Schlesinger et al. [1] studied the core of most HCI studies - the user and have tried to explore the lines that separate users from each other - their gender, race and class. They claim that it becomes incredibly complicated to study identities since they may affect the context in different ways. Often researchers oversee the relevance of some of the other, especially when their primary focus is on one type of identity. The paper ends in recommendations highlighting the importance of disclosing context, the author’s stance, inclusion or omission of demographic information etc.
Based on Leslie McCall’s “The Complexity of Intersectionality”, the authors have discussed Anticategorical methods, Intercategorical methods and formed by clubbing the two, the Intracategorical techniques, to explain the concept of intersectionality in HCI. However, they didn’t work with this later in the paper. The topic was touched upon and forgotten.
The authors aimed to study the representation of identity by doing an extensive literature review. Their research methodology included an elaborate survey-based approach to select papers from CHI proceedings from the beginning of CHI conferences till 2016, when the research was conducted. They ran keyword searches using 50 words describing gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, or class to inform their research. Post paper collection, they analysed the papers thematically to observe trends. Their qualitative criteria was tailored to question who, how, why, what questions regarding the user, the author and their positionality. Their categorisation was in three parts - where identity was disclosed, and demographic and contextual data, classification focus, and simply acknowledged in related work or future work.
During the collection of papers for the corpus, the location wasn’t limited or decided. The results were primarily US-centric, considering the west overshadows the east in HCI research. However, since the search was generic, limiting the keywords to specific social structures like the ones adopted reduced the results. Similar to the caste system in India, there would be other social structures that could have added value to the search for types of identity. Moreover, the authors could look for the basis of discrimination studied by researchers across the globe, like language, ageism and even ableism. Doing the same may have been fruitful since they all contribute to a person’s identity.
The authors have collected papers published from 1982 to 2016. Although there were fewer papers from the first few years, there may have been trends in how the identity of users was seen two decades ago and now.
The paper talks about the lack of researches where the focus is on men, and to conclude, states, “This gives the impression that gender matters for women and women alone, which warrants reflection”. This authors’ ideology is flawed for two reasons - firstly, they considered only the binary genders in this claim, despite two of them having undergone safe space training. Second and more importantly, the reason why women are studied more because, more often, they are the oppressed population in the patriarchal society, making them more interesting research subjects or users. The industry is more focused on men and their requirements.
The title of the paper is not justified since it gives the impression that the authors will discuss in detail the intersectionality of aspects of the identity of a user. The paper works with finding papers that discuss different forms of identity rather than discourse over how they overlap and affect a person, the research or the overall impression of communities. The research is not novel. Schlesinger et al. have maintained a corpus of existing work and commented on the same. The flow of content was easy to follow, the structure of the paper was systematic.
The paper’s central idea is attractive, especially since disclosure of identity is now more commonly spoken of and discussed. The direction initially adopted in the research methodology is promising. However, the overall methodology and the paper do not do justice to the area of research, and there needs to be more work done to actually discuss the engagement of users through identity. The paper does not make any significant contribution to the HCI community since it seems to state the obvious while concluding while expressing the need for self-disclosure. The authors acknowledge the “publish or perish” culture taking over HCI research. This paper makes it seem like the authors fell prey to this culture.
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