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

2025-12-15

AI Summary

East Asian Feminist HCI faces structural challenges including insufficient legitimacy, scarce funding, low academic recognition, and a lack of senior scholars and resilient communities. This study is the first to systematically identify localized tensions and sustainability bottlenecks in this context, proposing a three-dimensional “Legitimacy–Development–Sustainability” practice framework that foregrounds cultural embeddedness and community empowerment. Employing participatory action research, transregional workshops, community co-creation, and critical discourse analysis, the project advances knowledge sharing via an open-source platform (feminist-hci.github.io). Key contributions include: (1) establishing the first sustained academic community for Feminist HCI in East Asia; (2) developing reusable regional support guidelines and cross-institutional collaboration mechanisms; and (3) significantly enhancing the field’s visibility and institutional integration within local academic ecosystems.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Human-Computer Interaction
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

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/

Problem

• Legitimizing Feminist HCI in East Asia's unique cultural context
• Addressing funding scarcity and stigma against Feminist HCI research
• Building community and action plans for sustainable Feminist HCI development

Innovation

• Organizing meet-ups to build community for researchers
• Creating legitimized channels for Feminist HCI connections
• Facilitating action-oriented dialogue for regional sustainability