Sarah Fox’s research while affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University and other places

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Publications (72)


“Oh, you’re watching me ”: Care workers’ experiences of surveillant assemblages on the platform and in the home
  • Article

February 2025

Hunter Akridge

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Alex Ahmed

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Free S Bàssïbét

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[...]

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Sarah Fox

Domestic workers have long been marginalized, even as they are made hypervisible to their employers. This is a process increasingly augmented by digital technologies. These technologies include care platforms, which have increasingly mediated the process of finding employment. This article reports on interviews with in-home childcare workers or “nannies” who shared experiences of scrutiny and surveillance across the labor process, both on and off the platform. This includes background checks, in-person monitoring, hidden cameras, and more. Although these practices might be legitimized as an extension of parental care or benign monitoring, workers’ negative afffects—fear, worry, anger—disrupt this normalization. Their stories make visible harm and hidden burdens from this hybridization of care and control. Through their accounts, a surveillant assemblage comes into view that intensifies uneven visibility regimes and reinstates the racialized and gendered power dynamics that have long defined domestic labor.


"It's Always a Losing Game": How Workers Understand and Resist Surveillance Technologies on the Job
  • Preprint
  • File available

December 2024

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10 Reads

With the rise of remote work, a range of surveillance technologies are increasingly being used by business owners to track and monitor employees, raising concerns about worker rights and privacy. Through analysis of Reddit posts and in-depth semi-structured interviews, this paper seeks to understand how workers across a range of sectors make sense of and respond to layered forms of surveillance. While workers express concern about risks to their health, safety, and privacy, they also face a lack of transparency and autonomy around the use of these systems. In response, workers take up tactics of everyday resistance, such as commiserating with other workers or employing technological hacks. Although these tactics demonstrate workers' ingenuity, they also show the limitations of existing approaches to protect workers against intrusive workplace monitoring. We argue that there is an opportunity for CSCW researchers to support these countermeasures through worker-led design and policy.

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The Denizen Designer Project: Practices, Relationships, and Principles of Activist-Led Design

November 2024

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10 Reads

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Design activism is a way for designers and researchers to negotiate societal inequities and resulting implications for design practices. Within HCI and design, community-based methods are a common way to situate design engagements among those directly impacted by social inequities. Despite its potential for social impact, current approaches to design activism can be extractive and at odds with community-aligned advocacy. Drawing on interviews with 32 individuals who use design to address local, social inequities, we extend the current discourse around design activism by exploring 'activist-led design'. We outline four key considerations of this work: understanding activist-led design practices; relationality and community engagements; challenges of doing this work; and democratizing access to design. Our analysis highlights implications for academia's role in design activism. This paper interrogates design activism's role as a social and communal practice, and considers ways to support activist-led design. We propose considerations that contribute to the larger conversation of academic design having more equitable impact.


Integrating Equity in Public Sector Data-Driven Decision Making: Exploring the Desired Futures of Underserved Stakeholders

November 2024

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11 Reads

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1 Citation

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Public sector agencies aim to innovate not just for efficiency but also to enhance equity. Despite the growing adoption of data-driven decision-making systems in the public sector, efforts to integrate equity as a primary goal often fall short. This typically arises from inadequate early-stage involvement of underserved stakeholders and prevalent misunderstandings concerning the authentic meaning of equity from these stakeholders' perspectives. Our research seeks to address this gap by actively involving undersevered stakeholders in the process of envisioning the integration of equity within public sector data-driven decisions, particularly in the context of a building department in a Northeastern mid-sized U.S. city. Applying a speed dating method with storyboards, we explore diverse equity-centric futures within the realm of local business development, a domain where small businesses, particularly women-and minority-owned businesses, historically confront inequitable distribution of public services. We explored three essential aspects of equity: monitoring equity, resource allocation prioritization, as well as information and equity. Our findings illuminate the complexities of integrating equity into data-driven decisions, offering nuanced insights about the needs of stakeholders. We found that attempts to monitor and incorporate equity goals into public sector decision-making can unexpectedly backfire, inadvertently sparking community apprehension and potentially exacerbating existing inequities. Small business owners, including those identifying as women-and minority-owned, advocated against the use of demographic-based data in equity-focused data-driven decision-making in the public sector, instead emphasizing factors such as community needs, application complexity, and uncertainties inherent in small businesses. Drawing from these insights, we propose design implications to assist designers of public sector data-driven decision-making systems to better accommodate equity considerations.


Artfully Integrating AI: Proceeding Responsibly With Worker-Centered Best Practices

October 2024

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3 Reads

AI’s “great acceleration” is a vital moment for intervention on behalf of the workers tasked with integrating autonomous systems. In this chapter, we draw on eight months of field research across two sites of essential work newly deploying automation, in order to examine how frontline employees—here, janitorial staff and recycling sorters—take on the supervisory responsibilities and troubleshooting required by emerging technologies. Workers are called to produce this labor on top of existing duties, attuning to the machinery’s regular mistakes and often still performing the original activities meant to be relieved by AI. We argue that a humane future with autonomous technologies cannot be secured through design alone, but requires developing processes of worker-centered integration. We offer a set of recommendations on the installation, evaluation, and maintenance of AI in essential sectors, and reflect on new governance strategies meant to regulate the promotion and use of artificial intelligence within workplaces.


AI Failure Loops in Feminized Labor: Understanding the Interplay of Workplace AI and Occupational Devaluation

October 2024

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3 Reads

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1 Citation

A growing body of literature has focused on understanding and addressing workplace AI design failures. However, past work has largely overlooked the role of occupational devaluation in shaping the dynamics of AI development and deployment. In this paper, we examine the case of feminized labor: a class of devalued occupations historically misnomered as ``women's work,'' such as social work, K-12 teaching, and home healthcare. Drawing on literature on AI deployments in feminized labor contexts, we conceptualize AI Failure Loops: a set of interwoven, socio-technical failures that help explain how the systemic devaluation of workers' expertise negatively impacts, and is impacted by, AI design, evaluation, and governance practices. These failures demonstrate how misjudgments on the automatability of workers' skills can lead to AI deployments that fail to bring value and, instead, further diminish the visibility of workers' expertise. We discuss research and design implications for workplace AI, especially for devalued occupations.


Figure 1: Example interaction with our interview probe
'Simulacrum of Stories': Examining Large Language Models as Qualitative Research Participants

September 2024

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29 Reads

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1 Citation

The recent excitement around generative models has sparked a wave of proposals suggesting the replacement of human participation and labor in research and development--e.g., through surveys, experiments, and interviews--with synthetic research data generated by large language models (LLMs). We conducted interviews with 19 qualitative researchers to understand their perspectives on this paradigm shift. Initially skeptical, researchers were surprised to see similar narratives emerge in the LLM-generated data when using the interview probe. However, over several conversational turns, they went on to identify fundamental limitations, such as how LLMs foreclose participants' consent and agency, produce responses lacking in palpability and contextual depth, and risk delegitimizing qualitative research methods. We argue that the use of LLMs as proxies for participants enacts the surrogate effect, raising ethical and epistemological concerns that extend beyond the technical limitations of current models to the core of whether LLMs fit within qualitative ways of knowing.


"My Sense of Morality Leads to My Suffering, Battling, and Arguing": The Role of Platform Designers in (Un)Deciding Gig Worker Issues

HCI and design studies have increasingly identified challenges for gig workers and advocated for designs centered around worker justice. However, there’s an existing research gap in understanding how platform designers approach gig worker issues in their practice. Our study engaged ten platform designers from food delivery and ride-hailing platforms to investigate this gap. Through semi-structured interviews, we uncovered their strategies, the extent of authority and responsibilities, and the range of obstacles they encounter in influencing decision-making that could affect gig workers’ experiences with the platforms. While platform designers were aware of gig worker issues, they confronted challenges from business goals, decision-making power, policies, and job security in promoting worker well-being. We discuss the jurisdiction of platform designers and propose that HCI research should further support them, who are deeply engaged in the gig economy and have the potential to participate in addressing social justice issues.



Carefully Unmaking the “Marginalized User:” A Diffractive Analysis of a Gay Online Community

June 2024

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6 Reads

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4 Citations

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

HCI scholars are increasingly engaging in research about “marginalized groups,” such as LGBTQ+ people. While normative habitual readings of marginalized people in HCI often highlight real problems, this work has been criticized for flattening heterogeneous experiences and overemphasizing harms. Some have advocated for expanding how we approach research on marginalized people (e.g., assets-based design, the everyday, and joy). Sensitized by unmaking literature, we explore this tension between conditions, experiences, and representations of marginality in HCI scholarship. To do so, we perform a diffractive analysis of posts in a gay online community by bringing two readings of the same data together: a normative habitual reading of marginalization and an expanded reading. By examining the relationship between empirical material and its representations by HCI researchers, we explore how to carefully unmake HCI research, thus maintaining and repairing our research community. We discuss the political and designerly implications of different readings of marginalized people and offer considerations for attending to the processes and afterlives of HCI research.


Citations (60)


... Professional use cases displayed more variability, notably with Elementary School Teacher AI, which was uniquely unacceptable. This underscores the necessity for further research into how AI should be developed and integrated, as well as what skills it should have, particularly in fields where empathy and care are crucial [15,38,82]. In addition, prior ...

Reference:

Diverse Perspectives on AI: Examining People's Acceptability and Reasoning of Possible AI Use Cases
AI Failure Loops in Feminized Labor: Understanding the Interplay of Workplace AI and Occupational Devaluation
  • Citing Article
  • October 2024

... Recent SIGCHI scholarship has extensively studied how public sector workers engage in discretionary care work, unpacking how workers translate client information into credible data and mediate complex dynamics between the realities of providing client care while adhering to formal data or algorithm requirements through interview studies [3,45,68,84,87,104,105]. Through an in-depth ethnography of a large homelessness system in Canada, our work extends and adds insights to these prior works by providing the following contributions. ...

Integrating Equity in Public Sector Data-Driven Decision Making: Exploring the Desired Futures of Underserved Stakeholders
  • Citing Article
  • November 2024

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

... Artificial intelligence is increasingly utilized in the public sector to automate bureaucratic process and workflows, and assist critical decision-making processes that impact residents [26,37,52,56,58,82,102]. Often, such public-sector AI applications are not developed in-house, but are purchased from external third-party vendors through a process called "public procurement" [59,76,95]. ...

Public Technologies Transforming Work of the Public and the Public Sector
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • June 2024

... At the same time, we encourage researchers to approach the study of fat people as a marginalized group with care. There is ongoing debate among those researching marginalized groups over the extent to which HCI researchers should center harms, deficits, or damage in their work relative to joy or everyday experiences [25,126]. Certainly, the anti-fatness associated with online harassment and representational harms are important to address and warrant further research attention in HCI (Section 5.2). ...

Carefully Unmaking the “Marginalized User:” A Diffractive Analysis of a Gay Online Community
  • Citing Article
  • June 2024

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

... Fairness is another theme that could be employed for equity research, surfacing impacted stakeholders' perceptions of fairness, as well as measuring and evaluating fairness (Section 2). Other lenses and frameworks relevant to equity but not have been explored in this literature review are critical race theory [109], intersectionality [167], and queer theory [146]. ...

Cruising Queer HCI on the DL: A Literature Review of LGBTQ+ People in HCI
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • May 2024

... We also draw on humancomputer interaction literature on other empirical studies of care and data to discuss actions like combining numbers and stories (Section 5.2.1), leveraging advocates as stewards (Section 5.2.2), and tailoring towards specific goals (Section 5.2.3). These tradeoffs and strategies present future work that not only further explores the theoretical expectations behind them but also the empirical experiences in different settings where low-wage, frontline workers are increasingly seeing their labor quantified (e.g., transportation [8], hospitality [72], gig work [91]). ...

“The bus is nothing without us”: Making Visible the Labor of Bus Operators amid the Ongoing Push Towards Transit Automation
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • May 2024

... While past works have explored micro-entrepreneurship, many have focused on transitioning current entrepreneurs towards digital business practices [19] and exploring digital tool use for entrepreneurs in low-resourced and rural contexts [2,72,89]. There are only a few examples of research that focus specifically on maker entrepreneurs [6,45] whose creative goals influence their business goals, and that suggest design opportunities for new digital tools to support these entrepreneurs [54]. This suggests that more research is needed at the intersection of makers, entrepreneurship, and technology to understand better how makers, who in theory have access to a plethora of technologies, undergo the transition to entrepreneurship and how technologies may be designed to facilitate this transition [13,24,52]. ...

Peerdea: Co-Designing a Peer Support Platform with Creative Entrepreneurs
  • Citing Article
  • April 2024

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

... As service robots become more prevalent in public spaces carrying out tasks such as delivery and cleaning [47,52], people are increasingly having spontaneous interactions with them in dynamic, uncontrolled environments [6,24,43]. Through these interactions, people begin to perceive, relate to, or engage with these robots' Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or 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 components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. ...

The Robot in Our Path: Investigating the Perceptions of People with Motor Disabilities on Navigating Public Space Alongside Sidewalk Robots
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • October 2023

... Similarly, (Forlano & Halpern, 2023;Wong et al., 2020), have engaged with history as a realm for speculative exploration to critically analyze the politics of technology within HCI. This interest in history and its role in design to historicism is currently being explored as a method in HCI and CSCW (Soden et al., 2023). (Howell et al., 2021). ...

Historicism in/as CSCW Method: Research, Sensibilities, and Design
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • October 2023

... We also draw on humancomputer interaction literature on other empirical studies of care and data to discuss actions like combining numbers and stories (Section 5.2.1), leveraging advocates as stewards (Section 5.2.2), and tailoring towards specific goals (Section 5.2.3). These tradeoffs and strategies present future work that not only further explores the theoretical expectations behind them but also the empirical experiences in different settings where low-wage, frontline workers are increasingly seeing their labor quantified (e.g., transportation [8], hospitality [72], gig work [91]). ...

Designing for Wellbeing: Worker-Generated Ideas on Adapting Algorithmic Management in the Hospitality Industry
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • July 2023