research-article

Health promotion as activism: building community capacity to effect social change

Authors:

Vasudhara Kantroo,

Miguel Osornio,

Rebecca GrinterAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 99 - 108

https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2207692

Published: 05 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

As HCI researchers have designed tools to promote wellness, disease has often been approached as a general problem. In contrast, public health research argues for an activist approach focused on how certain groups disproportionately experience disease and eliminating these disparities. Taking this activist stance, we examine how technology can reduce health inequalities by disrupting power relationships and helping communities pursue social change. We discuss our tool, Community Mosaic (CM), which allows individuals to share their healthy eating ideas with one another as a means of advocating behavior change. Our results characterize how CM helped facilitate activism (i.e., collective efforts to counter local challenges to healthy living) and shift users' attitudes regarding their role as advocates for health. We contribute to the field of HCI by using our findings to present a set of recommendations for future research focused on designing and evaluating health promotion tools using an activist lens.

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Index Terms

Health promotion as activism: building community capacity to effect social change
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 2012

3276 pages

ISBN:9781450310154

DOI:10.1145/2207676

General Chair:
Joseph A. Konstan
University of Minnesota
,
Program Chairs:
Ed H. Chi
Google
,
Kristina Höök
Mobile Life at KTH

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 05 May 2012

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3678884.3681832
Gautam AGandhi KSendejo J(2024)Enhancing Reentry Support Programs Through Digital Literacy IntegrationProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660730(2882-2896)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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