Marginalized Identity and Decolonial Computing
Investigating how online platforms support marginalized communities in decolonizing identities by challenging colonial norms, values, and histories through collaborative storytelling.
Outcome
CHI 24, CSCW 24, CHI 22, CSCW 21, and Submitted
Overview
This project investigates how online spaces support communities in the aftermath of colonization as they work to revise, repair, and reclaim their identities. We critique how Western-designed technologies often impose universalist standards that reduce or erase non-Western cultural nuances and histories.
Approach
We utilize trace ethnography and critical discourse analysis to study interactions on platforms like Bengali Quora and YouTube. Drawing on Poka Laenui’s framework of decolonization, we analyze how users collectively move through phases of recovery, mourning, and action. We also employ design fiction to envision alternative futures for scientific writing and communication that resist Western heteropatriarchal normative standards.
Key Contributions
This research theorizes collaborative identity decolonization as a process of reclaiming narrative agency and reimagining communities through sociotechnical systems. We described how digital storytelling helps communities bounce back from colonial threats. Our work also advances “postcolonial sociomateriality,” which examines the material consequences of digital world designs on physical-world interactions within marginalized groups. By challenging the “colonial impulse” of academic practice, we offer a manifesto for decolonizing HCI that emphasizes sociocultural vulnerability and the co-construction of knowledge with local communities.