Restoration work: responding to everyday challenges of HIV outreach

Abstract

There has been a growing commitment across the fields of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) towards investigating the design and deployment of technologies in the context of complex healthcare ecologies. We present a qualitative inquiry of one such context, as we examine the outreach practices and everyday challenges of workers at a community-based organization in Gujarat (India) that works with People Living with the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus(PLHIV). Drawing on Yosso's framework of community cultural wealth-apt for such intersectional settings-and the lens of articulation work, we describe how the workers at Vikas build and strengthen varied forms of capital to restore "old normals," or what life was like for their PLHIV clients prior to diagnoses. Finally, we propose that attention to this nature of restoration work, and the workers' engagement with diverse forms of community cultural wealth, allows us to reflect on how technologies might (or might not) be designed to impact social and affective aspects of health.