My Publications
(In chronological order)
Abstract:
While domestic violence (DV) is prevalent in all socioeconomic settings, identity highly impacts how one experiences and recovers from abuse. This work examines US-based Muslim women's challenges when seeking help and healing from domestic violence. Through participatory interviews with 23 participants within the DV ecosystem, we find that victim-survivors' autonomy is compromised throughout the abuse, within their immediate communities, and when involving the criminal justice system.
To address such harms, we adapt a survivor-centered transformative justice (SCTJ) approach, a framework to discern individual and systemic harm, to understand how to design alongside victim-survivors, and to focus on victim-survivors' autonomy. We explain under what conditions an SCTJ approach may be productive for designers. We use insights from our interviews to highlight intervention areas for reducing harm, repairing harm, and promoting healing for victim-survivors. Lastly, we offer guidelines to design for harm reduction, accountability, and systemic change.
Brief:
This article calls for expanding HCI feminist theories to account for non-secular and non-Western contexts, and answers the following questions: 1) what is Islamic Feminism?, 2) why should we as academics care about it?, and 3) how can we bring it into HCI research and design?
Click here for full article: tinyurl.com/IFandHCI
Rabaan, Hawra. "Exploring Transformative Justice Principles to Inform Survivor-Centered Design for Muslim Women in the United States". Companion Publication of the 2021 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. https://doi.org/10.1145/3462204.3481797
Abstract:
Domestic violence (DV) is a social, political, and legal problem and requires contextual examination. In the U.S., earlier advocacy work focused on law reform to empower survivors in influencing the public and state in taking DV seriously and providing resources to support and protect survivors. However, harm is still perpetuated systemically and socially for survivors, especially from religious and racial minorities. In my dissertation work, I focus on DV within the Muslim population in the U.S. due to the unique issues Muslim survivors face when dealing with governmental services and service providers (e.g., gendered Islamophobia, racial discrimination, punitive actions) and within the Muslim community itself (e.g., community trauma, untrained faith leaders in dealing with abuse). I argue that in order to validate the Muslim survivor’s experience, provide competent resources and information, and allow for informed decision making, a transformative justice (TJ) approach supported by Islamic feminism and trauma-informed healing concepts must be integrated into design, to provide a multidimensional approach to tackling DV within the Muslim community. I will conceptually explore the strengths and weaknesses of using a TJ model through using design as a mode of social inquiry to elicit and understand the social phenomena of DV and TJ within sociotechnical interventions.
Tanisha Afnan, Hawra Rabaan, Kyle ML Jones, Lynn Dombrowski, “Asymmetries in Online Job-Seeking: A Case Study of Muslim-American Women”. CSCW 21.
Abstract:
As job-seeking and recruiting processes transition into digital spaces, concerns about hiring discrimination in online spaces have developed. Historically, women of color, particularly those with marginalized religious identities, have more challenges in securing employment. We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with Muslim-American women of color who had used online job platforms in the past two years to understand how they perceive digital hiring tools to be used in practice, how they navigate the US job market, and how hiring discrimination as a phenomenon is thought to relate to their intersecting social identities. Our findings allowed us to identify three major categories of asymmetries (i.e., the relationship between the computing algorithms' structures and their users' experiences): (1) process asymmetries, which is the lack of transparency in data collection processes of job applications; (2) information asymmetries, which refers to the asymmetry in data availability during online job-seeking; and (3) legacy asymmetries, which explains the cultural and historical factors impacting marginalized job applicants. We discuss design implications to support job seekers in identifying and securing positive employment outcomes.
(Honorable Mention) Rabaan, Hawra, et al. “Daughters of Men: Saudi Women’s Sociotechnical Agency Practices in Addressing Domestic Abuse”. CSCW '20.
Abstract:
While domestic abuse is an all too common experience for women worldwide, how people experience the abuse and their resources to deal with the abuse differ. In this qualitative, interview-based study, we examine Saudi women's domestic safety concerns living in Saudi Arabia and the United States. Based on non-Western Islamic feminist views of agency, we identify three key practices, focused on how women resist or deal with their domestic violence. For each practice, we highlight how interwoven cultural, religious, and political contexts impact Saudi women's ability to recognize and deal with domestic abuse. We attend to technology's role in enabling or hindering women's agency. These practices include: 1) recognizing abuse, where women identify abusive situations, 2) managing abuse, where women find ways to cope with ongoing or anticipated abuse within their constraints and resources, and 3) seeking non-abusive futures, where women decide how to mitigate the abuse or leave their abuser. Given domestic violence's complicated nature, we highlight several key design recommendations based on women's values.
For the full paper, click here.
(Honorable Mention) Rabaan, Hawra, et al. “Daughters of Men: Saudi Women’s Sociotechnical Agency Practices in Addressing Domestic Abuse”. CSCW '20.
Abstract:
While domestic abuse is an all too common experience for women worldwide, how people experience the abuse and their resources to deal with the abuse differ. In this qualitative, interview-based study, we examine Saudi women's domestic safety concerns living in Saudi Arabia and the United States. Based on non-Western Islamic feminist views of agency, we identify three key practices, focused on how women resist or deal with their domestic violence. For each practice, we highlight how interwoven cultural, religious, and political contexts impact Saudi women's ability to recognize and deal with domestic abuse. We attend to technology's role in enabling or hindering women's agency. These practices include: 1) recognizing abuse, where women identify abusive situations, 2) managing abuse, where women find ways to cope with ongoing or anticipated abuse within their constraints and resources, and 3) seeking non-abusive futures, where women decide how to mitigate the abuse or leave their abuser. Given domestic violence's complicated nature, we highlight several key design recommendations based on women's values.
For the full paper, click here.
In this position paper, we highlight challenges and questions faced in our work on domestic abuse in a predominantly Muslim community. We examined the different forms of abuse women faced by family members and partners, how women exhibited agency and resistance, and the role technology played in their agency and resistance practices. We found sociocultural factors amplified forms of abuse, and women dealing with abuse through various ways of resisting and non-resisting acts that mitigated or demolished consequences of the abuse, often aided by technology.
In this work-in-progress paper, we examine how the campaign to end the guardianship law in Saudi Arabia is being discussed and debated on social media. Through a content analysis of tweets, we first identify those with either a positive or negative sentiment towards ending the law and then we identify topical themes across these sentiment categories. We found polarizing responses with individuals either calling for the end of the law or those opposing its end on religious or moral grounds. This analysis provides a basis for building a model to automatically code tweets to increase the accuracy of Arabic text prediction. This will allow us to answer new questions about the dataset and inform the design of ICTs
In this workshop position paper, we propose a study to understand the safety concerns of Arab women in the MENA region and how these concerns impact their social participation. Using semi-structured interviews, social media analyses, and participatory design sessions, we intend to first understand Arab women’s experiences and uses of technology, and second to co-design technical tools that seek to provide safety features to mitigate domestic violence against women.