X4D Virtual Speaker Series

Dr. Munmun De Choudhury, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech, USA

Title: Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Approaches to Digital Mental Health: A Tale of Engaging with Three Stakeholders

Digital traces, such as social media data, supported with advances in the computer science field, are increasingly being used to understand the mental health of individuals and populations. With these approaches offering promise to change the status quo in mental health for the first time since mid-20th century, interdisciplinary collaborations have been greatly emphasized. But what are some models of engagement for computer scientists that augment existing capabilities while minimizing the risk of harm? This talk will describe the experiences from working with three different stakeholders in projects relating to digital mental health – first with a governmental organization, second with healthcare providers, and third with a non-profit, all in the United States. The talk hopes to present some lessons learned by way of these engagements, and to reflect on approaches we need to realize a dream of many computer scientists: how to have their research contribute to positive societal impacts.

Dr. Becky Inkster, Department of Psychiatry, Cambridge University; Finance & Economics Programme, The Alan Turing Institute; Self-Employed Neuroscientist & Digital Mental Health Advisor, UK

Title: Rhymes Equal Actual Life in the Youth*: Connecting Mental Health Support with Hip-Hop Culture

It is essential that we build digital mental health tools that are engaging and sensitive to both culture and context. In this talk, I will explore how hip-hop music and culture can be combined in a powerful way with human-centred algorithmic solutions, computational creativity and music therapy in order to support mental health and wellbeing. I am a Co-Founder of LYRICAL KOMBAT and Hip Hop Psych, and will illustrate examples based on these initiatives.
* lyrics by KRS-ONE

Dr. John Naslund, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Title: Design, Development, and Evaluation of a Digital Training Program for Building Capacity of Frontline Health Workers and Scaling Up Depression Care in Rural India

Mental disorders are a leading cause of disability worldwide; yet, in most countries, individuals living with mental disorders are more likely to have access to a mobile phone than basic mental health care. The increasing reach and availability of digital technologies in low-income and middle-income countries, such as smartphones and mobile Internet, present new opportunities to support task sharing through training and supporting community health workers in treating mental disorders. In this presentation, my objective is to describe the development and design of a digital program for training community health workers as part of a broader effort to scale up task sharing of a brief psychological treatment for depression in primary care settings in rural India. Specifically, I will describe efforts to involve community health workers throughout the iterative development and user testing of a digital training program accessible from a smartphone app, as well as the initial findings from a randomized controlled pilot study conducted in one district of Madhya Pradesh. I will discuss next steps and implications of leveraging emerging digital technologies for task sharing and bridging the global care gap for mental disorder.

Dr. Maryam Mustafa, School of Science and Engineering, LUMS, Pakistan

Title: Designing Digital Safe Spaces For Peer Support and Connectivity in Patriarchal Contexts

There is a deep stigma and taboo attached to mental health disorders and care in countries like Pakistan. Most people have little to no access to mental health support and women are particularly susceptible in patriarchal contexts like Pakistan. In this talk , I will explore the opportunities and challenges in designing peer-support and mental health mechanisms for low-income, low-literate women in Pakistan, a patriarchal and religious context where women’s movements, social relations and access to digital technologies are restricted. This is a context where shame and fear of defamation restrict the seeking of support for personal narratives around taboo subjects like abortion, sexual harassment, rape and domestic abuse. I will also discuss our findings from our participatory workshops in exploring the design of peer-support technologies for support seeking with low-income, low-literate women.

Q&A and Discussion

Catherine D'Ignazio, Assistant Professor of Urban Science & Planning, MIT

Title: Data Feminism & Feminicide

Data Feminism (co-authored with Lauren Klein, MIT Press, 2020) is a set of seven principles that demonstrate how feminist thinking can be operationalized in order to imagine more ethical and equitable data practices. This talk will briefly introduce those principles and relate them to a collaborative project undertaken by the Data + Feminism Lab, Feminicidio Uruguay and the Iniciativa Latinoamericana por los Datos Abiertos. We are exploring how to build technologies to support counterdata collection by activists and civil society organizations who are working to fight gender-related violence against women and its lethal outcome, feminicide, in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).

Dr. Nassim Parvin, Associate Professor of Digital Media, Georgia Tech

Title: On the Uses and Misuses of Unintended Consequences

One of the hallmarks of feminist theory and praxis is to identify and challenge dominant modes and tools of knowledge making that perpetuate oppressive power relations. In this talk, I discuss the uses and misuses of “unintended consequences,”—a seemingly mundane phrase that is popular in science and technology discourses—demonstrating its power in advancing techno-utopic interventions and visions. For more see, Parvin, Nassim, and Anne Pollock. "Unintended by Design: On the Political Uses of 'Unintended Consequences,'" Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6 (2020): 320-327.

Dr. Shaowen Bardzell, Professor at College of Information Sciences and Technology, the Pennsylvania State University

Title: The Tempest in the Menstrual Cup: How Design, Critique, and Activism Changed Taiwan

Can design contribute not just towards an incrementally better world, but to a radically better one? In recent years, feminist utopian thinkers have sought to imagine radically better social worlds and accompanying ways of life using a double-move: the first is a “diagnostic critique” of the present that seeks to denaturalize it, which creates openings for the second move “anticipatory design,” which imaginatively construes one or more aspects of the social world in a preferred and plausible way—much like what we in design call “design futuring.”

In this talk, I will explore how anticipatory design and critique contributed to real world product design, in this case, a menstrual cup in Taiwan. The cup proposes and enacts concrete strategies that challenge and overcome unquestioned misogynistic cultural tendencies about the care and maintenance of the hymen in Chinese culture. In doing so, it also proposes an aspirational future for the women in the country, which in fact led to activism that helped bring that future into being. I argue that contemporary feminist utopianism represents a living critical/design practice: its double-move teases out glimpses of preferred and possible futures, which can guide and motivate democratic forms of activism in the present.

Pragya Saboo and Navya Nanda, Cofounders of Aara Health

Title: Bridging the Gap in Access to Quality Healthcare for Women in India

Women's health and wellbeing needs remain seriously under-addressed in India, as in countries around the world. Aara Health allows women to connect with high quality doctors for virtual consultations, access expert-verified educational content, and join a safe and secure community for social support.

Q&A and Discussion

Dr. Kentaro Toyama, Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan School of Information

Title: 15 Years of ICTD

Abstract: The interdisciplinary field of information & communication technologies and development (ICTD) has explored how digital technologies could contribute to international socio-economic development. The associated research community includes designers, engineers, anthropologists, and sociologists among many others, with beliefs ranging from tech-utopianism to extreme skepticism about technology. Debates continue, but in this talk, I will attempt to summarize some of the expressed consensus in ICTD, and discuss why the field's interdisciplinary tension is essential.

Dr. Dorothea Kleine, Co-Director of the Sheffield Institute for International Development at the University of Sheffield

Title: Gender and Intersectionality in ICT4D

Abstract: Gender equality has moved from being a niche topic in ICT4D/ICTD research championed by key proponents, to being a key SDG and unavoidable issue for projects and thus for all researchers, across disciplines. I will reflect on the progress made and on the conceptual contributions that assisted in cross-disciplinary dialogue about the issue. I will also reflect on the risks to further progress. These include policy makers and researchers paying lip service instead of seeking deeper engagement, or essentialising women as hard-to-reach groups for ICT projects instead of exploring and celebrating their agency within current patriarchal structures. How can these structures themselves be challenged? Further, gender is only one axis in a broader intersectional picture of inequality. How can researchers learn from gender equality work in order to move to an even more complex intersectional lens?

Dr. Aaditeshwar Seth, Professor of Computer Science at IIT Delhi, Founder at Gram Vaani

Title: Making ICTD More Impactful

Abstract: The academic community in the broad 4D space has come a long way in highlighting the role that ICTs can play in development. I will attempt to highlight three areas where I feel we should introspect our work more deeply towards bringing greater impact. First, the gap between academia and practice seems to persist, and we may want to rethink typical models of engagement between academicians and practitioners. Second, despite the caveats highlighted by the 4D community on the limits of technology alone to drive impact, much thinking of governments, donors, and investors, still seems to be driven by a top-down tech deterministic approach. What should we do to change this mindset? Third, given the high levels of inequality and exploitation in the world, we should ask ourselves if we are using relevant lenses to understand the world and build solutions. The COVID-19 pandemic may present an opportunity for us to reorient our approach.

Dr. Rediet Abebe, Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley

Title: Roles for Computing in Social Justice

Abstract: Recent scholarship in AI ethics warns that computing work has treated problematic features of the status quo as fixed, failing to address and even exacerbate deep patterns of injustice and inequality. Acknowledging these critiques, we ask: what roles, if any, can computing play to support and advance fundamental social change? We articulate four such roles -- computing as a diagnostic, formalizer, rebuttal, and synecdoche -- through an analysis that considers the opportunities as well as the significant risks inherent in such work. We then discuss how these insights may be used to support advocacy work aimed at fostering more equitable and just systems.