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The expanding interest in justice-oriented HCI focusing on critical perspectives, structural oppression, and marginalization—often referred to as social justice—is reflected in a growing number of publications over the past few years. Through the continuous growth of social justice in HCI, we argue that now is a good time to provide an overview of the ongoing and current streams of social justice research. We introduce social justice as it has grown in HCI during the last 15 years followed by the most commonly framed theoretical tenets. Secondly, we construct a corpus of 60 HCI articles building on social justice as the main concept. Through our corpus we summarize and present 4 currently ongoing streams of research to further a cohesive, yet fluid understanding of how social justice is shaped and understood within HCI. Describing these interconnected streams also gives us the possibility to frame and describe the current development and move forward as a research community. Based on our study and discussions, we suggest 6 considerations for HCI researchers seeking to work with social justice as a concept, and we emphasize the need for long-term engagement in justiceoriented research to foreground and enable societal change and social good. Through this study, we contribute to the ongoing growth of social justice research in HCI by providing an overview of current streams and ways forward.

As technology becomes an integral part of everyday life for many, it also becomes a tool to facilitate harm and injustice towards communities who face marginalization.

To understand and address challenges of systemic oppression, the field of human–computer interaction (HCI) has moved towards framing larger questions of injustice and systemic issues. Through the growing area of social justice in HCI, researchers are collectively working to frame more just futures for communities that have experienced marginalization. 

However, the influence of systemic oppression on socio-technical systems can create hard-to-predict outcomes that ultimately lead to reproducing harmful practices towards marginalized communities. 

Through the included papers in this dissertation, on a range of topics from cultural heritage for Sámi communities, ageism reproduced through technology implementation, socio-political awareness to mitigate technology-facilitated sex trafficking, supporting women with experience of sexual violence to paths of justice, building a cohesive and fluid understanding of social justice in HCI, and critiquing interpersonal safety technologies, I present and discuss how the influence of systemic oppression creates hard-to-predict outcomes in the socio-technical systems we create. I show how these outcomes can lead to reproducing harmful practices towards marginalized communities and why it is important to actively work against this. 

To address the outcomes and harmful practices that I refer to as the “harm-reproduction loop,” I propose a theoretical lens called systemic sensitivity. Systemic sensitivity is a lens to support researchers in understanding the loop, addressing hard-to-predict outcomes and mitigating harmful practices. In doing so, we can more actively work against systemic oppression and work towards socio-political change and long-term contributions towards marginalized communities. 

This dissertation is a compilation dissertation, which means it is based on six papers in total. These papers are the foundation of the work produced, and all have been conducted within social justice in HCI.

Allteftersom teknologi blir en större del av människors liv kan det även bli ett allt större verktyg för systemiskt förtryck av marginaliserade grupper. 

För att förstå och adressera detta har området Människa-datorinteraktion (HCI) börjat centrera frågor om orättvisa och systemiska utmaningar. Genom det växande området ”Social Justice” inom HCI, arbetar forskare tillsammans med grupper och individer som upplevt marginalisering för att främja en rättvisare framtid. 

Men inflytandet som systemiskt förtryck har på socio-tekniska system kan skapa oförutsägbara resultat som i slutändan leder till att skadliga praktiker reproduceras gentemot marginaliserade grupper. Utan att vara känslig inför dessa resultat och skadliga praktiker kan forskare, trots motsatt avsikt, bidra till systemiskt förtryck. 

Genom artiklarna som ingår i denna avhandling presenterar och diskuterar jag hur inflytandet av systemiskt förtryck skapar svårförutsägbara utfall inom de sociotekniska system vi skapar. Jag visar hur dessa resultat kan leda till att reproducera skadliga metoder gentemot marginaliserade grupper och varför det är viktigt att aktivt motarbeta detta.

Grunden till avhandlingens bidrag kommer från 6 artiklar som handlar om allt från tillgång till kulturellt arv för samiska grupper, ålderism som reproduceras via teknologisk implementering, vikten av socio-politisk medvetenhet för att minska teknologiskt-faciliterad sextrafficking, digitalt stöd för kvinnor som upplevt sexuella övergrepp, hur man främjar en sammanhållen förståelse för Social Justice inom HCI, till att kritisera personlig säkerhetsteknologi. 

Avhandlingens bidrag stöttar HCI forskare att förstå och adressera systemiskt förtryck samt främjar positiv socio-politisk förändring gentemot marginaliserade grupper på lång sikt. 

We tell a story of a woman getting ready to go for a walk, using a plethora of personal safety technologies designed and reported on by HCI researchers to ensure her own safety against public gendered violence (GV). To reflect on this approach, we elicit the Four Domains of Power, highlighting HCI’s over-engagement with interpersonal safety technologies when seeking to intervene in GV.In later parts of the paper, we discuss two main contributions for HCI: (1) The Complexities of Designing for GV as an Interpersonal Problem and (2) Complexities of Designing for Normative Understandings of GV to highlight the potential harm in employing interpersonal technological solutions to socio-political issues. Coming back to the four domains of power, we ultimately argue that HCI-researchers and designers can use the framework to analyse their technological interventions to address GV in more nuanced ways so as to not re-produce shortsighted, solutionist, or victim-blaming technologies. 

There is a growing strand of research on social justice in HCI. While many contemporary HCI studies are being conducted and analyzed in a social justice context, still few studies examine how this plays out among older adults and their use of technology. In this paper, three streams of HCI and HCI-connected research are mapped out describing personal characteristics, economic benefits, and age-related vulnerability at the forefront of older adults’ technology use. Through an empirical study and a social justice-oriented perspective, I establish how HCI research on older adults’ technology use fails to include important societal factors and misses out on valuable insights such as how societal structures can affect senior’s life and technology use. Contributions posit three opportunities into how a social justice-oriented perspective can benefit research regarding older adults’ technology use in HCI.

Personal health and wellbeing have grown as an object of study within HCI research and many individuals undergoing weight loss journeys use persuasive systems, such as weight loss apps, to guide them. These systems rely on various principles to persuade users toward their health goal and have in much research been considered having positive effects. There are however also parallel findings indicating unwanted effects. To explore the effects of persuasive system design, we conduct a longitudinal exploratory expert evaluation of 10 free weight loss tracking apps by emulating drastic weight loss for an extended period of time. The objective of the exploration is to unravel potential negative effects of using such systems. Our findings highlight risks of negative effects as some apps take a passive stance toward drastic weight loss, while others actively encourage it through design. We contribute to a growing strand of health related HCI research by mapping out the relation between design and negative consequences of persuasive system use.

As technology and social media develop and expand, technology-facilitated sex trafficking becomes increasingly difficult to take action against and prevent. Technology-facilitated sex trafficking implies the use of digital tools such as social media platforms to coordinate trafficking and (mis)lead persons into sexual exploitation, e.g., commercial sex. To address and prevent sex trafficking as it expands through technology, legal frameworks can both help and interfere with the work provided by aid organizations and authorities. We present an expert interview study with six professionals from authorities, women shelters and NGO organizations working alongside the Swedish (governance) Model. Our findings show that digital technology is useful yet heavily challenging for anti-trafficking organizations and authorities in their fight against sex trafficking, exploitation, and digital child abuse. More resources and tools are needed to mitigate the (mis)use of technology and prevent abuse. To do this, we discuss the need to recontextualize efforts against trafficking within the structural conditions and legal model of Swedish society that facilitate exploitation. Furthermore, we propose a series of risk-mitigating approaches which centers four questions for the HCI community working towards anti-trafficking efforts.

In this paper we present our work on the design and evaluation of a web-based digital archive. The aim of this research project was to explore ways of enabling easy access to materials about their cultural heritage for indigenous people. In this project we worked in close collaboration with the Sami people across brainstorming sessions, design workshops, prototype development, and user tests. During this process we became aware of two intertwined sensitivities, i.e. a cultural sensitivity and a design sensitivity - and we refer to this as a “double sensitivity”. The data recorded from the interviews and the participants' interaction with the prototype were analyzed using thematic analysis as the methodological approach. Our results pointed at five main code clusters including: tonality of the design, usability, sociability, ethical considerations and technical errors. In this paper we discuss these findings, and we suggest that our results, and the proposed notion of “double sensitivity” contributes important research on human computer interaction (HCI) design for indigenous people.