Contestation as interaction: Queer and rural approaches to natural language processing

Natural language processing (NLP) systems increasingly shape the boundaries of legibility, authority, and participation in everyday life. For Queer and rural communities, these systems can impose forms of misrecognition, surveillance, and erasure, especially when opting out is no longer viable. This research approaches NLP as a site of crisis not to be resolved, but to be contested. Drawing on feminist and queer design traditions, it introduces contestation as interaction: a relational, everyday practice of resisting, reconfiguring, or refusing NLP systems. Using materially grounded and participatory method this project surfaces situated tactics of opacity, ambiguity, and misfit. Rather than designing for optimisation or compliance, the work invites a shift toward computing with crisis, supporting community-led modes of engagement that foreground relationality, refusal, and resistance.