Platform Design and Governance for Social Justice (Qunfang Wu) #TournesolTalk

Abstract. Digital platforms, such as TikTok, Reddit, and Uber, are powerful—they shape people’s everyday routines; furthermore, they exclude or exploit users by depriving them of their visibility or economic interests. This talk draws three cases, deceptive designs, platformed racism, and algorithmic harms, to demonstrate how socio-technical systems enable and reinforce oppression and violence through techno-cultural mechanisms (e.g., interface design, moderation, policies, culture, business models). The research drew theories from critical studies (e.g., new racism, design justice), which are productive lenses for unpacking power dynamics. At the same time, grassroots activists and community members are taking bottom-up actions and designing innovative tools to counteract power imbalances in digital platforms. The talk discusses how these resistance actions inform ethical design and governance that afford justice for underrepresented populations.

Bio. Qunfang Wu (qunfangwu.com) received her Ph.D. in Information Science and Technology from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. She earned her B.S. in Information Management and System and M.S. in Information Science from Peking University in 2014 and 2016. She also minored in Economics in the National School of Development at Peking University. Qunfang’s research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and social justice. She strives to challenge how socio-technical systems enable the construction and propagation of inequalities and advocate for design justice perspectives and practices. Her work has been published in places of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), the ACM Transactions on Social Computing (TSC), the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and the International Conference on Digital Government Research (DG.O).