SEALab Research Pillars

We Are About Qualitative Context

This lab’s core purpose is to leverage a variety of qualitative, design, and critical methods to examine the entire relationship between people and systems. We frequently engage in community-based and participatory work. We also develop novel qualitative methods to better explore complex problems, and partner with collaborators for mixed methods work.

We Take a Transfeminist Approach

Our approach is guided by transfeminist principles, in conversation with other feminist philosophies. As such, we are deeply concerned with self-determination and promoting agency through technology, and take a pro-inclusion, anti-separatist stance.

We Prioritize At-Risk Communities

Working with at-risk and marginalized communities allows us to see the most urgent points of friction and harm in the human-system relationship and close these specific gaps in understanding while building knowledge of how to address more general problems.

We Do Member Research

Whenever possible, we work as member-researchers, studying and collaborating with communities our researchers are part of and doing work on problems we experience ourselves.

We Are Trauma-Informed

We recognize that the harms imposed by social technology frequently induce or exacerbate trauma, and frequently engage in work that directly addresses these traumatic effects. As such, we take trauma-informed computing principles into account in all our research, especially our methods.