Introduction to This Special Issue on Transnational HCI

Abstract

It is not surprising that HCI researchers are attracted to the role of technology in global processes as many of us already live inherently transnational lives. While the notion of global connectedness is hardly new, the issues that confront us are more than specific concerns for remote migration, distributed work, or developing nations. Rather, we argue that transnational HCI is a contemporary condition of the design and use of technological systems, both at home and abroad. This special issue of Human-Computer Interaction is dedicated to exploring how and why a transnational lens matters to the study, design, and development of computational systems. We consider this theoretical perspective in terms of both present technology use to construct and manage transnational relations and processes, and the possibilities such a lens opens for future research and design. The papers in this issue contribute to the field of HCI by bringing the principles developed in anthropology, sociology, and elsewhere to bear on the conversation in HCI, retooling them for our present context, while preserving the richness of their methodological orientation.

WHY TRANSNATIONAL HCI?

You're packing your suitcase for a transcontinental flight from Los Angeles to Copenhagen. You switched to a smartphone years ago, but because it is locked to a local carrier that charges absurd roaming fees, you never travel anywhere without your old brick phone. It may have no data plan and an 8-year-old list of outdated contacts, but it also permits a colorful assortment of SIM cards to swap in and out depending on the country you land in. You take a break from packing and point your browser to a website local to your hometown that is 10 years in your past and thousands of miles away in a different country. You check the weather and find out about the latest city council decisions, then write a post on the local bulletin board in response to an article about the recent local by-election.

It is not surprising that HCI researchers are attracted to the role of technology in global processes as many of us already live inherently transnational lives. ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development), emerging markets, and globalizing trends dominate contemporary conversations about technology. Whether in academia or industry, many agree that technologies must somehow be designed or modified to fit the demands of a market involving intercultural collaboration, mobility, and global business transactions (Diamant, Fussell, & Lo, 2009; Marsden, 2006; Olson & Luo, 2007; Williams, Anderson, & Dourish, 2008). The issues that confront us are more than a remote concern for migration, distributed work, or developing nations (Light & Anderson, 2009; Taylor, 2011). Rather, we argue that transnational HCI is a contemporary condition of the design and use of technological systems. Global networks of industry, power, and infrastructure connect people to governments, corporations, colleagues, friends, and family distributed around the globe. Workers from different socioeconomic classes cross national (and other) borders on a regular basis to participate in this global economy while maintaining digitally mediated connections with family and friends at home. Many everyday transactions may become frustratingly implicated in transnational processes as people attempt to purchase goods from other countries online, or when they struggle with the incompatibility of devices and service providers across national borders and regulatory zones. From the mundane to the complex, the personal to the collaborative, our interactions with technology require us to confront the lived reality of transnational lives.

The notion of global connectedness is hardly new. Scholars in anthropology, sociology, and communications have long developed the conceptualization of transnational processes to incorporate a novel perspective on the study of global systems. This includes, for example, a resistance to defining culture in terms of national boundaries, with a preference instead to looking at hybrid cultural forms that emerge as people and communities come into contact with each other. It also includes a notion of economic, social, and technical systems that eschew models of one-way or top-down diffusion, instead taking into account the networks of power that prescribe the mobility of people, goods, and data. An emphasis on a transnational lens suggests an important resistance to thinking of “other cultures” as phenomena that simply happen “out there” in the world (Taylor, 2011). This requires decentering the researcher's or designer's sense of working from a privileged position, reaching out to communities in need, and shifting instead to a sense of researchers, designers, and communities as moving parts of an interconnected network (Light & Anderson, 2009).

This special issue of Human–Computer Interaction is dedicated to exploring how and why a transnational lens matters to the study, design, and development of computational systems. We consider this theoretical perspective in terms of both present technology use to construct and manage transnational relations and processes, and the possibilities such a lens opens for future research and design. The articles in this special issue contribute to the field of HCI by bringing the principles developed in anthropology, sociology, and elsewhere to bear on the conversation in HCI, retooling them for our present context while preserving the richness of their methodological orientation. They examine cases of diverse users—Mexican migrants in California, concertgoers in Germany, DIY makers in China, and slums and orphanages in Thailand. In doing so, these case studies touch on regulatory and design-based interventions while crafting a methodological toolkit for analysis. The authors challenge some of our existing analytical categories—especially the notion of “culture” and social connections—to provide new ways of thinking about generative design spaces.

Considering transnational systems requires engaging with an existing body of theory and analytical approaches that can help make such global networks visible, tangible, and actionable to HCI researchers. In this introductory article, we begin by outlining the chief analytical approaches essential to considering transnational processes. We draw on literature in sociology, anthropology, and communication studies, framing their contributions for the benefit of an HCI audience and demonstrating connections with existing lines of research. We then discuss how best to place this work in dialog with HCI for the purposes of both research and design. Finally, we situate the articles in this issue within a larger conversation about transnationalism and computing, concluding with implications for future directions for research.

A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Previous work in transnational studies has produced a range of definitions to describe a variety of economic, geopolitical, and cross-cultural ties and processes. In its changes over time, the term reveals different ways of thinking about connections that cross national boundaries. Rather than describing this intellectual history (for more, see Kivisto, 2001; Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007; Portes, Guarnizo, & Landolt, 1999; Vertovec, 1999), we highlight five major interconnected aspects of transnational thought to best illuminate its chief characteristics and significance to HCI. ¹ Each of these conceptualizations, in addition to the rich theoretical literature that supports it, offers opportunities for locating and operationalizing the transnational in HCI.

Hybrid Communities

First introduced by Randolph Bourne in the early 20th century, transnationalism was initially conceived as a way to contest the idea of immigrant integration into the melting pot of “American culture.” Bourne (1916) described instead “the immigrant refusing to be melted.” As a classic aspect of a transnational perspective, this concern with broadening our understanding of the immigrant experience remains today. For example, Levitt and colleagues described transnationalism as rooted in migrant laborers' practices of establishing and maintaining links between the countries of their origin and settlement, often relying on large amounts of energy, financial considerations, geographical mobility, and emotional investments (Levitt, 2001a; Levitt & Schiller, 2004). Portes et al. (1999) described “a growing number of persons who live dual lives: speaking two languages, having homes in two countries, and making a living through continuous regular contact across national borders” (p. 217). This can produce particular kinds of political instability. Rouse (1991) considered migrant transnational spaces as spaces of resistance to state impositions, spaces of, often inadvertent, political oppositions to the established order, hierarchy, and impositions of cultural homogeneity by the receiving countries. Such thinking accords with Kivisto's (2001) identification of transnationalism as “a social morphology focused on a new border spanning social formation” (p. 550).

Thus a transnational perspective requires and yet supersedes immigration in the classic sense, approaching instead a notion of an interconnected diaspora. Immigrants (or migrants) do not simply pick up the new cultural patterns of the places that they immigrate to and eschew existing social and cultural ties to their homelands. Instead they maintain ties to their homelands if it is possible and form new, hybrid communities in the places of relocation (Basch, Schiller, & Szanton Blanc, 1994; Smart & Smart, 1998). This is visible in over a decade of work on the digital practices of migrant communities (Madianou & Miller, 2012; Miller & Slater, 2000). For example, Komito and Bates (2011) examined how Filipino and Polish migrant workers in Ireland use social media to stay connected to their home communities, as well as to other migrants in their new national context. Wyche and Grinter (2012a), too, discussed how Kenyan migrants in the United States communicate with their families back home using digital tools. Such studies remind us that migrant communities maintain unique cultural identities and many continue to maintain ties with their homeland, even as they contribute to or become citizens of the receiving countries.

Yet connections to homeland are not always possible, even when these are desired, as political, social, and economic forces intervene (Waldinger & Fitzgerald, 2004). In unstable or authoritarian political regimes, foreign contact can result in negative consequences for those living in such countries effectively limiting any possibilities of physical travel or even digital communication with ties that have emigrated. Here, too, a transnational perspective is advantageous, pointing out how migrants, despite being out of contact with their homelands, nevertheless form groups or collectives around concern for the homeland and join cultural or religious centers with affiliations in the homeland. This is what Basch et al. (1994) termed “stretching the homeland”: a process that can result in social formations that not only help maintain cultural continuity but also are capable of supporting swift political action when possibilities arise (Bernal, 2006). Waldinger and Fitzgerald (2004) also pointed out that such transnational communities are constructed not only by the migrants alone but also by the social, political, and economic conditions of the state that shape the forms these social formations can take.

Social and Economic Ties

Economic transactions remain the most obvious way of conceptualizing and measuring transnational ties and their considerable impacts (Guarnizo, 2003; Levitt, 2001b; Portes & Sensenbrenner, 1993). That is, transnational thinking presumes the movement of not only people but also goods and capital across borders, whether at the level of large-scale manufacturing and multinational corporations or through exchanges of remittances among families. Important for scholars of sociotechnical systems, these transnational connections are sustained by investments in communication networks and physical travel routes across borders. They are also sustained by the exchanges of material goods and local information essential to maintaining both loyalties and networks (Massey & Parrado, 1994; Portes et al., 1999; Tilly, 2007). Although commercial systems are not typically a domain of focus for HCI, contemporary reliance upon computerized networks for the exchange of goods and capital suggests a fruitful avenue for research.

Moreover, such transactions are not exclusively economic: Levitt (1998) identified “social remittances,” which include forms of information exchange oriented not only at the maintenance of interest in the local goings-on of a distant homeland but also infusions of different understandings of the world inflected through encounters with a different culture in a different land. As computational technologies play an increasing role in forming and maintaining social and economic ties, HCI researchers are well positioned to examine and design for this aspect of socio-technical exchange. Burrell (2008, 2012) discussed the shifting practices around meeting people online and running internet scams in Ghana and Nigeria and their uncertain material benefits. Burrell and Anderson (2008) described how Ghanaians living in London use the Internet to discover new opportunities and forge new connections that enrich their networks both financially and socially. Madianou and Miller (2012) showed what it takes to accomplish motherhood at a distance in transnational Filipino families, and Wang and Brown (2011) illustrated difficulties in parenting at a distance when communication infrastructures in sending countries can not support extensive connectivity. It is not simply that migrants form communities in their new national contexts: Such connectivity among migrant families and communities as well as development of new transnational connections between strangers permit forms of cultural, social, and economic exchange across borders. This offers novel opportunities for HCI investigation and design. At the same time, it is important to remember that such connectivity is not always available to all involved, or may be unevenly distributed. In addition, even when available, the ensuing cultural and socioeconomic exchange does not necessarily lead to desired or expected outcomes but can result in unexpected socio-cultural formations, as we discuss next.

Culture as Process

As people, goods, and capital move, individuals craft local cultures that fuse elements from a variety of locales: their places of origin, their new homes, and other dominant cultural elements. As an example, a family moving from China to Kenya might not only maintain their networks in China and within the Chinese community in Kenya; their “culture” will also be expressed as a mix of Chinese elements from their homeland, Kenyan aspects from their new home, and Western forms from international media and the Internet. Because the community extends to encompass distant places, actions in both places affect each other and produce what authors in anthropology and cultural theory describe as hybrid cultural forms (Anthias, 2001; Appadurai, 1996; Faist, 2000; Lindtner, Anderson, & Dourish, 2012; Rouse, 1991). Thus culture, from a transnational point of view, is a dynamic process constantly morphing and adapting to changing conditions. As Vertovec (1999) and Kivisto (2001) described it, the transnational includes “a mode of cultural reproduction variously identified as syncretism, creolization, bricolage, cultural translation, and hybridity” (Kivisto, 2001, p. 550).

In the transnational perspective, then, “culture” cannot be seen to be static or tied to a singular location. Instead, as communities come into increasing contact and entanglement, we witness a series of cultural forms, new syntheses among them, and novel practices that cross national borders and social worlds. A perspective on culture as generative, changing, and arising from multimodal practice (instead of taxonomic, fixed, or static) is increasingly familiar in HCI (Dourish & Bell, 2011; Irani, Vertesi, Dourish, Philip, & Grinter, 2010). Irani, Dourish, and Mazmanian (2010) described Indian designers' “transnational shopping” as infrastructural work that made their local practices visible and legible, both to other members of their design firm and to their Euro-American contractors. Wyche and Grinter's (2012b) study of Charismatic Pentacostalism in Brazil discusses the distinctly local flavors given to transnational cultural practices, as even codified cultural practices such as worship services are incorporated into a Brazilian national and cultural context. Finally, Lindtner et al. (2012) articulated how technologies are culturally appropriated in transnational contexts, that is, actively reframed, resisted, or reused by a multitude of players to serve translocal goals. Thus cultural and sociotechnical practices shift, realign, and incorporate new activities or interests in their transnational articulation.

Cosmopolitanism and Global Political Engagement

Early work in transnational studies was often motivated to describe how the subaltern ² and the dispossessed created their own worlds of survival that extended beyond national boundaries, hence the interest in migrant labor and other socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. However, at the same time as scholars attempted to understand “transnationalism from below” (M. P. Smith & Guarnizo, 1998), postmodern theorists such as Appadurai (1996) and Ong (1999) described transnational processes at play in privileged spaces beyond national boundaries and the control of the state. Transnational thought, they argued, is not only applicable to migrant workers or the dispossessed. Globetrotting academics and cosmopolitan businessmen, too, exhibit an insistent refusal of settled belonging, in favor of broadly defined world-identities. Here, notions such as past, culture, or nation are preexisting conditions one attempts to transcend in order to realize a new kind of transnational identity (Ong, 1999). For example, Ong examined the practices of the business elite in Southeast Asia, arguing that global capitalism engenders a kind of “flexible citizenship” where the business elites blend strategies of migration, capital accumulation, and political influence to negotiate the tension between national and personal identities through locating markets and homes in multiple locales.

Adding to this notion of transcendence is a kind of multiplicity specific to transnational identity. After all, individuals with multiple citizenships or belonging to diasporic religious, cultural, or even business communities frequently imagine themselves as part of more than one social unit. They may even engage in transnational political activities, participating in elections or local organizations in their home countries from afar (Guarnizo, Portes, & Haller, 2003). This phenomenon confronts the rise of “virtual” political engagement where well-to-do diaspora communities organize to influence homeland politics (Bernal, 2006) and cultural practice (Burrell & Anderson, 2008). For example, Saeed, Rohde, and Wulf (2011) described how transnational activist groups attending the European Social Forum deployed information and communications technologies (ICTs) to organize and enable various forms of protest at the summit meeting. The recent political conflicts in Tehran, Cairo, London, New York, and Istanbul reveal how social media play a central role in the dissemination and coordination of eyewitness reports in midst of conflict (Starbird & Palen, 2012). Further, the relationship between diaspora communities and those on the ground in conflict zones demands fuller exploration (Wulf et al., 2013). Ultimately, taking a transnational perspective can expose the linkages between local practices, global politics, and issues of power.

Communication at a Distance

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, sociologists and anthropologists cast transnationalism as a question of local communities in places distant from each other, tied by virtue of particular human connections, economic ties, technological means, and ways of navigating geopolitical conditions (M. P. Smith & Guarnizo, 1998; R. C. Smith, 1998). Such studies frequently focused attention on this cosmopolitan sentiment for places one traversed and connections to these places, chiefly as created and sustained through technologically supported flows of information and people (Castells, 2000). The term therefore shifted to mean an increase in the ability for people of certain means and aspirations to communicate, interact, and conduct business regardless of national boundaries: boundaries that were then seen as receding due to the process of globalization. Hence Kivisto's (2001) vision of transnationalism: “as a reconfiguration of the notion of place from an emphasis on the local to the translocal” (p. 550).

Such an articulation speaks directly to the interests of HCI. On one hand, it is through contemporary ICTs that we can bring into dialogue studies of migrant workers and of businessmen. Cheap and easy methods of connecting across borders have recently facilitated resurrections of lapsed relationships between families and friends that were rarely if ever maintained earlier once someone had moved across those borders (Castro & Gonzalez, 2009). Although previously informal relations most often did not participate in remittance economies due to the costs of relationship maintenance, we currently see a rise in non kin social exchanges across borders and nation-states. Pre-Internet, maintaining ties beyond the family required inordinate economic and time investments that outweighed the kinds of gains they could potentially provide. Although international phone calls ³ and especially discretionary international travel continue to remain the purview of people with economic means, of the cosmopolitan and mobile, the rise and spread of such relational economies sustained by information technology has begun to receive attention in HCI research. Shklovski (2010) showed how people living in the former Soviet states use social network sites to discover lost acquaintances at home and abroad and share reminiscences. Based on an examination of Kenyans living in Nairobi and in Atlanta, Wyche and Chetty (2013) proposed a system that supports continued connections and the ability to imagine what life is like in foreign locales among distant relatives. Communication across distance cheaply and conveniently supported by information technology is also typically used to connect global companies and research groups, leading to studies of distance and, more recently, intercultural collaboration in computer-supported distributed work (Hinds, Liu, & Lyon, 2011; Olson & Luo, 2007; Olson & Olson, 2000).

More important, however, is the reconceptualization of the familiar “local/global” divide to inquire into translocal exchanges. Whether transnational (in the sense of state border crossing) or not, the conflation of locality in the use of ICTs requires sustained analytical attention. Issues of mobility take on a sociotechnical character: now prescribed not only by visas and border guards but also by SIM cards, state regulations, service providers, and device ecologies. Collaborations are not so much “centered” in one place and distributed to peripheral satellites but rather demonstrate how action in one location affects and intersects with actions in other locations in a near-real-time manner. In this way, a transnational lens draws our attention to ongoing shifts in our interactions, collaborations, and relationships. ⁴

APPLYING THE TRANSNATIONAL LENS TO HCI

There are several key takeaways from this literature that are of critical importance for both research and design in HCI. Certainly HCI scholars already encounter field sites that bind together distinct global locations, in which information or people cross boundaries and borders and in which mobility is a central feature of the environment in question. However, we typically encounter such field sites with a frame of reference distinct from the transnational view.

A transnational lens moves us away from several limiting factors in our analysis of global interactions. Through this lens we can resist notions of singular, bounded nations, focusing instead on how those boundaries are constructed, whether through state actors or through the work of people on the ground who move across them. Such a theoretical perspective encourages scholars to look at the flows of people, goods, and capital across borders instead of using those borders to delimit the scope of inquiry (consistent with Marcus, 1995). It is not that a transnational lens assumes that there are no boundaries or borders in the world. Instead, much like studies of how new technologies can be used for structuration in existing environments (Barley, 1990), transnational studies are concerned with how those boundaries and borders are at the same time constructed and transcended by state and local actors. This way we can recast migration away from the old questions of immigration, which frequently concerned permanent resettlement, lower class status in the new adopted country, and the “melting pot” notion of assuming a new identity. Instead a transnational perspective leads us to examine mobility across social ties, social classes, and the cultural practices that construct what theorists have called “hybrid” identities.

A shift in orientation is necessary, then, to drive research and design agendas for transnational systems into new domains, to support existing and future interactions between people and their technological tools. Although the domain applications are endless, we articulate three specific reorientations to existing frameworks across HCI that we believe will benefit from transnational thinking: culture, ⁵ boundaries, and the local.

Culture: Hybridity and Imagination

Traditional approaches in the design of computational systems for intercultural interaction often conflate cultures with national borders. It is perhaps deceptively intuitive that cultures, contained by national borders, would encompass whole categories of people. Thus, a company with a long-standing collaboration between a site in China and one in the United States is assumed to have a clear and distinct dividing line between “the Chinese” and “the Americans,” with distinct cultures in both places that are likely to conform to national standards or stereotypes. This perspective might suggest that building effective technologies for these sites requires knowing about “the Chinese” and about “the Americans.” With this in mind, one might also draw on existing frameworks (e.g., see Hofstede & Bond, 1984) to distill generalizable cultural characteristics such as Chinese displaying communal and American individualistic traits, which can be incorporated into design briefs and requirement specifications.

The transnational approach suggests a different sensitivity, where the notion of “culture” is first recast as a generative process, instead of a property that certain people or places “have” (Appadurai, 1996). Further, cultures can be conceived of as hybrid and are produced and reproduced in unexpected ways and places (Bhabha, 1994). Cultural characteristics are in flux as people, goods, and capital move across borders, producing new allegiances and attachments to places and communities far away. Thinking transnationally means that culture is always a verb and not a noun.

With a transnational lens, broad categories such as “the East” and “the West” fall short. Yet this does not mean that there are no productive ways to operationalize or conceptualize culture in a research and design space. Instead, a transnational perspective suggests fertile ground in looking at how cultural divisions, distinctions, and new variants are constituted by the people and institutions involved. If new cultural forms arise from interactions, and our interactions are both transnational and technologically mediated, this suggests fruitful new ways of examining “cross-cultural” work places and practices in HCI. For example, researchers examining global companies have already begun to note the specific hybridities of practices across borders as individuals assemble in video-conferenced meetings (Jensen & Bjørn, 2012). In their studies of a global engineering firm with teams located in Denmark and India, Bjørn and Christensen (2011) described the fundamental activity of relational practice as a prerequisite of articulation work comprising people and artifacts necessary to facilitate successful interaction and collaboration in distributed settings. Such studies bring up further questions, going beyond the interpersonal nature of relational practice. How do members of these communities assert their multiple memberships, as members of the company, as citizens of their home countries, and as global citizens? How is this process helped—and hindered—by collaborative technologies?

One way of operationalizing this kind of transnational lens on the notion of culture is in the application of Benedict Anderson's (1991) imagined communities to the example of Mexican migrants by Castro and Gonzales (in this special issue). Anderson used the idea of imagination to describe how people who have never met each other come to consider themselves as part of the same social and political unit. This sense of belonging to a group that transcends local commitments can have very real and practical effects on individuals' decision making, activities and mobilities in the world. Researchers in HCI encounter similar transnational extensions of such an imagination when in their research field sites individuals identify themselves as members of transnational, global communities and collectives. At the same time, transnational scholars encourage us to consider the work that this self-identification does for the creation and maintenance of real rather than imagined communities transcending borders and locales (Levitt & Schiller, 2004; Rouse, 1991). Specifically, HCI researchers must consider how imagined communities might sustain actions at global distances and the role different forms of self-identification can play in interpersonal interaction locally and remotely. How, when, and why individuals proclaim these identities should be of interest to HCI not because they indicate a new hegemonic category of personhood that can be encoded into a system but instead for our understanding of how to support multiple, shifting, and emergent allegiances, politics, and personas in our socially aware systems.

Just as people might have strong affinities for others with whom they share beliefs, affiliations, or social positioning, they also draw strong distinctions around differences for different purposes. Individuals may find it helpful to distinguish between themselves and their families or coworkers for political or personal reasons. Pointing to “cultural differences” can help ease concerns as to why a project failed or why individuals did not report fully to their supervisors. The trouble with a reliance on “cultural differences” as an explanatory concept is that it presumes traits or characteristics internal to individuals that are static and largely unchangeable. If instead we were to consider culture as process then “cultural differences” becomes an inadequate explanation, a “black box” that conceals the socio-historical processes at work, evident in how people construct and manage boundaries.

Researchers also create categories for the ease of analysis. Although categories are unavoidable, the transnational view underscores that these categories do not come premade (Nafus, 2003) but instead that they are invoked and revoked, made and remade as part of the complexities of global information flow. Where we encounter ready-made categories whether emerging inductively from our studies or imposed from above by researchers, such as “individualistic” or “communal,” “American” or “Chinese,” the transnationally informed HCI researcher should be prepared to undo those categories to see how they are put together and to what uses they are put. Ultimately, the very use of cultural categories or markers in a field site should serve not as an ontological marker of difference but as concepts that require further investigation or articulation.

Borders: Friction, and Boundaries in-the-Making

The problem of “culture” can be reframed as a question of boundaries. After all, if “cultures” do not map easily onto national borders, then do such boundaries matter at all? Should we not worry about the geopolitical map of China or America if those within it cannot be assumed to be homogeneously “Chinese” or “American”? We argue that the transnational approach to boundary-work does not negate the importance of boundaries. Rather, it highlights them as places where the work of the transnational, with all its concomitant frictions, takes place.

This notion of boundaries conflicts with two common ones in HCI but finds resonance with a third. Certainly there are practitioners in the field who, like Manuel Castells (2000), believe in a network without boundaries across which goods, capital, and people might flow in a relatively frictionless environment. For such individuals, good design requires commitment to the total flow of information without obstacle. A second approach might be identified within HCI as common to, for example, HCI4D (HCI for Development). In such cases, differences between countries are so reified by their borders that global economic indices determine the degree to which we must treat the country we design for as “out there” (Taylor, 2011). In such a rubric, some boundaries matter more than others. Underprivileged nations fall under design for development; the BRIC countries deserve attention as rising economies; design research done in Scandinavia is assumed to be roughly equivalent to that in the United States.

For the transnational researcher, boundaries matter as there are always specific kinds of “frictions” (Tsing, 2005) concomitant with their crossing. The very complexities of border-crossing reveals the inequities of global power structures, the micropractices of evasion or patchwork, and the work of making seamful transactions appear smooth (Waldinger & Fitzgerald, 2004). In this way, boundaries as conceptualized by transnational thinking align more closely with Star and Griesemer's (1989) work on “boundary objects” in their attention to the work, the artifacts, the inconsistencies, and the practices of boundary-crossings. This work is already quite familiar to the HCI audience and is frequently used in sociotechnical systems research. The transnational lens, however, requires us to go a step further. Like “cultures,” “boundaries”—however real in their consequences—can never be simply assumed. Boundaries are constituted by people both acting to secure them, and to move across them. Thus specific ways in which boundaries are permeable, and how people make them so, matter. The transnational lens reveals the many ways in which people both make and permeate boundaries in and across their sites of work.

This presents some important implications for HCI, where we are often used to imagining how our technologies might produce the final death of distance or a conflation of spaces of work across international divides. Instead, we might think about how technologies—even connecting ones—produce global boundaries and how actors have to work hard to transcend or reproduce them. After all, with unprecedented mobility always come unprecedented conflicts. The transnational perspective looks to the creative imaginings and managings done on the ground to mitigate and produce the borderland.

For example, the concept of the Great Firewall of China is a simple shorthand that can obscure a myriad of social and technological techniques of censorship, partially automated and partially enacted through human labor and continuously altered. The limitations on Internet access in China in fact include self-censorship, carefully timed blocking and unblocking, and are continuously enacted by all involved be that national or international corporations, low-income workers, or high-profile celebrities. To design as if “the Firewall” as a single coherent and static entity existed would clearly be pointless, as would be the assumption that the limitations on Internet access are enacted solely by the Chinese government with corporations and Chinese citizens simply following rules. Instead HCI researchers might ask, how do the existing censorship techniques play a part in the construction of the Internet in China and the boundaries of the Chinese nation in cyberspace? How do people on the ground in China and abroad enact the Firewall and work with it and around it? How does persistent censorship and blocking affect their practices and how do they resist it or support it? How might the concept of “the Great Firewall” as a single and static entity be utilized in managing personal or corporate relations nationally and internationally?

We must think the same way about technologies that aim to transcend borders instead of reifying them. For example, Google promises to bring people together by bringing all the world's knowledge and information together, under the rhetoric of global connectedness and equality. Yet running the same search string in Atlanta, Bangalore, or Cologne generates three different sets of results (Vaidhyanathan, 2011). As search companies compete for providing more relevant results to their users, they strive toward greater personalization and localization. Instead of providing universal access to information then, they rely on generalized models of relevance local to the users reinforcing differential access to knowledge. In this way, even the entities we might take for granted as homogeneous and homogenizing must be challenged. Even our most connective technologies act to both reify and produce boundaries.

The Local: Relational, not Geographical

This attention toward the shape-shifting nature of borders and cultures may at first glance appear difficult for HCI scholars to put into practice, whether in experimental application or parsimonious design. We suggest that focusing attention at the local scale is one way to get at these questions, particularly with respect to transnational ties. This, we believe, is where most of the work of transnationalism is done as boundaries, borders, and meanings are always negotiated and managed through social processes. Beyond HCI's reliance on geolocalization, or even the cultural geographic notions of place or space, thinking “locally” in transnational terms requires a reframing of the concept of the “local” away from something that can be geographically pinpointed, and toward a concept that is mediated and produced by allegiances and relationships.

Ironically, in this digital age, identifying where people are physically located has become a priority for many search, communication, and social technologies, not to mention commercial ventures that have to comply with state controls and regulatory frameworks. The rise of geolocalization technologies has led to an increasing commodification of location (Shklovski et al., 2009), where GPS traces and automatic location detection through IP addresses stand in for broader contextual experiences that are not captured. But what happens when you are not defined by your GPS trace or your IP? Imagine a situation where a person may be traveling in France, and Google helpfully serves up information on her own device in French—which she does not speak. The problem here is that while the person in question might be physically located in France, her social network, heritage, workplace, and identity are bound up elsewhere. The problem compounds whether we consider migrant communities with ties to multiple locales or cosmopolitan ultramobile elite. How can we technologically support transnational practices beyond the coarse assumptions of homogeneity within state borders? How do companies or NGOs manage their distributed work teams and social, political, or economic activities in distant countries? How do migrants deploy digital techniques to maintain connections to their sending countries and families back home?

Clearly, thinking “locally” must go beyond simplifications of belonging to consider the multiple allegiances and relationships that produce transnational flows. If transnationalism can be understood through considerations of “border-spanning social formations” (Kivisto, 2001, p. 550), then we must consider individual relational work that is not limited by borders, with a focus on how individuals must work hard to cross them. Transnationalism, then, is not about abstract economic connections or supportive encounters or about using global technologies and adapting them to local flavor. Instead, we argue that it is more productive to conceive of the transnational processes and practices of maintaining social ties and allegiances that require people to manage the myriad contradictions they encounter as they are forced to reconcile the demands of their physical realities and the needs of remote connections. HCI is well positioned to investigate these phenomena that entangle human relationships with technology. It is what people do to manage and maintain transnational ties, and how they do so despite and because of the technologies they use and the borders they cross, that matters to transnational HCI.

For example, Shklovski and de Souza e Silva (2013) described how players of an international urban gaming community managed the tension between allegiances to their everyday local environments and their connection and commitment to an international gaming community. They noted that physical presence in a local environment and a connection to that environment was an important aspect of the individual conceptualization of self as it influenced the kinds of allegiances people relied upon when interacting with the distributed group of players. Yet membership in the distributed group (global community) in turn became an identity marker when interacting with local people who were outside of the gaming community. These two conflicting aspects of the self worked in tandem to create conditions where people were both locally tied and globally connected.

Many HCI and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) researchers are deeply concerned with the challenges involved in distance work as companies increasingly rely on teams of employees distributed around the globe. Yet it is tempting to focus on distance work and long-distance relationships almost at the expense of the experience of the research participants in their local physical environments. From a transnational perspective, it is clear that not only are the two connected and affect each other but people manage frictions as they navigate the boundaries between them, actively constructing membership in the local community and the remote digital affiliations as markers, identifiers, and important aspects of the self (Bjørn & Christensen, 2011; Jensen & Bjørn, 2012). That remote connections, whether social ties, economic transactions, or political sentiment, place very real demands on people and require commitments from them is not news to HCI and CSCW researchers. Transnational thinking, however, underscores that the local experience and remote connectedness interact in ways that are sometimes complimentary and sometimes a source of tensions and problems as people construct, navigate and manage boundaries between them.

Thus scholars of transnationalism frequently deploy the term “translocal” to describe how individuals who connect to each other across geographical distance manage to produce a new sense of place and belonging through their connected interaction. This emphasizes the practices and technologies that secure translocal experience: for example, mobile phones, text, chat, or massively distributed online platforms. Due to its extensive research in this domain, HCI is, again, well placed to discuss the hows and whys of global connectedness, such as how and why individuals produce and maintain both shared experiences and capacities for action across distance. After all, in the course of everyday mundane daily practice, people do not directly experience the abstractions of “society” or “culture.” Instead mundane engagements with “society” and “culture” occur through other people and places that people encounter and manage in the course of fulfilling the demands and requirements of daily life.

CONTRIBUTIONS: THIS SPECIAL ISSUE

Drawing on transnational theory and existing literature, we have laid out a discussion of how and why a transnational lens matters to HCI. The articles in this special issue put this theoretical conversation into practice, deploying a transnational orientation in three different contexts. As each article generates novel insights into particular case studies, the authors one by one demonstrate how different definitions of transnationalism can be usefully applied within and across the domain of HCI.

Luis A. Castro and Victor M. Gonzáles focus their attention on a very simple technology: a community website designed for a specific township in Mexico with a high degree of out-migration to the United States. Through online observations and interviews with individuals in the United States and in Mexico, the authors show how a website designed for a particular ethnic community can result in “new border-spanning social formations.” The website reconnects the diasporic community in the United States to a broad range of past relationships in their homeland, creating conditions for engagement and a broadening of personal, economic, and political horizons for both homeland and diasporic participants. Using Anderson's lens of the transnational imagination (1991), the authors show how the website constructs a sense of community, offering a place for individuals to manage their identity and status at home and abroad, and demands our attention in HCI as part of a community-centered approach to research and design. It thus describes and elaborates ways in which we might fruitfully apply the transnational perspective on imagination, culture, and boundary work in HCI.

Jordan Kraemer examines the use of social media, especially Facebook, in concertgoers' friendship circles in Germany. On the one hand, she deftly demonstrates how particular, American notions of “Friendship” built into the social networking platform sit awkwardly alongside Germans' more complex vocabulary for social relations and yet are incorporated into young Germans' cultural practices. In this way, she describes the processes of cultural appropriation in the context of her participants' transnational imagination. On the other hand, Kraemer more fully develops the notion of the translocal, describing how online friendship circles connect individuals to their local townships, each with a distinctive identity, and to friends and colleagues abroad. It is in this translocal context that concertgoers make sense of their concert experiences. The article, then, clearly exemplifies the reconfiguration of place from local to translocal and the generative approach to transnational technological appropriation in HCI.

Finally, Amanda Williams, Silvia Lindtner, Ken Anderson, and Paul Dourish take a design perspective on the question of transnational processes. Drawing on multisited ethnography, a method of investigating both connectivity and frictions across locales, the authors develop an analytical sensitivity of “multi-sited design.” Their approach is based on ethnographic work in Shanghai and in Bangkok within communities who displayed significant transnational connections and political engagements. This methodological response to the myriad concerns of transnational thinking not only respects but also reflects and engages fully with the complex social and political aspects of transnational fieldwork. As a result, the method “multisited design” speaks to a way forward for researchers and designers addressing questions of social and material production, and the culture and politics of collaboration and collectivity in transnational processes.

AVENUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Although selected for their exemplary use of transnational theory in the HCI domain, the articles included herein are not exhaustive. That is, they do not demonstrate the full range of applications of transnational theory to HCI. For example, applying transnationalism to CSCW, particularly in the case of transnational companies and distributed workflows, will no doubt reveal exciting opportunities in research and in design practice. As ubiquitous computing scholars increasingly engage with the “mess” in interactional practices (Dourish & Bell, 2011), we feel they may find much benefit in the transnational perspective toward the research and design of new border-spanning technological and socio-technical formations. Meanwhile, studies of transnational social media practices, already common across HCI and related fields of computer-mediated communication, must embrace transnational thought to better understand contemporary global mediascapes and their importance to political and social life. We hope that the preceding discussion and herein inspires new work and device trajectories in HCI and its associated domains of expertise.

However, as in any interdisciplinary encounter, we argue that HCI has much to offer the domain of transnational studies as well. As researchers and designers of sociotechnical systems in all their complexity, HCI as a field brings a unique attunement to the precise practices and modes of human–machine interaction that constitute and confound the global flows of information with which transnational thinking is concerned. This deep attention to and respect for how best to theorize human–computer systems offers exciting possibilities in domains in the social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, political science, history, and economics. It also offers productive opportunities to both imagine and design alternative systems in the next generation of networks and devices, ones that more clearly take into account the inequities, frictions, and possibilities inherent in transnational flows. We close this introduction with a call for greater engagement between relevant fields rather than a simple one-way flow of theoretical conceptualizations from the social sciences to HCI. Transnational processes are after all enabled, extended, challenged, and reconfigured through the use of the technologies we design and develop. We are excited to see what a fusion of transnational thinking and sociotechnical HCI expertise will bring forth.

Notes

¹Throughout this introduction, we follow the primary overlapping conceptualizations of transnationalism as laid out by Vertovec (1999) and summarized by Kivisto (2001, p. 550): “(1) as a social morphology focused on a new border spanning social formation; (2) as diasporic consciousness; (3) as a mode of cultural reproduction variously identified as syncretism, creolization, bricolage, cultural translation, and hybridity; (4) as an avenue of capital for transnational corporations, and in a smaller but significant way in the form of remittances sent by immigrants to family and friends in their homelands; (5) as a site of political engagement, both in terms of homeland politics and the politics of homeland governments vis-à-vis their émigré communities, and in terms of the expanded role of international non-governmental organizations; and (6) as a reconfiguration of the notion of place from an emphasis on the local to the translocal.

²A term typically used in postcolonial theory, “the subaltern” refers to individuals who subordinate to the global power elite, as members of nation-states who are and have been typically subjugated to and/or oppressed by colonial powers.

³Despite the proliferation of cheap international phone cards (Vertovec, 2004), phone calls still require far more investment of effort and resources than textual forms of mediated communication such as social network sites, email or instant messaging.

⁴Ours is not the only transnational time. Among the many historical studies of transnational connections, see O'Leary, Orlikowski and Yates (2002) for its relevance to the HCI community.

⁵“Culture” is one the most slippery words in the social sciences, evading standard definition. Rather than defining “culture,” per se, we hope instead to illuminate a shift in sensitivity around the word that may be productive for HCI.

Background. This special issue is the result of several workshops and interactions at related conferences. In particular, “Transnational HCI: Humans, Computers, and Interactions in Transnational Contexts” run by Janet Vertesi, Silvia Lindtner, and Irina Shklovski at CHI 2011 in Vancouver, British Columbia; and “Transnational Times: Locality, Globality and Mobility in Technology Design and Use,” run by Irina Shklovski, Silvia Lindtner, Janet Vertesi, and Paul Dourish at Ubicomp 2010 in Copenhagen, Denmark. We are grateful to all of the participants at these workshops and beyond for their participation in elucidating the many contributions and connections between transnational theory and HCI research and practice.

Acknowledgments. We express our deepest thanks to Lucy Suchman for her senior editorial support and mentoring. We also thank Paul Dourish for his continued collaboration, Tom Moran and Patricia Sheehan for their editorial assistance, Rebecca Grinter for her comments on an earlier draft, and the authors and anonymous reviewers for their energies and insights.

Support. NSF SOCS Grant 0968616; NSF HCC Small 0917401.