TY - GEN
T1 - Witchcraft and HCI
T2 - 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2019
AU - Sultana, Sharifa
AU - Ahmed, Syed Ishtiaque
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2019/5/2
Y1 - 2019/5/2
N2 - While Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on health and well-being is increasingly becoming more aware and inclusive of its social and political dimensions, spiritual practices are still largely overlooked there. For a large number of people around the world, especially in the global south, witchcraft, sorcery, and other occult practices are the primary means of achieving health, wealth, satisfaction, and happiness. Building on an eight-month long ethnography in six villages in Jessore, Bangladesh, this paper explores the knowledge, materials, and politics involved in the local witchcraft practices there. By drawing from a rich body of anthropological work on witchcraft, this paper discusses how those findings contribute to the broader issues in HCI around morality, modernity, and postcolonial computing. This paper concludes by recommending ways for smooth integration of traditional occult practices with HCI through design and policy. We argue for occult practices as an under-appreciated site for HCI to learn how to combat ideological hegemony.
AB - While Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on health and well-being is increasingly becoming more aware and inclusive of its social and political dimensions, spiritual practices are still largely overlooked there. For a large number of people around the world, especially in the global south, witchcraft, sorcery, and other occult practices are the primary means of achieving health, wealth, satisfaction, and happiness. Building on an eight-month long ethnography in six villages in Jessore, Bangladesh, this paper explores the knowledge, materials, and politics involved in the local witchcraft practices there. By drawing from a rich body of anthropological work on witchcraft, this paper discusses how those findings contribute to the broader issues in HCI around morality, modernity, and postcolonial computing. This paper concludes by recommending ways for smooth integration of traditional occult practices with HCI through design and policy. We argue for occult practices as an under-appreciated site for HCI to learn how to combat ideological hegemony.
KW - Faith
KW - ICTD
KW - Postcolonial
KW - Rural
KW - Wellbeing
KW - Witchcraft
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85067593182&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85067593182&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3290605.3300586
DO - 10.1145/3290605.3300586
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85067593182
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
BT - CHI 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 4 May 2019 through 9 May 2019
ER -