FYI

Best Regards, Ishtiaque

Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science University of Toronto, ON, CA Ph: +1 647 220 3482 Skype: syed.ishtiaque.ahmed web: https://www.ishtiaque.net/ My Availability: Google Calendar Link https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ishtiaque.uoft%40gmail.com&ctz=America%2FToronto

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Nithya Sambasivan nithyas@gmail.com Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 12:18 PM Subject: Fwd: ToCHI Special Issue call for papers: Rural Computing and HCI To: Neha Kumar neha.kumar@gmail.com, Joyojeet Pal joyojeet@gmail.com, Susan Wyche spwyche@msu.edu, ishtiaque@cs.toronto.edu, Nicola Dell < nixdell@cs.washington.edu>, Kentaro Toyama toyama@umich.edu

Perhaps of relevance to you?

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Norman Makoto Su normsu@indiana.edu Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 at 09:05 Subject: ToCHI Special Issue call for papers: Rural Computing and HCI To: Julia Haines juliahaines@google.com, Nithya Sambasivan < nithyas@gmail.com>

Hi Julia and Nithya,

Hope you are enjoying the Fall weather! Would you mind distributing this call for papers to your colleagues? We would love to get submissions from industry folk such as yourselves who might be working on rural computing. Abstracts are due Jan 10th, 2020. Thanks!

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Special Issue on Rural Computing and HCI ACM Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (ToCHI)

Special Issue Editors: Norman Makoto Su (Indiana University Bloomington), Jean Hardy (University of Michigan), Morgan Vigil-Hayes (North Arizona University), Tiffany Veinot (University of Michigan), Shaowen Bardzell (Indiana University Bloomington)

Contact: ruralhci_editors@acm.org

Deadline for Abstract Submissions: Friday January 10th, 2020

45 percent of the world’s population—over 3 billion people—live in rural areas. Scholarship has begun to amplify the already innovative practices and opportunities of rural communities for HCI, while drawing out the uniqueness that defines rural spaces. Rural areas offer us novel insights on privacy, location, values, and space for imagining more diverse forms of information infrastructures and technologies. HCI can and is offering an important counter to popular media that often emphasizes the apparent helplessness of rural people in the face of complex sociopolitical and economic crises—whether it be about outmoded infrastructure, lack of jobs, and health crises. Such a counter aligns with the “cultural turn” in rural sociology, geography, and public health research that speak to “multiple” ruralities, the interconnectedness of urban and rural spaces, and the active enactment of rural identities.

The time is ripe for a special issue at ToCHI on rural computing that seeks to build and grow a computing research community interested in celebrating rurality. Such an issue will contribute to deeper discussions from ICTD, emboldened by postcolonial, social justice, and feminist perspectives, questioning the dominance of cities in design. We seek scholarship dedicated to understanding, designing, and building computing technologies that are particular to the needs, aspirations, and practices of rural areas around the world. We welcome narratives on how research can avoid parachuting, dehistoricizing, and imposing upon rural communities sometimes wary of past research and efforts that have promised technological change. In parallel, we also seek contributions that help legitimate rural computing not as “niche area” but rather a space offering exciting opportunities to benefit design for all of us. HCI has an opportunity to work with the rural as a legitimate voice of expertise in design.

We welcome articles that contribute to this special issue in the following ways:

* Theoretical work that explores, problematizes, or locates rurality in HCI, especially work that tackles issues of multiple ruralities (e.g., developed VS. developing rurals, queer and other identity-based understandings of rurality, etc.)

* Work identifying and offering potential solutions to methodological challenges of the rural, including the challenge of bridging rural and non-rural populations or researcher fatigue

* Articles that introduce concepts outside HCI that can help us better understand the complexities of geography and rurality

* Work that considers popular discourse around the rural

* Empirical studies of the design and use of technologies in rural places, particularly studies within the unique context of local rural culture and values (e.g., novel insights on privacy, location, values, information infrastructures)

* Design methods that engage with rurality in equitable and inclusive ways, or that propose new ways of thinking about and doing design methods in rural places

We will use a standard journal review process for this special issue, with two rounds of reviews and revisions. Authors are required to submit a short abstract (300-500 words) and a tentative title prior to the full paper submission to be reviewed by the special issue editors. Please submit the materials (abstract and title) to ruralhci_editors@acm.org by Friday January 10th, 2020.

Authors should address the following in their abstracts:

* Description and motivation for the work, methodology, and primary contribution

* Definitions of rural: How rural is being defined or conceptualized in their proposed paper and whether that definition is truly representative of the data and experiences of participants (if applicable)

Please see the official call at: http://tochi.acm.org/rural-computing-and-hci/

More details on the motivations for this special issue can be found at: https://ruralhci.info/https://ruralhci.info/