Bardzell's ``Feminist HCI'
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CHI 2020 Late-Breaking Work CHI 2020, April 25–30, 2020, Honolulu, HI, USA Bardzell’s “Feminist HCI” Legacy: Analyzing Citational Patterns Shruthi Sai Chivukula Abstract Purdue University In this late-breaking work, we describe the legacy of fem- West Lafayette, Indiana, USA inist theory within HCI literature, focusing on Shaowen [email protected] Bardzell’s seminal publication “Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design,” which was one of the first to propose adoption of feminist theories into HCI re- search and practice. We conducted a citation analysis of 70 published texts that cited this paper, using the Harwood functions to identify how feminist theory concepts have Colin M. Gray been cited in HCI and whether the implementation of pro- Purdue University posed frameworks has taken place. This paper was mostly West Lafayette, Indiana, USA given ‘credit,’ and most frequently ‘signposted’ to keep read- [email protected] ers on track of the topical issues in HCI, with little evidence of explicit use or extension of proposed frameworks. These results demonstrate a largely one-dimensional impact, char- acterized by a lack of deep engagement in feminist theo- ries. We identify opportunities to expand feminist approach to further improve research and practice in HCI. Author Keywords Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or Feminist theory; citation analysis; Feminist HCI. classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. Introduction For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). CHI ’20 Extended Abstracts, April 25–30, 2020, Honolulu, HI, USA. In the past decade, HCI scholarship has increasingly ex- © 2020 Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). plored feminist theories as a part of a “turn to critical(ity)” ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6819-3/20/04. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3382936 [12, 18, 22], with the goals of expanding the field’s concep- tual vocabulary and improving design practices. HCI re- LBW005, Page 1 CHI 2020 Late-Breaking Work CHI 2020, April 25–30, 2020, Honolulu, HI, USA Harwood Citation searchers have increasingly adopted or translated theories 2010 Bardzell paper and describe how these citations in Functions from multiple related fields such as anthropology, psychol- the citee’s work function in representing feminist concepts 1. Signposting: Directing ogy, computer science, and human sciences [18], and “third in HCI research; and 2) To illustrate how feminist concepts readers to other sources wave” HCI scholarship [12] has also engaged with the po- have propagated in HCI scholarship, and identify how Bardzell’s 2. Supporting: Helping tential intersections and adoption of critical theory, ethics frameworks have been used to frame critically-focused HCI authors justify their topic and values, and reflexivity in HCI research and practice. As research and design practices. Each of these contributions part of this shift, critically-focused researchers have trans- extends the field’s collective understanding of critically- 3. Credit: Acknowledging lated and adopted feminist theories—part of a larger strand focused research practices, and provides a foundation for authors’ debt to others for of critical theory-inspired approaches—the most prominent future theoretical, conceptual, and pragmatic work that re- ideas or methods of which was proposed as “Feminist HCI” [2–4]. While there lates to feminist theory in an HCI context. 4. Position: Allowing authors has been substantial critically-focused research and design to explicate researchers’ work resonant with third-wave ideals of reflexivity and criti- About Bardzell’s 2010 Paper standpoints in detail cality, the propagation and patterns of adoption of feminist In Shaowen Bardzell’s 2010 paper titled “Feminist HCI: Tak- 5. Engaging: Having critical theories in HCI is understudied. To describe how feminist ing Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design” [4], she dialogue with their sources approaches have been represented in HCI research, we summarizes the state of the art of feminism in HCI, de- 6. Building: Using sources’ answer the following research questions: How is feminist scribes the use of feminist theory in analogous fields, and methods or ideas as theory cited in HCI scholarship? In what way(s) are HCI re- proposes a set of contribution criteria and feminist interac- foundations searchers citing Bardzell’s 2010 Feminist HCI paper?; and tion design qualities to improve HCI research and design How might the study of citation functions inform the propa- practice. This pioneering work, chosen for its high cita- 7. Tying: Aligning source’s gation of feminist theory in interdisciplinary HCI research? tion count and novelty, proposes the need for and possible methodology or schools of means of adoption of feminist theories in HCI through two thought To address these research goals, we conducted a citation frameworks: (1) Contribution Criteria (ways in which femi- 8. Advertising: Alerting analysis of Bardzell’s 2010 pioneering Feminist HCI pa- nist theories and methods might contribute to HCI): Theory, author’s earlier work per [4]. Citation analysis is a common research method in Methodology, User Research and Evaluation [4]; and (2) 9. Future: Establishing information science [6, 7, 16], and has been successfully Feminist Interaction Design Qualities (attributes of a fem- future research plans used in social work [1] and design [5] contexts. One of the inist interaction paradigm): Pluralism, Participation, Advo- 10. Competence: Displaying primary uses of this method is “[q]ualitative and quantitative cacy, Ecology, Embodiment, and Self-Disclosure [4]. We re- author’s knowledge of the evaluation of scientists, publications, and scientific institu- fer to these two frameworks throughout this paper, and use field tions” [16], which can be used “to better analyze the rich them for analysis purposes as a priori themes in extension sociocultural context of research behavior” [24]. In our con- 11. Topical: Showing to the citation analysis to illustrate how Bardzell’s proposed text, citation analysis will aid in our attempt to describe how research is concerned with frameworks have been implemented in HCI research. “Feminist HCI” and related feminist concepts are cited and state-of-the-art issues described in HCI scholarship. Our Approach To answer our research questions, we conducted a cita- Table 1: Descriptions of Harwood The contribution of this late-breaking work is two-fold: 1) Citation Functions [13] tion analysis of 70 published conference proceedings that To identify and describe the patterns of citations of the cited Bardzell’s 2010 paper [4], allowing us to describe LBW005, Page 2 CHI 2020 Late-Breaking Work CHI 2020, April 25–30, 2020, Honolulu, HI, USA Example of a citation snip- ways in which feminist theories are cited and utilized in Data Analysis pet: “Their keenness to help HCI research. In addition to a citation analysis based on Each citation snippet was coded using Harwood’s typology women in their families and Harwood’s citation function typology [13], we also con- of citation functions, as described in Table 1 [13]. These villages to access information ducted a thematic analysis using two a priori frameworks— citation functions were not exclusively coded, resulting in (the girls consider) valuable for contribution criteria and feminist interaction design qualities— the total sum of the occurrences not equaling the total num- their health is representative proposed in [4] to illustrate how Bardzell’s contributions ber of snippets. These snippets were also coded using two of the quality of advocacy that have been extended or implemented in HCI research. frameworks from Bardzell’s 2010 paper: Contribution Cri- Bardzell [2] suggests as be- teria and Feminist Interaction Design Qualities. Bardzell’s ing a necessary component of Data Collection frameworks were coded as ‘used’ and ‘not used’ for each Feminist HCI.” To collect published work citing Bardzell’s 2010 paper, we citation snippet. If ‘used’, additional sub-codes from ele- retrieved a list of citations of this paper from the ACM Dig- ments of the framework were coded to further the analysis. In this snippet, ‘Bardzell [2]’ is ital Library. At the time of writing, this database included Once the coding was complete, descriptive statistics were cited and the statement details 200 citations of the Bardzell 2010 paper. To further limit calculated to present frequencies of citation functions and how authors built on her work. this potential dataset, we created inclusion criteria that re- identify how the contribution criteria and feminist qualities quired the citing paper to be published in the CHI (Human were used. Factors in Computing Systems) (n= 89) and DIS (Design- ing Interactive Systems) (n=13) conferences. These two Results conferences were selected because they had the highest In this section, we present the quantitative results of the number of Bardzell 2010 citations coupled with the highest analysis in two different sections: 1) Results of Harwood’s likelihood of engagement in these critical frameworks. This citation functions to present why and how Bardzell’s work resulted in 70 conference proceedings from 2010 to 2019. was cited; and 2) Bardzell’s framework results to illustrate how the two frameworks proposed by Bardzell [4] were im- These conference proceedings were further analyzed to plemented (or not) in the published texts. collect citation snippets, which were copied into the database. By citation snippets, we refer to any statements that directly Harwood’s Citation Functions cited Bardzell’s 2010 work (see example in sidebar). In to- Figure 1 presents the distribution of the various Harwood’s tal, we collected 108 citation snippets (Mean=2, SD= 1.067) citation functions across the collected 108 citation snip- across the 70 conference proceedings.