Infrastructure Research

  • China ended its zero-COVID policies in December 2022, shifting from collective safety to individualized health responsibility.

    Chinese citizens sought out safety, in part, through acquiring medical resources, including Paxlovid, an antiviral medication developed by Pfizer. However, the distribution of name-brand Paxlovid in China was complicated by geopolitical tensions, corporate interest, and general supply issues.

    This online ethnographic research explores how Paxlovid acquisition was undertaken by Chinese citizens abroad and at home.

  • This work makes use of anticipation work, following Steinhardt and Jackson’s CSCW scholarship.

    Anticipation work involves individual and collective practices that leverage future expectations to guide present actions. This work is both affective and speculative.

    This work shows how Paxlovid was desired in both the present tense for the presently ill and in the future tense as an anticipatory form of safety.

    Through this new empirical context, this work considers the affective, collaborative, and temporal dimensions of anticipation work.

  • This work also highlights moments of precarity to focus on friction within what can be considered "collaborative" aspects of anticipation work.

    In particular, this work explains how individual practices can "contradict" collaborative moments, further complicating anticipation work and further exacerbating feelings of precarity.

    To read further: The Search for Paxlovid: Medication Acquisition as Anticipation Work After China’s Zero-COVID Policy. Ankenbauer, S. & Yi H. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work | CSCW 2024

  • Independent movie theaters are vital cultural infrastructure, offering shared spaces for community engagement with cultural artifacts—both the films themselves and the spaces they are shown within.

    However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced these theaters to shut down, causing an abrupt breakdown.

    This work examines three sociotechnical practices undertaken by theater employees to maintain their place within their community's cultural infrastructure. These include collaborating with community partners and external stakeholders, screening films through online virtual cinema platforms, and attempting to retain a feeling of community through online engagement.

    This work highlights the invisible labor involved in maintaining cultural infrastructure.

  • This work makes space for discussing culture and community engagement, the arts and cultural sharing, and cultural infrastructure within HCI and CSCW. This work advocates for further work into cultural infrastructure—those environments that support individual and community cultural needs.

    In contrast to well-studied essential social and human infrastructures, cultural infrastructure remains less researched.

    This work makes inroads by investigating independent movie theaters' community value, highlighting the essential nature of their physical presence. As per one theater employee, "People see it as sort of (...) their spiritual center [...] their weekly thing that kind of gives them a meaningful experience. [...] It provides that connection, which I do think, culturally, there are fewer places like that — social gathering spots outside of just bars and whatnot."

  • Making Space for Cultural Infrastructure: The Breakdown and Maintenance Work of Independent Movie Theaters During Crisis. Ankenbauer, S. & Lu, A.J. Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems | CHI 2022

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Remembering and Forgetting in HCI and CSCW

  • Historian Pierre Nora said, “memory is alive, always carried by the living."

    Memory artifacts are personal and collective objects that evoke memories and play a crucial role in continuity of personal, familial, and community narratives.

    Managing memory artifacts—and their associated memories and histories—requires careful curation efforts, which include acts of selection, organization, divestment, and preservation.

    This personal curation is often undertaken by older adults.

    This work explores the personal curation practices of older adults.

  • We find that personal curation practices are informed by several tensions.

    Social tension—personal curation is not just undertaken for the self but for family members, for community members. Individual memory is always in relation to collective memory—a social and shared body of layered remembrances. Tensions can arise when, for instance, an older adult cares deeply for an artifact that means nothing to their children.

    Temporal tension—health, memory, and artifacts change over time. This can disrupt personal curation, as when memory artifacts felt significant in one moment only to feel insignificant in another.

    Material tension—the changing of mediums can create tension, as when a digital representation of a physical photo lacks "authenticity". However, the process of digitization can create new forms and new meaning, as when a digital photograph is placed in conversation with other digital artifacts and information.

  • This work generates a few considerations, for both older adults and researchers investigating curation practices.

    They include: raising awareness, supporting preservation and documentation, supporting recontextualization, and supporting forgetting.

    To read further: Spirits in the Material World: Older Adults’ Personal Curation of Memory Artifacts. Ankenbauer, S. & Brewer R.N. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work | CSCW 2024

  • In our contemporary moment, there exists a hegemonic design practice and a general social desire to retain information.

    Sociotechnical platforms have altered the boundaries of information, leading to unbounded and algorithmic retention.

    This has social, political, environmental, and technological consequences, such as ranging from an overabundance of autobiographical information that cannot be fully understood by the individual to the improper use and economization of such information by state and corporation alike.

    The work explores forgetting as a counter-hegemonic practice within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

  • In HCI and CSCW, forgetting research often falls under six categories:

    Pure forgetting—an immediate and total loss of information

    Performative forgetting—a negotiated forgetting without the full commitment to pure forgetting

    Temporal forgetting—forgetting characterized by time

    Spatial forgetting—forgetting characterized by space and environment

    Visualized forgetting—forgetting as something that can be seen

    Unintentional forgetting—forgetting not intentionally facilitated by user or system

  • We can imagine an alternative future in which forgetting takes its place as an integral and defined (not just implied) component of research and design.

    To do so, we consider the art of Chinese contemporary artist Song Dong.

    To read further: Time’s Sublimest Target: Practices of Forgetting in HCI and CSCW. Ankenbauer, S. & Brewer R.N. Proceedings of the 2025 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work | GROUP 2025

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