HCI Across Borders and Intersections @CHI 2019

  • January 15th: submissions for authors with request for visa support (please inform organizers if you need a visa support letter)
  • January 31st: participant notifications for submissions done before January 15th
  • February 12th: all submissions
  • March 1st: participant notifications
  • March 31st: camera-ready version
  • May 4th: symposium at CHI

About HCI Across Borders (HCIxB)
The HCI Across Borders (HCIxB) symposium at CHI (initially held as the Development Consortium at CHI 2016, then as a symposium 2017-2019) has evolved into a critical collaborative effort to bring together researchers working in under-represented contexts around the world. Our mission has been to foster community across geographies, backgrounds, methodologies, and other borders. To achieve this, we have explored building bridges with the larger HCI community, and creating concrete mentorship opportunities for supporting HCIxB researchers in publishing at impactful venues such as CHI.

HCIxB at CHI 2018 in Montreal

Theme 2019
For 2019, our theme is “across intersections”. We invite submissions that consider intersectionality in their work, or the recognition that multiple forms of marginalization (e.g., race, gender, class, religion, among others) must be understood in conjunction, with reflections on how this understanding might inform new opportunities in HCI research, design, and practice. Once again, we invite researchers and practitioners working across the globe, particularly those seeking to work across different borders, to participate in HCIxB 2019. As defined by our participants across the years, “borders” may entail national/geographical boundaries but also boundaries across diverse research interests, disciplines, methodologies, and more.

Submissions
We invite participants engaged in early-stage and mid-stage projects, so that presenters can seek actionable feedback from community members. Prospective participants are requested to submit a position paper that is 800-1,000 words long (single column, 1.5 line spacing, Times New Roman, size 12 font, PDF format) on http://hcixb19.hotcrp.com. This should clearly outline their views on the symposium theme and reason for interest. Submissions might identify how different facets of identity and forms of marginalization appear in their work, and discuss how looking at these intersections informs new, integrated questions. We have added a list of relevant readings on feminist and intersectional theories, and work that operationalizes them and grounds them in research, design, practice, and policy (see bottom of page). We hope these will serve as a good starting point for those less familiar with these concepts.

Example submissions might include, but are not limited to, the topics below:

  • Deploying a national women’s safety intervention in Nepal
  • Technology usage by Mexican migrants in the United States
  • Creating e-mentorship opportunities that bridge the rural-urban divide in the United States
  • Digitizing informal savings in Pakistan
  • Medical chatbots to improve healthcare delivery in Kenya
  • Media reconstruction and archiving on Cambodian Facebook
  • Community-led video education for digital financial services in India

Here are some questions you may want to consider answering in your submission:

  • Who are you? Please include your department, year of study, organization, etc.
  • What are your project/intervention/research motivations, goals, and questions?
  • What problems are you addressing? What solutions, if any, are you expecting to deliver?
  • In what context are you working? What are the social, political, or cultural conditions there?
  • What methods are you using/do you plan to use?
  • What have you found thus far?
  • What is novel or innovative in your approach? How does it stand apart from similar ones?
  • What is the status of your project? What are the challenges and obstacles you have found?
  • What are the expected contributions of your work?
  • Is intersectionality present in your work? Where and how?
  • How do you think attending HCIxB 2019 will be beneficial to this work?

In addition, please include a 1-page curriculum vitae. If you need a visa support letter, please email admin@hcixb.org with proof that your submission was accepted.

For examples of accepted submissions in previous years, please see:

All submissions will be reviewed by our program committee, and their acceptance will be conditional on their potential to contribute to the HCIxB community, and to foster discussion and growth among participants. Authors of accepted submissions will be invited to bring poster versions of their submissions at CHI. We will invite seasoned HCI researchers in relevant areas to provide rich feedback to symposium participants. A selection of accepted submissions will be invited to make short oral presentations.

For those who require a visa support letter to attend, the deadline is Tuesday, January 15, 2019. We will aim to send notifications for these by January 31, 2019. For all others, the deadline will be Tuesday, February 12th. Notifications will be sent by Friday, March 1, confirming the list of oral/poster presenters, and all camera-ready versions will be due on Sunday, March 31. Please note that accepted submissions will not be indexed in the ACM DL but will be listed on the HCIxB website for participants to read before attending CHI. Through March and April, we will publish submissions as blog posts (on https://medium.com/hccxb). Please check www.hcixb.org for relevant information, and email hcixb2019@gmail.com with questions.

Schedule
HCIxB will take place on Saturday, May 4, 2019, as a one-day symposium. Our schedule and further author instructions can be downloaded here: HCIxB Detailed Agenda

Bursaries
We will aim to obtain funding to pay travel expenses (or at least a portion thereof) for attendees in need, though we should clarify beforehand that this is going to be a challenge this year. Please know that there are multiple options for obtaining financial support, and it is up to you to apply once you have an accepted submission. Below is a short list of options:

  • SIGCHI Student Travel Grant, https://sigchi.org/conferences/student-travel-grants/student-travel-grant/
  • Gary Marsden Student Development Fund, https://sigchi.org/2017/08/gary-marsden-student-development-fund-now-opens-to-all-hci-relevant-conferences-and-sigchi-sponsored-summerwinter-schools/
  • Become a Student Volunteer, https://chi2019.acm.org/for-attendees/student-volunteering/

Organizers
(in alphabetical order)
Aditya Vashistha, University of Washington (USA)
Anicia Peters, Namibia University of Science and Technology (Namibia)
Apoorva Bhalla, IIIT Bangalore (India)
Christian Sturm, Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences (Germany)
Christine Wanjiru Mburu, University of Cape Town (South Africa)
Cuauhtémoc Rivera Loaiza, University of Michoacan (Mexico)
David Nemer, University of Kentucky (USA)
Elefelious Getachew Belay, University of Milan (Italy)
Kurtis Heimerl, University of Washington (USA)
Laura S. Gaytan-Lugo, University of Colima (Mexico)
Leonel Vinicio Morales Diaz, Universidad Francisco Marroquin (Guatemala)
Lucia Marisol Villacres Falconi, Georgia Institute of Technology (USA)
Lynn Kirabo, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
Malay Bhattacharyya, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata (India)
Marisol Wong-Villacres, Georgia Institute of Technology (USA)
Michaelanne Dye, Georgia Institute of Technology (USA)
Moinuddin Bhuiyan, Grameenphone Ltd. (Bangladesh)
Naveena Karusala, University of Washington (USA)
Neha Kumar, Georgia Tech (USA)
Nova Ahmed, North South University, Dhaka (Bangladesh)
Rama Adithya Varanasi, Cornell University (USA)
Rita Orji, Dalhousie University (Canada)
Susan Dray, Dray Associates (USA)
Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, University of Toronto (Canada)
Vikram Kamath Cannanure,  Carnegie Mellon University (USA)

Contact
For updates, please check http://www.hcixb.org
Email us your questions at admin@hcixb.org

Some readings on feminist and intersectional theories
(in alphabetical order)
Alison Symington. 2004. Intersectionality: a tool for gender and economic justice. (2004).
Angela Y Davis. 2011. Women, race, & class. Vintage.
Ari Schlesinger, W Keith Edwards, and Rebecca E Grinter. 2017. Intersectional HCI: Engaging identity through gender, race, and class. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 5412–5427.
Audre Lorde. 1980. Age, race, class, and sex: Women redefining difference. Women in Culture: An intersectional anthology for gender and women’s studies (1980), 16–22.
Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix. 2004. Ain’t IA woman? Revisiting intersectionality. Journal of international women’s studies 5, 3 (2004), 75–86.
Baukje Prins. 2006. Narrative accounts of origins: a blind spot in the intersectional approach? European Journal of Women’s Studies 13, 3 (2006), 277–290.
bell hooks. 1981. Ain’t I a Woman Black Women and Feminism. (1981).
Gloria Anzaldúa. 1987. Borderlands: la frontera. Vol. 3. Aunt Lute San Francisco.
Kathy Davis. 2008. Intersectionality as buzzword: A sociology of science perspective on what makes a feminist theory successful. Feminist theory 9, 1 (2008), 67–85.
Kimberle Crenshaw. 1989. Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. U. Chi. Legal F. (1989), 139.
Marisol Wong-Villacres, Arkadeep Kumar, Aditya Vishwanath, Naveena Karusala, Betsy DiSalvo, and Neha Kumar. 2018. Designing for Intersections. In Proceedings of the 2018 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2018. ACM, 45–58.
Nira Yuval-Davis. 2006. Intersectionality and feminist politics. European journal of women’s studies 13, 3 (2006), 193–209.
Rita Kaur Dhamoon. 2011. Considerations on mainstreaming intersectionality. Political Research Quarterly 64, 1 (2011), 230–243.
Sarah Fox, Amanda Menking, Stephanie Steinhardt, Anna Lauren Hoffmann, and Shaowen Bardzell. 2017. Imagining intersectional futures: Feminist approaches in CSCW. In Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. ACM, 387–393.
Sasha Costanza-Chock. 2018. Media, communication, and intersectional analysis: ten comments for the International Panel on Social Progress. Global Media and Communication (2018), 1742766518776695.
Sheena Erete, Aarti Israni, and Tawanna Dillahunt. 2018. An intersectional approach to designing in the margins. interactions 25, 3 (2018), 66–69.