Hello!
My name is Calvin Liang, and today I ll be talked about our paper titled Embracing Four
Tensions in HCI Research with Marginalized People, done in collaboration with my co-advisors,
Sean Munson and Julie Kientz, published in TOCHI in 2021.
I had initially come into this project through years of witnessing how HCI and marginalization
come together.
Upon reflection, my advisors and I generated a lot of questions as you might expect from
a first year PhD student, like can an able-bodied researcher study people with disabilities?
Can anyone from a non-marginalized population do research on marginalized people?
How can know if we are making the right decision, versus a good or well-intentioned one?
Through these questions, we settled on an exploratory study into how marginalization
and HCI intersect.
And to ground this conversation, when we are talking about marginalization, we are referring
to how a person experiences the world around them based on their identities and how others
perceive them.
[next slide] We draw upon the axes of oppression in our understanding that for those who experience
marginalization, there are different contexts in which they are marginalized and/or privileged,
and their experiences can change over the course of a lifetime, a year, or even a day.
Also, when thinking about marginalization, we would be remiss not to identify the structural
powers that do the actual marginalizing.
The oppression that we see in the world is not a naturally occurring thing, but an active
operation that society, and sometimes HCI research, perpetuates.
We drew from several fields outside of HCI to inform our research, such as disability
studies and systems of power, and we set out to better understand current HCI researchers
approaches to doing work with marginalized people, and so, this project was created.
Our guiding research question asked: How do HCI researchers engage in and reflect on work
that involves marginalized people?
But this can be further broken down into three sub-questions around specific interactions:
How do HCI researchers see their research affecting participants, and how do they reflect
on and adjust their practices as a result?
How do HCI researchers engage in and reflect on research with marginalized people as it
affects researchers?
How do the norms of the field of HCI affect marginalized people as researchers and, further,
those researchers interactions with participants?
This was a qualitative study, where participants had the choice between taking an online survey,
doing a semi-structured interview, or both.
We ended up with 24 participants total, and we recruited broadly, asking for self-identified
HCI researchers who had worked with marginalized people, which has its limitations.
An important thing to note is that a majority of the voices represented in this study are
based in the US, which definitely skews the data and our analysis.
We hope that readers keep that in mind when interpreting our work.
We used a reflexive thematic analysis to analyze our data, meaning we constructed themes as
we encountered the data until we reached saturation.
We also went through a rigorous member checking process, where we brought our analysis to
participants to see if their data were represented accurately.
For each interaction, we present findings as two groups.
First, the resulting harms of each interaction, and second, things that our participants did
to mitigate such harms.
Though, participants did not provide feedback on every harm we found.
Okay no need for a drum roll or anything, but the four tensions we constructed through
our findings are exploitation, membership, disclosure, and allyship.
Each tension is complicated, they overlap with each other, and, honestly, we will never
fully resolve them.
And yet, they are still worth pursuing.
Let me show you why.
A prevailing theme in this tension is that exploitation
is inherent to the research process.
Participants in our study talked about exploitation on two broader levels: extracting experiences
from participants and tokenizing the identities of fellow researchers.
At the researcher level, it is unethical to involve researchers solely for their marginalized
experiences; however, some marginalized researchers spoke of being left with no other choice but
to be tokenized to ensure that work is done with care, seen through P8 s quote here.
Under our current paradigm of research with marginalized people, we rely too heavily on
representation at the expense of increased labor for researchers with marginalized backgrounds.
But!
even still there are ways to mitigate harms for participants and researchers alike.
We talk about specific things that researchers we spoke to do to mitigate exploitation, but
there are also really great resources in the literature.
One way we might think about preventing exploitation is limiting who can do what research based
on identity, but we demonstrate why this is not good, which leads us to
The tension of membership talks about how gatekeeping research based on the identity
of an author actually ends up harming marginalized people.
It unpacks how yes, membership is very helpful, but it also does not mean that being a member
grants a person omniscience, or all-knowing power and authority over that entire group.
For example, a queer person is capable of doing unethical queer research, and they cannot
speak on behalf of all queer people.
At the same time, we absolutely cannot use this as an excuse to invalidate marginalized
people s experiences.
Rather than using a researcher s identity as the metric for the appropriateness and
validity of their work, can we evaluate what considerations the researcher made throughout
their research process in addition to remaining attentive to the author s positionality in
the study context?
Membership based judgements also requires knowing people's identities, but it is harmful
to require people to out themselves.
This brings us to
The paradox of disclosure talks about how reflexive and positionality statements, in
an ideal sense, are a good practice BUT creating a norm around including them is actually harmful
to marginalized researchers.
In our interviews, we actually asked specifically about reflexive and positionality statements
which don t necessarily equate to identity-based disclosures, but everyone brought up experiences
with them.
We can t make marginalized researchers choose between having their work appear as legitimate
and possibly be discriminated against for disclosing.
To support people making a decision to disclose or not and for reviewers who might want some
more information, we put together a table of questions to consider.
For researchers, think about your reasons and if anyone is pressuring you to disclose.
Are there mechanisms in place that would allow you to reverse your decision?
For reviewers, How might the authors be harmed through such a request?
Is there other information that could address these needs?
Finally, allyship examines how not all research that claims to be allyship is actually allyship,
and yet I believe that all research that involves marginalized people should be done through
an allyship-oriented lens.
Here, we talk about how research should avoid prioritizing a researcher s agenda ahead of
the agendas of their participants.
This tension also brings together lessons, dilemmas, and questions from the previous
three, building towards an allyship-oriented approach to research with marginalized people.
Here, it is about the journey, not the destination.
From what we heard, there are intense pressures that individuals face that are a direct result
from a system that tells us that it is our individual responsibility to fix the world
and systems we live in.
We are told that if we publish one more paper, we ll get closer to tenure, and THEN we ll
finally be able to do some good.
But what if we removed that pressure?
What if we called out the systems of oppression that are working against us and are informing
how we navigate our work?
How can we be less focused on the destination and more attuned to how we are getting there?
I also want to point people to several resources that were incredibly helpful in shaping my
understanding of all four of these tensions.
All highlight different definitions, characteristics, and issues of allyship.
We have three main limitations that I hope you take with you when interpreting these
tensions.
First, we ourselves are subjects of our own critique.
The themes of extraction were very front of mind for me as I interviewed and analyzed
data.
Another glaring and valid critique of this paper is that it is very Western and US-centric,
despite our best efforts to hear from as many people as possible.
Next, where we look across marginalization in the macro, we overlook specific instances
of injustice.
Finally, while we maintain that each of the tensions that we have identified affects researchers
who experience marginalization in some way, we cannot make definitive claims about to
what extent.
I am hopeful that future research takes these tensions and runs with them, challenges them,
unpacks them for different contexts.
I am hopeful that people find that these tensions are insufficient and in need of reshaping
when it comes to different contexts.
But my hope is that these four provide a good jumping off point for future inquiry.
So where do we go from here?
Now, you might be expecting that I end on a list of best practices or what exactly you
should do to ensure ethical research.
[next slide] But, the overarching theme of our participants experiences is that there
is no one, perfect way to go about doing this work.
We intentionally avoided prescribing an exact checklist for doing research the right way.
[next slide]
We do leave you with the considerations of the participants in our study but note that
accomplishing all of them is not an automatic fail-safe for ethical research.
Instead, we hope you will consider the situational needs of the project, potential participants,
and others affected by the work, including the research team.
In closing, we hope to highlight what makes engaging with marginalized people in research
difficult, but also that it is important to not let these complexities prevent good research
from being done.
Thank you so much for your attention, and I am excited for any questions you may have.