Conference Presentations
Research Associate Sarah Gilbert will co-deliver the paper “Whose Knowledge is Valued?: Epistemic Injustice in CSCW Applications” at the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing conference. While policies around knowledge are essential for targeting misinformation, they are value-laden; in choosing how to present information, the authors undermine non-traditional—often non-Western—ways of knowing. In their paper, they articulate how epistemic injustice in sociotechnical applications leads to material harm.
Last week, Associate Professor Dawn Schrader presented three papers and participated in a plenary panel at the Association for Moral Education conference. The papers are: “Ensuring Transparency and Responsibility in AI Algorithms in Everyday Life” (with D. Akkiraju, undergraduate student in Information Science), “Re-Examining the Good Life: Social Media Influences in a Technological Era” (with Nia Stewart, recent undergraduate student in Information Science), and “Advancing AI Technologies’ Use in Education: Implications for Student Moral and Epistemic Development, Theory, and Educational Practice.” The Plenary Session, “The Future of The Association for Moral Education,” featured Dawn and colleagues from across the world. Dawn is the president of the Association for Moral Education.
Faculty and graduate students in Associate Professor Andrea Stevenson Won’s Virtual Embodiment Lab had a strong showing at the recent International ACM SIGACCESS Conference, including two collaborative papers and one collaborative poster. The two papers were “An AI Guide to Enhance Accessibility of Social Virtual Reality for Blind People” and “Accessible Nonverbal Cues to Support Conversations in VR for Blind and Low Vision People.” The poster was “Exploring the Accessibility of Social Virtual Reality for People with ADHD and Autism: Preliminary Insights.” These are in addition to two papers delivered by grad student Ria Gualano, featured in the October 23, 2024, COMM Updates.
Events
REMINDER: Join us for COMMColloquium Monday, November 4, at 1:30 pm in 160 Mann Library Building. Postdoctoral Associate Avriel Epps will present “Algorithms, Abolition, and African American Youth Development: Theorizing and Evaluating the Impacts of Socio-Algorithmic Systems on Black Youth in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter.” The colloquium is followed by a reception, located in The Hub of the Department of Communication.
Lectures
On November 11, 2024, Associate Professor Neil Lewis, Jr., will present the invited lecture “What We Learn from Where We Live: How Contemporary Segregation Affects Our Minds” at the University of Michigan’s Research Center for Group Dynamics. This semester, the Research Center for Group Dynamics Seminar Series—the longest running seminar series in the social sciences—is exploring the question “what makes systemic racism systemic. Neil will share findings from his program of research that has spent the past decade examining how patterns of segregation and other forms of social stratification seep into the mind and affect how people perceive and make meaning of the world around them. He will also discuss the consequences of those processes for people’s judgments, motivations, and decisions, and how those decisions lead to the maintenance or reduction of inequality in multiple domains of society.
Assistant Professor Wunpini Mohammed will participate in the invited panel “Transnational Feminist Praxis and Solidarity: Crisis and Social Media” at the Harriet Tubman Institute at York University, Toronto, Canada. She will speak on social movements, African feminisms, and digital media.
Professor Katherine Sender will deliver an invited lecture at the University of Michigan’s Department of Communication and Media entitled “The Queer Vanguard: How Television Streaming Platforms Promoted Intersectional LGBTQ+ Content to Establish their Brands.” The “queer vanguard” theorizes how Netflix, Prime, and other television streaming platforms articulated intersectional lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and nonbinary (LGBTQ+) representations with attributes of narrative complexity, hip edginess, prestige programming, and authenticity in their pursuit of subscribers. Streamers reworked branding strategies innovated in the 1980s and 1990s by cable and broadcast channels that produced Black-cast shows, and by cable channels in the early twenty-first century that centered gay and lesbian characters. Streamers advanced the queer vanguard to attract subscribers to their original content, develop distinctive libraries, sustain subscribers’ attention, and expand their markets. As the streaming wars have ensued, digital distributors are returning to traditional television practices of appealing to mass audiences with ad-supported content that threaten the future of the complex, intersectional LGBTQ+ narratives that have been central to “Peak TV.”
Media
Graduate student Bya Rodrigues served as a producer for the documentary Farm Grrrl Folk Punk which has been selected for the Sound Unseen: Music + Film Festival. Motherwort, the band featured in the documentary, will be sharing a sneak peek during their show at Angry Mom Records on November 2, 2024, at 8:00 p.m. The film originated in the Rural Humanities Seminar taught by the Department of Performing and Media Arts Professor Austin Bunn.
Publications
Associate Professor Brooke Duffy et al. published “Global Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production” in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, October 2024. Research on platforms and cultural production is dominated by studies that take the Anglo-American world and Northwestern Europe as their main points of reference. Central concepts in the field, consequently, bear the imprint of Western institutions, cultural practices, and ideals. Critically responding to this state of affairs, this opening essay of the special issue on Global Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production, consisting of 20 articles, aims to: 1) challenge universalism, 2) provincialize the U.S., and 3) multiply our frames of reference.
Graduate student Ria Gualano co-published articles in the Proceedings of ASSETS '24: The 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility: “’I Try to Represent Myself as I Am’: Self-Presentation Preferences of People with Invisible Disabilities through Embodied Social VR Avatars” and “The Looking-Glass Avatar: Representing Chronic Pain through Social Virtual Reality Avatar Movement.” In the first paper, the authors examined how and whether people with invisible disabilities (e.g., ADHD, dyslexia, chronic conditions) want to represent their disabilities through avatars in social VR worlds. Through an interview study, they found that some participants wished to use VR’s embodied affordances, such as facial expressions and body language, to dynamically represent their energy level or willingness to engage with others, while others preferred not to disclose their disability identity in any context. The paper defines a binary framework for embodied invisible disability expression (public and private) and discusses three disclosure patterns (Activists, Non-Disclosers, and Situational Disclosers) to inform the design of future inclusive VR experiences. In the second, the authors explore whether pain associated with chronic pain conditions (e.g., arthritis, Crohn’s disease, lupus) is also linked to identity and representation preferences through an interview study with avatar customization and headset immersion components. Participants incorporated social norms, cultural considerations, and internalized self-stigma into their decision-making about pain disclosure and representation in different contexts. Aligning with previous work on self-presence and embodiment, in order to avoid discomfort, most participants wanted to avoid experiences where their avatar moved in ways that they did not, or could not, move in the physical world (i.e., jumping, bending over from the spine), and two participants wanted to represent their personal use of clothing and fashion as accommodation in the physical world.
