Computing technologies can function both as instruments for public health management and mechanisms for political control. This study investigates the deployment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Iran's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular emphasis on Kurdish communities in Kermanshah province, a historically marginalized group. Through 22 interviews, we explore how state-controlled digital infrastructures influenced citizen engagement with pandemic-related ICT services. Although government-developed tracing applications, information platforms, and digital health services were ostensibly designed to manage the crisis, they also facilitated mass surveillance, imposed restrictions on mobility, and suppressed alternative narratives. A crisis of trust prompted citizens to adopt alternative strategies, such as encrypted messaging, informal information networks, and social media. By illustrating how trust, mistrust, and digital infrastructures are co-constructed in crisis contexts, this paper contributes to critical computing research by raising significant questions about governance, design, and ethics during times of uncertainty.

It is beyond doubt that technological change, shifts in the occupational structure, the riseof post-Fordist flexible specialisation and of new forms of professional and entrepreneurialworking have contributed significantly to the rise of ‘mobile’ or ‘nomadic’ working. Thesight of people on the laptops on trains and in airports, the rise of ‘serviced office’ provision,home working, and so on, all testify to this. The Covid epidemic, ironically, has brought theseissues into sharp relief. Work, where and how it is done, who legislates and controls it and thehuge importance of spatiality and temporality have been brought to our attention in a big way.Much of what has happened has made us, as members of the sub-category of academic workers and as workers tout court, confront a number of otherwise taken-for-granted issues aroundwhere and how we do our work. The book is based on a five year collaborative project andrelies on a primarily qualitative approach, utilising interview data to elaborate on, and contribute to, much of the theoretical debate about the role of mobility in contemporary working life.

This paper documents some details and some examples of the influence of ethnomethodological work in the fieldwork tradition associated with European CSCW; in particular what has been termed 'ethnomethodologically informed ethnography'. In so doing, we do not wish to downplay other perspectival and methodological contributions but to simply suggest that much of the ethnomethodological work that was done in the UK during the early development of CSCW had a distinctive character and made significant contributions to the study of complex organizational environments for design-related purposes that arguably reinvigorated the European fieldwork tradition. The distinctiveness we speak of in 'ethnomethodologically informed ethnography' had to do with what it owed to Wittgenstein and Winch as much as Garfinkel and Sacks, was rooted in a contempt for methodological fetishism, and emphasized the centrality of reasoning or rationale in the conduct of working and, more generally, social life. This focus and approach drew heavily on the ethnographic work of the likes of John Hughes in Lancaster, Wes Sharrock in Manchester, Bob Anderson at Xerox in Cambridge, and Christian Heath in King's, London, where attention was focused on the actual 'doing' of work as opposed to work in some idealised form - and it is this that we suggest has become important to design and designers of various kinds and in various domains.

This chapter emphasizes the role of ethnography for design-related matters. The issue of the relevance and purpose of ethnography is critical to understanding its role in human-computer interaction (HCI). The origins of ethnography lie in a challenge to conventional theoretical thinking about other cultures, of which the best known example is probably Sir James Fraser's, The Golden Bough. Various perspectives have been brought to bear on the ethnographic project in the HCI context, of which the best known are probably grounded theory, activity theory, distributed cognition, interactional analysis, and ethnomethodological "studies of work". An extension of the ethnographic project in HCI has been into behaviors with mobile technology, and the use of public spaces. There is a longstanding debate about the degree to which doing ethnography relies on specific or specialized skills. The ethnographic research is directed toward some kind of research objective.