WORKSHOP THEMES

By providing a space to share a wide range of experiences in seeking to understand and support care work, the workshop will allow us to develop and propose a research agenda for thinking comprehensively about the politics of care work. Our goal is to explore the following three related themes:

Critical Perspectives on Care Work. This theme is intended to encourage participants to draw connections between one another's work and feminist political economy. Questions we reflect on through this theme include: What counts as care work? How do the cultural meanings, forms of control over, and economic and political contributions of care work change depending on the context? How has/does technology fit into these meanings and mechanisms? What methods are useful for comprehensively answering these questions and how can researchers and designers enable a critical reflection on complexities surrounding care work?

Design For and With a Radical Politics of Care. The goal of this theme is to understand the role that design can play to meaningfully support care work that resists systems of oppression, advocacy for and by caregivers, and sociopolitical means of valuing care work. As part of this theme, we will ask: What are the continuities between participatory research and design and other design justice agendas and care-focused research? How can we learn from a radical politics of care rooted in, for example, mutual aid or commoning? What is the potential for speculative design as a way of understanding how to design with a radical politics of care?

The Future of Care Work. Through this theme, we will explore forthcoming trends in the use of technology in care work, taking a broad view of what counts as work. We will discuss how this positionality could inform future of work discourse in CSCW and HCI, including avenues for policy change and workplace organizing. This theme also offers the opportunity to consider on a meta-level how researchers do (often unpaid) care work in research and our workplaces to create safer environments, and introspect on doing more going forward.