About

Shaowen Bardzell is Chair and Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Interactive Computing. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University and pursues a humanistic research agenda within the research and practice of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). A common thread throughout her work is the exploration of the contributions of feminism, design, and social science to support technology’s role in social change. Her recent research topics include care ethics and feminist utopian perspectives on IT, research through design, women’s health, posthumanist approaches to sustainable design, computational agriculture and food justice, and cultural and creative industries in Asia. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation, Intel Corporation, and the Mellon Foundation, among others.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Law
• Philosophy
• Engineering
• Nursing
• Epistemology
• Environmental ethics
• Medicine
• Public relations
• Engineering ethics

Selected publications

• Whose Time Counts? Temporal Arrangements in Sociotechnical Infrastructures

  2026-04-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper examines how infrastructures organize time in ways that unevenly distribute burden, access, and opportunity across communities. We draw on two ethnographic cases: eviction case filings in Atlanta, part of the state’s legal and housing governance infrastructure, and a sexual healthcare intervention in Chicago, situated within the city’s public health services. We advance HCI’s engagement with temporality by demonstrating how infrastructures sediment layers of political, social, and technical decisions over time. We conceptualize infrastructures as stratified formations where earlier allocations of power become materially and procedurally embedded, configuring present-day experiences of public systems. We define temporal arrangements as the patterned ways infrastructures shape and allocate time, producing unequal demands on who waits, who moves, and who must continually adjust. We describe two temporal arrangements—compression and gaps—to show how systems structure and constrain access to care, support, and basic services. By linking inherited infrastructural logics to everyday temporal burdens, we offer HCI a framework for examining how inequities persist through time.

  PublisherDOI

• CHIdeology: Disentangling the fragmented politics, values and imaginaries of Human-Computer Interaction through ideologies

  2026-04-13

  articleSenior author

  Against the backdrop of shifting political landscapes, this workshop approaches the fragmented politics, values, and imaginaries in Human–Computer Interaction through the lens of ideologies. Ideologies, underlying belief systems of sections of the population, influence both society and the design of technology. Ideologies help to highlight tensions and forces that play a role in our research practices. We aim to disentangle ideological framings, allowing participants to identify possible research areas and collaboratively develop new ways of working with ideologies in HCI. Through hands-on activities—crafting conceptions of ideology and engaging in thematic group discussions—we explore how ideologies shape fundamental assumptions and catalyze societal change. This leverages HCI’s interdisciplinary methods to generate knowledge and impact beyond technological design.

  PublisherDOI

• Compliance as Data Work

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Advancing Post-growth HCI

  2025-04-23 · 3 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Datafication of Climate Change: From Prediction to Participation

  2025-08-18 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  How is the climate crisis mediated by data?In this one-day hybrid workshop, we will gather an interdisciplinary group of critical computing scholars and practitioners examining and practising the different ways that climate change is becoming datafied.The datafication of climate change refers to the collection, analysis, and representation of data to inform decision-making around strategies for the prevention, mitigation, or adaptation to the impacts of climate change.While increased use of data promises to keep powerful actors accountable for their actions and enable targeted decision making necessary for policy analysis, there are challenges regarding how and what kinds of data are being used and for whom.Furthermore, the increased data usage also entails environmental impacts, such as the rising energy consumption, which may contradict the intended goals behind datafication in the first place.In this workshop, we aim to map the climate data pipeline, based on presentations by participants on their current research in relation to the data lifecycle (e.g.cleaning, storing, analysis, scraping, etc.) with a tentative output of a

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Whose, Which, and What Crisis? A Critical Analysis of Crisis in Computing Supply Chains

  2025-07-23 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Resisting AI Solutionism: Where Do We Go From Here?

  2025-04-23 · 8 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Computing and the Arts: Establishing Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

  2025-10-17 · 2 citations

  article

  The last five years have resulted in substantial changes to how computing affects work, how work affects computing, and how work and computing operate in tandem to affect society. From advances in automation, artificial intelligence, and virtual/extended reality, to the entrenchment of hybrid and remote work arrangements, and<br/>the documented harmful societal impacts that computing work has produced, these changes to computing-work relationships raise concern and opportunities to reimagine these relationships in new ways. CSCW has an opportunity and a responsibility to ensure that the kinds of futures we imagine and enact benefit workers, communities, and future generations. Artistic research is well-positioned<br/>to help us not only understand, but imagine new pathways forward in response to pressing CSCW questions. By hosting a panel of experts in artistic methods well-equipped to help us imagine these futures, we expect to lay the groundwork for mutually respectful cross-disciplinary collaboration between arts and computing<br/>that makes more space in our field for different kinds of thinking, approaches to problems, and new imaginaries.

  PublisherDOI

• CSCW Contributions to Critical Futures of Work

  2025-10-17

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Making Sense of Trauma Over Time: Interweaving Feminist Temporalities to Understand Histories

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-05-02 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Trauma, an emotional response to events with lasting impacts, is a significant public health issue influencing technology interactions. This paper focuses on the sixth principle of trauma-informed care—Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues—by exploring multiple timescales of trauma and generational impacts through two ethnographic vignettes: a trauma-informed healthcare design project in Chicago and environmental advocacy in Borneo, Indonesia. We integrate feminist temporality to understand temporal contingencies in cultural contexts to inform future trauma-informed design and computing work. Our contributions include detailed ethnographic accounts that shift the focus from trauma as an individual event to a historically and communally felt phenomenon, advancing CSCW scholarship by incorporating historicist sensibilities and feminist theorizations of temporality.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CHS: Medium: Collaborative Research: From Hobby to Socioeconomic Driver: Innovation Pathways to Professional Making in Asia and the American Midwest

  NSF · $616k · 2015–2023

• CHS: Small: The Farm as Lab: Information Technology Innovation in Computational Agriculture

  NSF · $499k · 2019–2022

• CHS: Medium: Collaborative Research: Regional Experiments for the Future of Work in America

  NSF · $590k · 2019–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Jeffrey Bardzell

  Pennsylvania State University

  118 shared

• Silvia Lindtner

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  12 shared

• Austin L. Toombs

  Indiana University Bloomington

  12 shared

• Tyler Pace

  Indiana University Bloomington

  11 shared

• Neha Kumar

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  10 shared

• Shad Gross

  9 shared

• Nicola J. Bidwell

  Rhodes University

  9 shared

• Guo Freeman

  Clemson University

  9 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Human-Computer Interaction

  University of California, Berkeley

  2002

• M.S., Computer Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  1998

• B.S., Computer Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  1996