COVID‐19 has precipitated a massive social experiment – the sudden shift of millions of knowledge workers from their traditional offices to homes or other remote work locations. This has inspired heated debates and new ways of imagining the future of work. This paper hopes to contribute to a better understanding of these changes by reporting on the results of several dozen in‐depth interviews with remote workers from a variety of geographies, industries and professions. We focus in particular on their experiences of remote meetings, with special attention to complaints workers have with their current implementation. As we learned, workers' complaints tended to be driven by social – rather than productivity or technical – concerns. We explore this social dimension in depth, propose a framework for thinking about meetings as rituals, and suggest how this emphasis might inform the design of technology to support remote collaboration.

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Based on ethnographic work conducted between 2015 and 2022 at the periphery of Fortaleza, in Northeast Brazil, this article analyzes the work of community activists as a form of subversive care. Women activists, many of whom work for the local public clinics, as social workers with local NGOs, or as schoolteachers, challenge dominant narratives presented in the media and political discourses about their neighborhood as being poor and therefore violent. By establishing relationships of mutual trust with gang members and humanizing them, women activists “challenge the logic of fear” and maintain presence in areas controlled by the gangs to direct the economically vulnerable toward existing public resources. Activists’ understanding of urban violence is informed by participation in collective action and living together with gang members and their families. These experiences lead activists to see urban violence as the symptom of systemic inequalities that require systemic changes.