneous, experiential, and relational epistemologies that characterize social movements. Through three case studies (two drawn from existing literature and the third being an original analysis), we provide an analytical model of how generative epistemological refusals can support more value-aligned navigations of epistemological ambiguity that resist data-centrism. Finally, we suggest how these findings can inform pedagogy, research, and technology design to support communities navigating datafied political arenas.