Jennifer Pierre
Jennifer Pierre, Ph.D., is a user experience and human-computer interaction researcher with expertise in social media, games, critical data studies, and social informatics. Her research explores how people, especially underrepresented and minoritized groups, use various forms of media and data to form and maintain communities. She received her doctorate from the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, and holds an MLIS from the same department. Jennifer is currently working as a User Experience Researcher at YouTube, conducting research on viewer-creator relationships and communities. Her work can be found in several top journals and conferences, including CHI, HICSS, PACMHCI CSCW, and Big Data & Society, and has been recognized by ACM SIGCHI, the Ford Foundation, and the Bouchet Honor Society. In addition to and intersected with her research and industry work, Jennifer has fueled her passion for inclusion in STEM, higher education, and tech as a member and leader of several diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
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Getting Ourselves Together: Data-centered participatory design research & epistemic burden
Roderic Crooks
Morgan Currie
Britt Paris
Irene Pasquetto
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing, CHI 2021 (2021)
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Data-centered participatory design research projects—wherein researchers collaborate with community members for the purpose of gathering, generating, or communicating data about the community or their causes—can place epistemic burdens on minoritized or racialized groups, even in projects focused on social justice outcomes. Analysis of epistemic burden encourages researchers to rethink the purpose and value of data in community organizing and activism more generally. This paper describes three varieties of epistemic burden drawn from two case studies based on the authors’ previous work with anti-police brutality community organizations. The authors conclude with a discussion of ways to alleviate and avoid these issues through a series of questions about participatory research design. Ultimately, we call for a reorientation of knowledge production away from putative design solutions to community problems and toward a more robust interrogation of the power dynamics of research itself.
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Chats over spats: Exploring social media use for mentorship in youth development programs
Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction, 3, CSCW (2019)
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This paper presents a unique finding from a larger research project exploring social media use for social support among youth development program participants in Lafayette, IN. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews conducted with Boys and Girls Club members ages 9-15, youth revealed varied uses of social media to sustain unexpected cross-age friendships. These friendships were perceived as integral sources of social support, and members described them to be some of the most significant in their lives at the time of their interviews. This finding raises important questions about the significant role social media may play in the maintenance of such cross-age relationships and mentorships, considering the absence of consistent face-to-face contact during the school day. Ultimately, participation in youth development programs in combination with social media use fosters these mentorships and encourages maturity and stability among these youth, which validates these unique friendships as important sources of social support. This finding offers implications for integrating digital and social media into youth development spaces, as well as for informing social and digital media designers of this particular use case.
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