Introduction to the Special Issue on HCI and the Body

ing with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2020 Association for Computing Machinery. 1073-0516/2020/08-ART20 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3406091 ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 27, No. 4, Article 20. Publication date: August 2020. 20:2 T. Almeida et al. conversations between the editors and between the authors and editors. Inspired byData Feminism [36] and many feminist scholars before that, we wish to hold ourselves to account in terms of the values that we as guest editors of ToCHI share, and the extent towhichwe have been able to uphold ourselves to these values. In curating this Special Issue, we hoped to explore women’s health HCI issues at a global scale. We aimed at highlighting new technologies and new interactions that might respond to core issues affecting women’s health, as well as critically engaging with the sociopolitical context that contributes to health inequality for women and girls worldwide. We wished to generate a pluralistic and intersectional account of women’s health and HCI, one that would speak to issues of race, sexuality, poverty, disability, and aging. In our Call for Papers, we requested potential authors to submit a short abstract of their planned paper, so we could gauge the broader interest in the topic and the variety of issues being addressed. Wewere overwhelmed by the response, and indeedmany interesting topics were raised, and it was very difficult to decide on a manageable number that we would invite to proceed with the development of a full manuscript for review. Among the abstracts we received, we invited 16 groups of authors to submit full-length papers, and eventually we accepted seven papers for this Special Issue, all having been through three rounds of rigorous peer-reviewing process. Our reviewers included both junior and senior scholars, with expertise in HCI, health, feminism, gender, design, Cultural Studies, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Looking at the submissions received for the Special Issue, there were surprisingly few works on how gender, racism, ageing, poverty, ableism, obesity, rurality, mental wellness, HIV, and cancer intersect with women’s health, as well as work from/about regions such as Africa or South and Central America, or the Middle East. And those that did unfortunately did not make it beyond the peer-reviewing process, despite our efforts to encourage them throughout the process. The lack of such contributions or their rejection during the peer-reviewing process was a disappointment. We were also expecting more contributions from the mainstream health informatics community, but we did not have many, and those we had did not emerge successfully from the reviewing process. Additionally, wewere hoping to receive contributions around emergent technologies andwomen’s health, but we did not receive any submissions of that nature either. None of this should be seen as a failing of our field, nor the researchers, but instead highlighting the possible gaps that exist within the current research in this area as a way of motivating all of us interested in this topic. We believe that some of the gaps are the result of systemic issues within academia that make some voices harder to be heard. Some of these are on us too: Did we get the call out wide enough? Are we in the right networks?.We have taken note of howwemight do better in the future, because the diversity in research is on all of us to improve. In spite of these limitations, we remain hopeful in that there is much to be explored in/about women’s health and the body in HCI. Moving forward, we hope to see more work in this space that goes beyond the limited geographical regions, stands in contrast to the existing politics around women’s health, and creates new ways of relating to our bodies in/with/through technologies. Such a more expansive view opens up many new and exciting possibilities. The collection of papers in this Special Issue represents only the beginning of the effort towards this end. They not only introduce new practices into women’s health HCI but also suggest new kinds of hope. Traditionally, a special issue begins with an introduction written by the special issue editors where together the editors narrate themotivation and purpose of the special issue through a single, authoritative voice. A key goal of such a piece is to highlight the main contributions of the articles selected to be published with the special issue, and where possible put those contributions into conversation with one another to showcase the current research landscape—what is well charted, and where needs more work, what are the key concerns, and where are the boundaries. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 27, No. 4, Article 20. Publication date: August 2020. Introduction to the Special Issue on HCI and the Body: Reimagining Women’s Health 20:3 We have chosen to do something a little different. Instead, what we offer here is a series of conversations between the four editors. The process of talking, responding, and reflecting is simultaneously an individual and collective task, and we see the form of conversations as our feminist commitment to challenge the dominant epistemology, research methodology, and politics in doing women’s health research in the field with the hope of creating some new openings. We wish to make visible that this area of research is still very much open, and its boundaries are blurred. There is no one established way to proceed and no agreed methodology for undertaking research in this area. We, as editors of this Special Issue, while all actively researching women’s health HCI, do not have all the answers. In what follows, we share our conversations around four themes about women’s health research that we came back to time and time again as we curated this Special Issue and show how we and these authors walk alongside each other. 2 TOWARDS A NEW FEMINIST HEALTH POLITICS IN HCI Madeline. Clearly, maternal health is a significant area within women’s health concerns. According to the World Health Organization, 1,000 women die everyday due to the consequences of pregnancy, or complications arising from childbirth. And, so as a community, it is natural that significant research efforts have been targeted upon these particular health concerns. When I began working in this growing area of “women’s health,” it was within this domain—initially through a workshop at CHI 2013 on “Motherhood and HCI” [17]. At the time, I was reading Sara Ruddick’s work on maternal thinking [80], and reflecting how we design such that we can care with and through technologies. As some kind of response to this, and with a team of others, I designed, developed, and deployed FeedFinder—a mobile application to support public breastfeeding [14, 86]. A series of interactions that embody a promise to allow breastfeeding people and others to care for one another by providing practical, location-based resources may create a feeling in which public breastfeeding (in an otherwise unwelcoming context) becomes a possibility. At the time that we made FeedFinder, I was really thinking that it would be relatively “easy” to make a mobile application that could support women in breastfeeding in public. It was not really until afterwards, as I reflected on the design and its subsequent deployment, that I realised the political consequences of the design work, and that its consequences spanned the personal (e.g., do we think that the best infant feeding option is breastfeeding?), legal (e.g., are we suggesting that women should only breastfeed in certain locations?), and practical (e.g., do we interfere with the mother-infant bond by designing for themobile?) aspects. The social, cultural, and political entanglements within women’s health are nicely captured by Kumar et al.’s reflection over 13 studies in the Global South [60, this issue]. Here, the authors reject the categorisation of “health” and instead prefer to consider their work under the umbrella of “women’s wellbeing.” Health epitomises a way of thinking about the body, which is overtly medical—something to be fixed when broken, or something that needs to be managed and maintained; else, it might misbehave. This categorisation of “health” does not fully capture the social and cultural elements of women’s lives and experiences, which reduce their capabilities. It does not capture the patriarchal societal and organisational structures, which influence how the body is experienced and cared for, and therefore it does not bring these structures into an analytical framework, which can be questioned, critiqued, and worked upon. Kumar et al.’s contribution to this Special Issue is to highlight why so much of the work that classifies as, or could be classified as, “women’s health” can often be viewed as also having an activist or political agenda. There is recognition that what needs to change is not just the tools and technologies available for supporting women’s health, but also the whole social and cultural system within which these bodies are categorised, performed, and enabled. 1https://www.who.int/gho/women_and_health/en/. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 27, No. 4, Article 20. Publication date: August 2020. 20:4 T. Almeida et al. Across this Special Issue, we see authors usingmultiple forms and styles of research to give voice to experiences that have been marginalised—from historical analysis to critical genealogy through to design memoirs. And, perhaps, it is not surprising that so many of these papers are developed from an activist perspective, whether it be self-identification as an activist-scholar [43, this issue] or unpacking how entrepreneurial activism can lead to social and political change [72, this issue]. And, of course, for many