Seam Work and Simulacra of Societal Impact in Networking Research: A Critical Technical Practice Approach

This paper explores how conceptions of societal impact are produced and performed during academic computer science research, by leveraging critical technical practice while building a digital agriculture networking platform. Our findings reveal how everyday practices of envisioning and building infrastructure require working across disciplinary and institutional seams, leading us as computer scientists to continuously reconceptualize the intended societal impact. By self-reflectively analyzing how we accrue resources for projects, produce research systems, write about them, and maintain alignments with stakeholders, we demonstrate that this seam work produces shifting simulacra of societal impact around which the system’s success is narrated. HCI researchers frequently suggest that technical systems’ impact could be improved by motivating computer scientists to consider impact in system-building. Our findings show that institutional and disciplinary structures significantly shape how computer scientists can enact societal impact in their work. This work suggests opportunities for structural interventions to shape the impact of computing systems.