"What is Safety?": Building Bridges Across Approaches to Digital Risks and Harms

Ashley Marie Walker, Michael Ann DeVito, Karla Badillo-Urquiola, Rosanna Bellini, Stevie Chancellor, Jessica L. Feuston, Kathryn Henne, Patrick Gage Kelley, Shalaleh Rismani, Renee Shelby, Renwen Zhang

Abstract: Safety is a frequently discussed and increasingly important topic in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and one historically wellrepresented at CSCW [30]. However, CSCW is a diverse community that engages multiple fields and perspectives; therefore, the community employs multiple, sometimes contradictory, definitions of technologically-mediated 'safety' both at the conference and in the field overall. While different concepts of safety may have clear meaning within a computing subfield, the overall importance of safety as a topic to HCI and the need to communicate clearly across subfields and to other disciplines underscores the importance of exploring how differing approaches to defining and operationalizing safety compare and potentially build on/communicate with each other. Moreover, by comparing, contrasting, and synthesizing CSCW's multiple approaches to safety, we can better understand and account for safety as a whole. A core goal of this workshop is to make progress towards a collective understanding of safety. Without clarity on such an important concept, there will be wasted efforts in intervention design for mitigating harms for impacted users and communities, and we squander the potential for effective, academic collaboration. In this workshop, we take the first step towards initiating a conversation between different HCI perspectives on safety and mapping out the multitude of different goals, aspirations, and working definitions of what academic research on and about safety looks like.