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Past CSCW work has examined the role of temporal rhythms in cooperative work and has identified alignment work--the work required to bring dissonant rhythms into alignment--as an important aspect of large-scale collaboration. We ask instead how individual workers interact with temporal rhythms to sustain the conditions that make their work possible--not aligning rhythms, but attuning them. This paper draws on interviews with farmer-knowledge workers, people who engage with both farm work (the work of growing food or raising animals for food, on a commercial or non-commercial basis) and computer-based knowledge work. We identify three ways that farmer-knowledge workers interact with natural and structural rhythms to construct sustainable work-lives: anchoring (tying oneself to a particular rhythm to create accountability and structure), decoupling (loosening or cutting ties with a rhythm to create flexibility), and gap-filling (interweaving complementary rhythms to create balance). Together, these practices constitute attunement work. 

Why do social computing projects aimed at alleviating social inequality fail? This paper investigates this question through a qualitative interview study with 25 individuals working to address the problem of wage theft in the United States (US) context. Our analyses uncover failures at three levels or scales of interaction: one, failures at the individual level of technology adoption; two, relational failures (i.e., the anti-labor worker/employer dynamic in the US); and three, institutional or macro-level failures. Taken together, these various failings point to larger, structural forces that negatively fate pro-labor projects’ trajectories – i.e., capitalism. Capitalism's incarnations in the US play a significant and at times harsh grip in steering the path of social computing design projects. In this paper, we untangle the relationship between capitalism and social computing, providing an analytic framework to tease apart this complex relationship, the lessons learned from our empirical data, as well as ways forward for future, pro-labor, social computing projects. 

Technologies in the workplace have been a major focus of CSCW, including studies that investigate technologies for collaborative work, explore new work environments, and address the importance of political and organizational aspects of technologies in workplaces. Emerging technologies, such as AI and robotics, have been deployed in various workplaces, and their proliferation is rapidly expanding. These technologies have not only changed the nature of work but also reinforced power and social dynamics within workplaces, requiring us to rethink the legitimate relationship between emerging technologies and human workers. It will be critical to the development of equitable future work arrangements to identify how these emerging technologies will develop relationships with human workers who have limited power and voice in their workplaces. How can these emerging technologies develop mutually beneficial partnerships with human workers? In this one-day workshop, we seek to illustrate the meaning of human-machine partnerships (HMP) by highlighting that how we define HMP may shape the design of future robots at work. By incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives, we aim to develop a taxonomy of HMP by which we can broaden our relationship with embodied agents but also evaluate and reconsider existing theoretical, methodological, and epistemological challenges in HMP research. 

HCI has long considered sites of workplace collaboration. From airline cockpits to distributed groupware systems, scholars emphasize the importance of supporting a multitude of tasks and creating technologies that integrate into collaborative work settings. More recent scholarship highlights a growing need to consider the concerns of workers within and beyond established workplace settings or roles of employment, from steelworkers whose jobs have been eliminated with post-industrial shifts in the economy to contractors performing the content moderation that shapes our social media experiences. This one-day workshop seeks to bring together a growing community of HCI scholars concerned with the labor upon which the future of work we envision relies. We will discuss existing methods for studying work that we find both productive and problematic, with the aim of understanding how we might better bridge current gaps in research, policy, and practice. Such conversations will focus on the challenges associated with taking a worker-centered approach and outline concrete methods and strategies for conducting research on labor in changing industrial, political, and environmental contexts. 

This paper provides insight into the use of data tools in the American labor movement by analyzing the practices of staff employed by unions to organize alongside union members. We interviewed 23 field-level staff organizers about how they use data tools to evaluate membership. We find that organizers work around and outside of these tools to develop access to data for union members and calibrate data representations to meet local needs. Organizers mediate between local and central versions of the data, and draw on their contextual knowledge to challenge campaign strategy. We argue that networked data tools can compound field organizers' lack of discretion, making it more difficult for unions to assess and act on the will of union membership. We show how the use of networked data tools can lead to less accurate data, and discuss how bottom-up approaches to data gathering can support more accurate membership assessments. 

This workshop brings together folks currently or interested in becoming academic accomplices, or scholars committed to leveraging resources and power to support the justice work of their community collaborators. Academic accomplices are necessary for research justice-research that materially challenges inequity-and owe it to community partners to challenge underlying oppressive structure and practices as perpetuated through academic research. The goal of this workshop is to discuss concrete strategies for challenging oppression through research methodologies, physical or institutional resources, and/or pedagogy. This workshop will generate practical strategies for research justice for DIS and HCI scholars. 

Recent years have seen increased investment in data-driven farming through the use of sensors (hardware), algorithms (software), and networking technologies to guide decision making. By analyzing the discourse of 34 startup company websites, we identify four future visions promoted by data-driven farming startups: the vigilant farmer who controls all aspects of her farm through data; the efficient farmer who has optimized his farm operations to be profitable and sustainable; the enlightened farmer who achieves harmony with nature via data-driven insights; and the empowered farmer who asserts ownership of her farm's data, and uses it to benefit herself and her fellow farmers. We describe each of these visions and how startups propose to achieve them. We then consider some consequences of these visions; in particular, how they might affect power relations between the farmer and other stakeholders in agriculture--farm workers, nonhumans, and the technology providers themselves. 

This workshop brings together folks currently or interested in becoming academic accomplices, or scholars committed to leveraging resources and power to support the justice work of their community collaborators. Academic accomplices are necessary for research justice-research that materially challenges inequity-and owe it to community partners to challenge underlying oppressive structure and practices as perpetuated through academic research. The goal of this workshop is to discuss concrete strategies for challenging oppression through research methodologies, physical or institutional resources, and/or pedagogy. This workshop will generate practical strategies for research justice for DIS and HCI scholars.