Conceptualizing Indigeneity in Social Computing

Colonialism refers to the policies and practices where external powers migrate to other lands and alter the social, cultural, political, and economic structures and, thus, identities of local and indigenous populations (Loomba, 2002). Two primary discourse communities explore the relationship between societies and coloniality-postcolonial and decolonial (Bhambra, 2014). Whereas postcolonial scholars study the impacts of colonialism, decolonial scholars articulate a rejection of Western domination over its colonial subjects. The term "indigeneity" is differently conceptualized by scholars, policymakers, and dominant state actors. For instance, Indigenous scholars, activists, and collectives in the Global South have multiple and complex perspectives of indigeneity in relation to the experience of colonization, structural conditions of oppression, multiple historical exploitation and displacement, and power struggles among different ethnic groups and various forms of domination within the state apparatuses besides place-making cosmologies, the complex relationships between ethnicity, caste and cultural distinctiveness (Eubanks and Sherpa, 2018). Recognizing the existence, suffering, and agency of indigenous people and the complex and dynamic conceptualization of indigeneity is central to both decolonial and postcolonial scholarship. Computing scholars have also adopted decolonial and postcolonial perspectives to critically understand the role of power and cultural differences in design, their impacts on people's practices, and proposed ways of engaging people at the margins in building computing systems (Irani, 2010; Ali, 2016). Yet, despite the growing interest in these fields over the past decade, especially for studying technology in marginalized communities, non-Western cultures, and the Global South (Das, 2022), there has been little effort in conceptualizing "indigeneity" in the context of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). 

Conceptualizing indigeneity is critical given the human-centered nature of our community--it is important to understand what and who indigeneity means in the spirit of inclusivity and reclamation (Smith, 2021). The HCI community often deploys universalist framing around indigeneity. Indigeneity is not a monolith, and we need to move beyond this universalism to better conceptualize indigeneity relative to the various geographies and histories of indigeneity. Conflating one indigenous community's experience with a general idea of colonial marginalization or that of an indigenous community in a different geopolitical context reemphasizes harmful stereotypes, risks losing important histories and nuance relative to different indigenous groups, establishes minority myths, increases polarization and communal intolerance, and creates emancipatory politics around this identity (Baviskar, 2013; Subba, 2013). Let's consider Native Americans, African Americans, Adivasis (Tribal communities in Bangladesh and India (Britannica, 2023)), and Bengali people in the Indian subcontinent-all of whom are colonially marginalized communities. While HCI and CSCW work have used decolonial and postcolonial computing perspectives to study some of these communities' experiences with technology (Duarte, 2017; Harrington, 2019; Das, 2022), we need to reflect on whether and how those studies perceive their indigeneity. 

It is also important to consider how by not conceptualizing the nuances, differences, relationships, and overlapping of indigeneity and colonial marginalization, we might silence different populations in research. HCI and CSCW research should connect the perception of a community's indigeneity with other important factors in social computing, such as culture, politics, nationality, religion, and caste. In order to materially locate the projects that adopt decolonial and postcolonial computing perspectives--where the research sites are, which communities they are studying, what those studies' physical and policy-level outcomes are, how indigeneity is defined in that particular context, whose values are prioritized over whose, and how technology is mediating those processes--conceptualizing the concept of indigeneity in an important project to take on. When we view the impacts of sociotechnical systems through a lens of coloniality, whom or what do we consider as the indigenous people or practices? The workshop will focus its efforts on conceptualizing indigeneity-both as a concept and also in terms of the who, what, when, where, how, and why of research related to indigenous identity.

In recent years, several CHI and CSCW workshops have explored and focused on related concepts like race, diaspora, and decolonization of learning spaces (Smith, 2020; Liang, 2021; Wong, 2020). However, decolonial and postcolonial scholarship examine spaces far beyond race and knowledge production, such as various intersectional dimensions of identity (e.g., gender, sexuality, race) and sociopolitical and economic structures-which strongly center around the idea of indigenous culture, people, and their practices. The goal of this workshop is to foreground the concept of indigenous people and indigeneity in social computing. We do this by asking three broad questions:

• What does the term "indigeneity" mean in the context of decolonial and postcolonial computing research projects in HCI and CSCW?

• Are the communities studied in those projects similar to the indigenous people recognized in respective sociocultural and geopolitical contexts? If not, how are they different?

• How can defining indigeneity distinguish these projects from other social justice projects and complement other critical computing perspectives?

References:

• Ali, S. M. (2016). A brief introduction to decolonial computing. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 22(4), 16-21.

• Baviskar, A. (2013). The politics of being “indigenous”. In Indigeneity in India (pp. 33-49). Routledge.

• Bhambra, G. K. (2014). Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues. Postcolonial studies, 17(2), 115-121.

• Das, D., & Semaan, B. (2022, November). Decolonial and Postcolonial Computing Research: A Scientometric Exploration. In Companion Publication of the 2022 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 168-174).

• Duarte, M. E., & Vigil-Hayes, M. (2017). # Indigenous: A technical and decolonial analysis of activist uses of hashtags across social movements. MediaTropes, 7(1), 166-184.

• Eubanks, C., & Sherpa, P. Y. (2018). We Are (Are We?) All Indigenous Here, and Other Claims about Space, Place, and Belonging in Asia. Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 4(2), vi-xiv.

• Irani, L., Vertesi, J., Dourish, P., Philip, K., & Grinter, R. E. (2010, April). Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1311-1320).

• Liang, C., Tseng, E., Pendse, S., Lee, C., Allison, K., H. Tan, N., ... & Zhang, A. (2021, October). Subtle CSCW traits: tensions around identity formation and online activism in the Asian diaspora. In Companion Publication of the 2021 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 347-351).

• Loomba, A. (2002). Colonialism/postcolonialism. London: Routledge.

• Smith, L. T. (2021). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Bloomsbury Publishing.

• Smith, A. D., Ahmed, A. A., Alvarado Garcia, A., Dosono, B., Ogbonnaya-Ogburu, I., Rankin, Y., ... & Toyama, K. (2020, April). What's race got to do with it? Engaging in race in HCI. In Extended abstracts of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-8).

• Subba, T. B. (2013). Indigenising The Limbus: Trajectory Of A Nation Divided Into Two Nation-States1. In Indigeneity in India (pp. 143-159). Routledge.

• Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2021). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Tabula Rasa, (38), 61-111.