Maintaining Computers and Maintaining Computer Science

Abstract

Every technical intervention is surrounded by a rich set of social relations which both maintain and are themselves maintained by the technical artifacts involved. My dissertation explores the social relations and technical cultures maintained by our work on computing for “good” or for “development” or for “impact” using three cases. First, a community networking collective in Argentina; second, an international collaboration to manage vaccine cold chain equipment; third, a UW CSE capstone course. I detail how we use seemingly mundane computing artifacts to stabilize and contest specific social structures, including the computer science discipline itself. Finally, I argue that the generic formulation of “CS4Good” is inadequate to the challenges facing computer science today, and that instead computer science needs to embrace sociotechnical analysis with a historicist sensibility.