Workshop: Sociotechnical Systems of Care

The goal of this workshop is to bring together CSCW audiences who engage in studies and interventions related to care work. Our aims are to understand how care has been conceptualized in the extant CSCW community, identify core issues and concerns, and formalize how CSCW concepts could be used as a lens to inquire into this domain. This workshop will be devoted to understanding how notions of “care” shape the methods, contexts, and practices of CSCW researchers. By shifting focus from care (a term that often connotes particular contexts for research) to care-ing (practices that involve care), we will trace patterns across multiple genres of research: from those that we typically associate with care-work (e.g., healthcare, eldercare, childcare) to those in which care motivates research objectives (e.g., social justice, sustainability) and perspectives (e.g. postanthrocentrism, feminism). This shift brings with it an expanded notion of how we might understand and design with care by framing care as a term that congeals certain sets of practices and orientations to the subjects of research. The aim of this workshop is to bring multiple practitioners to question how CSCW researchers practice and can practice “caring” within multiple realms of research. For instance, how might insights from studies of caregiving in healthcare settings apply to research involving care for the environment? How can care shape how our research is practiced and presented? How might care force us to confront and motivate action in areas for which we have long been concerned? How can we broaden our understanding of care labor and caring beyond medicalized and formalized understandings of care? As interpersonal and community interactions are increasingly facilitated through the technologies we design, how can we ensure that these often-tacit interactions are still able to take place? How might we be able to improve their efficacy?