"The Personal is Political"

Abstract

Initially conceived as problem-focused programming events, hackathons have expanded to encompass a range of issue areas, stakeholders and activities. There have been important critiques of hackathons in relation to their format and structure, their epistemological assumptions, and their outputs and impacts. Scholars working in Feminist HCI have proposed design considerations for more inclusive hackathons that focus on social justice outcomes for marginalized groups. Evaluative work on hackathons has assessed entrepreneurial contributions, skill development, and affective impacts, but largely absent from the analysis is a view of longterm personal impacts on participants. What kinds of lasting impacts (if any) do issue-focused hackathons have on participants themselves? In this paper, we describe a post-hoc qualitative study with participants and organizers of a postpartum health hackathon in the U.S., one year after the event took place. Our goals were to understand people's motivations for participating, what impact (if any) their participation had on their lives, and how (if at all) their participation shaped how they now understand postpartum health. Our findings indicate that the hackathon functioned as a space of "feminist consciousness raising" in that it provided space for navigating and sharing personal experiences, contextualizing and connecting those experiences to structural oppression, and developing participants' self-and collective-efficacy to create design interventions and enact social change. Feminist consciousness raising is not just "awareness-raising", but rather a specific historic and contemporary practice which we describe and situate in relation to personal experiences of oppression around stigmatized topics. With these findings, we situate feminist consciousness raising in relation to the literature on hackathons and Feminist HCI, speculate which aspects of the design of the event led to it fostering feminist consciousness raising, and generate recommendations for how to intentionally bring feminist consciousness raising to the design of hackathons and innovation events. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Participatory design; • Social and professional topics → Race and ethnicity; Gender.

Safety First Means Safety Fits: A Mixed Methods Analysis of Gender and Personal Protective Equipment Feminist Hackathon

“…Our analysis draws on grounded theory principles (Glaser & Strauss, 1967;Charmaz, 2006), symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969), feminist fieldwork (Kleinman, 2007), and feminist hackathons (D'Ignazio et al, 2016;D'Ignazio et al, 2020;Hope et al, 2019). After the event, the research team analyzed the preand post-survey responses, transcribed and analyzed the interviews, and reviewed fieldnotes and print materials generated at the event (sketches and design reflection journals).…”

“…Hackathons are often criticized for only providing technological fixes -technology band-aids that do not get to the root of the problem (Hope et al, 2019). Many problems are multifaceted, requiring both social and technological change, so ignoring the social aspect to focus solely on technical solutions may not yield lasting impacts (D'Ignazio et al, 2020). Chau and Gerber (2023) state the need for recruiting more diverse participants and considering positionality throughout the analysis of hackathons over time.…”

“…Building on these principles, our paper presents the development and implementation of a design process where users were invited to participate in revisioning the safety vest to better serve their needs for safety, comfort, fit, and function. Few studies have analyzed the implementation of feminist hackathons (D'Ignazio et al, 2016;D'Ignazio et al, 2020;Hope et al, 2019), and to date, we are unaware of any feminist hackathon held to improve safety equipment for women working in construction. Employing mixed methods, our VEST Hackathon extends the literature on feminist hackathon assessment while simultaneously aiming to improve women's experiences with poorly fitting safety vests by garnering their input and expertise.…”

Persuasion or Insulting? Unpacking Discursive Strategies of Gender Debate in Everyday Feminism in China

“…Prior research on feminism in HCI community predominantly focused on integrating feminism theories and perspectives into research and design (i.e., feminist HCI) [10,39,46,105,122]. Built upon that, researchers also made the efforts to address specific gender-related issues, such as combating sexual abuse [1,5,61], empowering low-income rural women [107,110], and advocating for abortion rights through digital storytelling [78].…”

Feminicide and counterdata production: Activist efforts to monitor and challenge gender-related violence

“…The connections between feminism and HCI have been explored in numerous research workshops. 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 Drawing from feminist theory, including feminist science, technology, and society’s (STS’s) “attention to the inequities caused by technology’s troubling relationship with gender” (see p. 1303 in Bardzell 27 ), feminist HCI aims to develop more liberatory design qualities that can challenge sex and gender oppression. 27 , 48 …”