Legitimizing, Developing, and Sustaining Feminist HCI in East Asia: Challenges and Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of Feminist HCI in East Asia, highlighting cultural challenges and proposing a community-building meet-up to legitimize and sustain research efforts in the region.

Contribution

It introduces a meet-up initiative aimed at connecting Feminist HCI researchers in East Asia to address regional challenges and promote community resilience.

Findings

Identifies key regional challenges for Feminist HCI in East Asia

Proposes a community-building platform for researchers

Highlights the importance of contextualized digital feminism practices

Abstract

Feminist HCI has been rapidly developing in East Asian contexts in recent years. The region's unique cultural and political backgrounds have contributed valuable, situated knowledge, revealing topics such as localized digital feminism practices, or women's complex navigation among social expectations. However, the very factors that ground these perspectives also create significant survival challenges for researchers in East Asia. These include a scarcity of dedicated funding, the stigma of being perceived as less valuable than productivity-oriented technologies, and the lack of senior researchers and established, resilient communities. Grounded in these challenges and our prior collective practices, we propose this meet-up with two focused goals: (1) to provide a legitimized channel for Feminist HCI researchers to connect and build community, and (2) to facilitate an action-oriented dialogue on how to legitimize, develop, and sustain Feminist HCI in the East Asian context. The website for this meet-up is: https://feminist-hci.github.io/