Designing the “good citizen” through Latina identity in USCIS’s virtual assistant “Emma”

ABSTRACT

Virtual assistants are increasingly integrated as “user-friendly” interfaces for e-government services. This research investigates the case study of the virtual assistant, “Emma,” that is integrated into the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website. We conduct an interface analysis of Emma, along with the USCIS website, and related promotional materials, to explore the cultural affordances of Latina identity as a strategic design for this virtual assistant. We argue that the Emma interface makes normative claims about citizenship and inclusion in an attempt to “hail” Latinx users as ideal citizens. We find that the “ideal” citizen is defined through the Emma interface as an assimilated citizen-consumer that engages with digital technologies in ways that produce them as informationally “legible” to the state.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• immigration
• Latinas
• e-government
• virtual assistants

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the editors and reviewers for their generous feedback and helpful guidance in support of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. At the time this article was originally written in 2017, Emma was represented by an image that depicted a photographic headshot of an actual Latina woman (Figure 1). Since that time, she has been replaced by a digital avatar that is more Anglo in appearance. This update occurred in mid-2018, though the exact date of this design change is unknown to the authors. In-depth analysis of the updated Anglo Emma is outside of the scope of this article, though this design certainly warrants further exploration in terms of how identity is deployed in the interface.

2. Next IT was acquired by Verint in December 2017.

3. The sudden replacement of the original Latina Emma virtual assistant with the new, Anglo version in 2018 underscores the liminal position of the Latina virtual assistant. The authors likened this disappearance to a kind of virtual deportation, with Emma’s own citizenship status subject to change in accordance to the state’s agenda.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melissa Villa-Nicholas

Melissa Villa-Nicholas is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Rhode Island, USA. She researches the intersections and co-constructions of race, gender, sexuality and information communication technologies (ICTs), the information and technology histories of Latina/os, and intersectional approaches to Library and Information Studies. E-mail: [email protected]

Miriam E. Sweeney

Miriam E. Sweeney is an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Studies and the University of Alabama, USA. She conducts critical cultural research in information and digital media studies, particularly focused aspects of race and gender in the design, use, and meaning of: virtual assistant technologies; emoji; and anthropomorphized interfaces. E-mail: [email protected]