Sociotechnical Equity & Agency Lab @ Northeastern University

“A Blocklist is a Boundary”: How Community Defense Clashes with Mutual Aid on the Fediverse We’d like to tell you a story to start. Two Fediverse instances, alice.social and bob.lgbt, once enjoyed strong local and shared cultures…

Blocklists: Good? Bad? It's a bit more complicated than that - SEALab PhD Candidate @evmelder.bsky.social looks at how blocklists in the fediverse serve as key community boundaries, but also put connection at risk in their current implementations: medium.com/acm-cscw/a-b...

Research that hits home: Erika Melder’s community-based push for user-friendly social media - Khoury College of Computer Sciences Social media platforms often want to be as big as possible, and in as many ways as possible. But one Khoury PhD student is finding that many communities want just the opposite, both for camaraderie an...

Some lovely coverage of senior @nusealab.bsky.social doctoral candidate @erikavmelder.bsky.social's research with our ARC techniques, second in a series on the kind of epistemically just research approaches I'm always talking about on here! www.khoury.northeastern.edu/research-tha...

Research that hits home: Michael Ann DeVito and the case for a more just research approach - Khoury College of Computer Sciences As director of the SEALab, Khoury–CAMD professor Michael Ann DeVito is advancing a research vision based on epistemic justice, and is elevating the communities she studies in the process.

They wrote a story about me and the rest of @nusealab.bsky.social and the work we're doing around epistemic justice in social computing! It's first in a series, and focuses mostly on my own work and the lab's approach. Good to see the continued support. www.khoury.northeastern.edu/research-tha...

NEW ARTICLE: It's not that LLMs are outright transphobic in their responses - in fact, they try to push against the basic stuff - but there's subtle anti-trans sentiment embedded throughout LLM responses that it's hard to see if you're not trans yourself. We can do better! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Why Can't Black Women Just Be?: Black Femme Content Creators Navigating Algorithmic Monoliths | Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.

2) Black women, femmes, and non-binary content creators can find joy through creative work - @giannawilliams.bsky.social, Natalie Chen, @michaelann.bsky.social & @alexandrato.bsky.social explore how algorithmic monoliths act to constrain that joy and how folks fight back dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Moving Towards Epistemic Autonomy: A Paradigm Shift for Centering Participant Knowledge | Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

We have two new papers at #chi2025, both of which got Honorable Mentions!

1) Epistemic Autonomy is a key priority for ethical, effective research with marginalized populations - @leahajmani.bsky.social @taliabhatt.itch.io and @michaelann.bsky.social write on why and how dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Our paper won an Honorable Mention at #chi2025! We call for CHI researchers to fundamentally shift away from our status quo of undermining the epistemic authority of marginalized users @michaelann.bsky.social @taliabhatt.itch.io @nusealab.bsky.social
programs.sigchi.org/chi/2025/pro...

Moving Towards Epistemic Autonomy: A Paradigm Shift for Centering Participant Knowledge Justice, epistemology, and marginalization are rich areas of study in HCI. And yet, we repeatedly find platforms and algorithms that push communities further into the margins. In this paper, we propos...

Exciting new #CHI25 preprint: “Moving Towards Epistemic Autonomy: A Paradigm Shift for Centering Participant Knowledge” with stories & guidance on how to make HCI research more epistemically just from Leah Ajmani, @taliabhatt.itch.io and lab director @michaelann.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2501.14648

Hi Bluesky! Are you a) transfeminine and b) someone who’s experienced an attack in an online community that isolated you from that community? If so, I would love to speak to you; @michaelann.bsky.social and I are working on a project to better understand these attacks.

For more interesting research and commentary around sociotechnical systems, agency, and tech for marginalized communities, consider following SEALab's research team members and some of our collaborators/friends of the lab: go.bsky.app/Qebmwfu

On the Need for a Transfeminist Empiricism to Combat Epistemic Injustice By Dr. Michael Ann DeVito, Northeastern University

I love this piece I wrote for
@enkiducoin.bsky.social's blog a while back, and there's exciting news on the horizon around it. I have some very, very clever students around me who tend to take my rants and turn them into full CS research papers... thirdsexedinsurrection.substack.com/p/on-the-nee...