Tawanna R. Dillahunt's research while affiliated with University of Michigan and other places

Publications (60)

Article
Small businesses are being encouraged to use digital technologies more than ever before. However, the greater emphasis on technology adoption puts underserved minority business owners (those who traditionally have faced barriers in accessing credit, capital and other resources) at greater risk of being left behind. We take an assets-based approach...
Article
Social media offers an alternative source for entrepreneurs to expand their social networks and obtain relevant resources to support their ambitions. Aspiring entrepreneurs with limited access to resources and social networks might rely more on the opportunities that social media tools offer. Aspiring entrepreneurs navigate social media to realize...
Article
Trust is key to community commerce or peer-to-peer e-commerce where transactions happen within local communities. Trust is especially vital among migrants who move to new countries and need time to develop trust after arrival. To understand migrants' trust development in community commerce and its potential and challenges for supporting their trans...
Article
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Objectives: There is growing attention to health equity in health informatics research. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive framework outlining critical considerations for health informatics research with marginalized groups. Methods: Literature review and experiences from nine equity-focused health informatics conducted in the United Sta...
Article
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Background: The task complexity involved in connecting to telehealth video visits may disproportionately impact healthcare access for populations already experiencing inequities. Human intermediaries can be a strategy for addressing healthcare access disparities by acting as "technology helpers" in reducing the cognitive load demands required to l...
Article
During the COVID-19 global health crisis, institutions, policymakers, and academics alike have called for practicing resilience to overcome its ongoing disruptions. This paper contributes a comparative study of the job search experiences of working-class and upper-middle-class job seekers, particularly in relation to their resilience practices duri...
Article
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Technology integration in the workplace context has led to substantial growth in high- versus low-skilled jobs, and thus, further disparities between workers and those who were already unemployed. Technology use is also being used more frequently in the job search process, which could further lead to disparities, especially for job seekers experien...
Conference Paper
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Millions of Americans forego medical care due to a lack of non-emergency transportation, particularly minorities, older adults, and those who have disabilities or chronic conditions. Our study investigates the potential for using timebanks—community-based voluntary services that encourage exchanges of services for “time dollars” rather than money—i...
Article
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Rapid changes in technology are expected to limit the availability of decent work for millions of people worldwide. This particularly disadvantages socially and economically marginalized job seekers who are already being pushed into lower-wage precarious work with increasing levels of job insecurity. While the number of employment support tools tha...
Article
Today, teachers have been increasingly relying on data-driven technologies to track and monitor student behavior data for classroom management. Drawing insights from interviews with 20 K - 8 teachers, in this paper we unpack how teachers enacted both care and control through their data work in collecting, interpreting, and using student behavior da...
Conference Paper
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The rise of ridesharing platforms has transformed traditional transportation, making it more accessible for getting to work and accessing grocery stores and healthcare providers, which are essential to physical and mental well-being. However, such technologies are not available everywhere. Additionally, there is a scarcity of HCI work that investig...
Article
Social media platforms provide access to informational and emotional resources that can enable low-income populations to further their socioeconomic mobility and cope with unexpected life demands. However, lack of both interpersonal trust and a sense of shared identity often prevent low-income individuals from eliciting resources from the diverse n...
Article
Seeking to improve systemic fairness in the computing realm.
Poster
Full-text available
Transportation has evolved throughout the past several years through developments in HCI and sociotechnical systems. However, there has been a lack of studies examining transportation in rural areas for vulnerable populations. Our study focuses on the transportation facilitators and barriers faced by people living with HIV in rural areas. We were i...
Preprint
Transparency in process and its reporting is paramount for establishing the rigor of qualitative studies. However, the CHI conference receives submissions with varying levels of transparency and oftentimes, papers that are more transparent can be inadvertently subjected to more scrutiny in the review process, raising issues of fairness. In this pan...
Conference Paper
This work examined the survey distribution methods used in a past study. The goal was to identify the most effective methods to reach marginalized voices to participate in technological research and thus, create more inclusive technologies. Initial analyses identified in-person onsite recruitment as one of the better methods for reaching hard-to-re...
Article
About 20% of the U.S. unemployed population has been out of the labor force for more than 6 months. The rise of the gig economy has changed the landscape of nontraditional employment opportunities for these predominantly low-skilled long-term unemployed workers. This particular type of on-demand work can be used to fill unemployment gaps and offers...
Article
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Companies providing ridesourcing, or the use of mobile phone apps to request rides from drivers of privately-owned vehicles, have expanded rapidly in many cities in recent years. To shed light on this phenomenon, this paper reports an exploratory study of ridesourcing trip patterns and mode choice in Washtenaw County, Michigan, USA, which obtained...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This work provides a preliminary understanding of how transgender women and non-binary people of color experience violence and manage safety, and what opportunities exist for HCI to support the safety needs of this community. We conducted nine interviews to understand how participants practice safety and what role technology played, if any, in thes...
Conference Paper
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" Technology allows us to scale the number of jobs we search for and apply to, train for work, and earn money online. However, these technologies do not benefit all job seekers equally and must be designed to better support the needs of underserved job seekers. Research suggests that underserved job seekers prefer employment technologies that can s...
Conference Paper
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If social, economic and environmental sustainability are linked, then support for the increasing number of non-profit groups and member-owned organizations offering what Trebor Scholz has called "platform cooperativism" [17] has never been more important. Together, these organizations not only tackle issues their members identify in the world of wo...
Conference Paper
Online grocery delivery services present new opportunities to address food disparities, especially in underserved areas. However, such services have not been systematically evaluated. This study evaluates such services' potential to provide healthy-food access and influence healthy-food purchases among individuals living in transportation-scarce an...
Conference Paper
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Returning citizens (formerly incarcerated individuals) face great challenges finding employment, and these are exacerbated by the need for digital literacy in modern job search. Through 23 semi-structured interviews and a pilot digital literacy course with returning citizens in the Greater Detroit area, we explore tactics and needs with respect to...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Digital employment tools ought to support job seekers in developing viable career paths while preparing them with necessary skills for employment. This is particularly important for job seekers who are not highly educated and lack access to resources such as career counseling. We designed, implemented, and conducted a preliminary evaluation of a pr...
Article
Advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) offer new opportunities for addressing transportation needs; however, past research suggests that opportunities are not equally shared by millions of low-income Americans. We draw from four empirical studies and two case studies to contribute descriptions of the 11 everyday transportatio...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The digital sharing economy has introduced opportunities for economic growth, productivity, and technological innovation. However, the adoption of sharing economy applications may be inaccessible to certain demographics, including older adults, low-income adults, and individuals who are not college educated. This research investigates how the demog...
Conference Paper
Modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) support job searches, resume creation, career development, and professional self-presentation. However, these technological tools are often tailored to high-income, highly educated users and white-collar professionals. It is unclear what interventions address the needs of job seekers who have...
Article
This is a forum for perspectives on designing for communities marginalized by economics, social status, infrastructure, or policies. It will discuss design methods, theoretical and conceptual contributions, and methodological engagements for underserved communities. --- Nithya Sambasivan, Editor
Conference Paper
The Internet is providing increasing access to information about employment opportunities, but not everyone can leverage it effectively. Research suggests that job seekers with limited access to Internet technologies are being left behind, while those with limited social resources are expected to rely on the Internet even more. In this work, we con...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Online technologies are increasingly hailed as enablers of entrepreneurship and income generation. Recent evidence suggests, however, that even the best such tools disproportionately favor those with pre-existing entrepreneurial advantages. Despite intentions, the technology on its own seems far from addressing socio-economic inequalities. Using pa...
Conference Paper
Today's transportation systems and technologies have the potential to transform the ways individuals acquire resources from their social networks and environments. However, it is unclear what types of resources can be acquired and how technology could support these efforts. We address this gap by investigating these questions in the domain of real-...
Article
The sharing economy has quickly become a very prominent subject of research in the broader computing literature and the in human--computer interaction (HCI) literature more specifically. When other computing research areas have experienced similarly rapid growth (e.g. human computation, eco-feedback technology), early stage literature reviews have...
Article
Full-text available
People experiencing financial hardship often possess resilient and resourceful behaviors when handling their day-to-day activities. Understanding how these individuals manifest resilience during adversity could provide insights into how technologies can support their existing efforts. In a partnership with an Australian community care center, we id...
Conference Paper
Information seeking is a central part of human life, and search engines are the dominant method of information seeking on the Internet. Although recent years have seen the rise of social search systems as a promising alternative, their application for populations across the digital divide that are starved for information has been overlooked. Drawin...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Real-time ridesharing services (e.g., Uber and Lyft) are often touted as sharing-economy leaders and dramatically lower the cost of transportation. However, how to make these services work better among low-income and transportation-scarce households, how these individuals experience these services, and whether they encounter barriers in enlisting t...
Article
This installment of Research for Practice provides curated reading guides to technology for underserved communities and to new developments in personal fabrication. First, Tawanna Dillahunt describes design considerations and technology for underserved and impoverished communities. Designing for the more than 1.6 billion impoverished individuals wo...
Conference Paper
The goal of this workshop is to facilitate a discussion around the ways in which research and design methods can be better tailored to support and engage underserved communities. We aim to create a publicly accessible repository of tools to support research and design efforts with underserved communities and to facilitate critical conversations abo...
Conference Paper
Despite the benefits offered by sharing economy, researchers have identified several challenges preventing disadvantaged groups (e.g. low socioeconomic status, un(der)employed and/or users from emerging regions) from receiving the same level of benefits as those from advantaged populations. This panel brings researchers from the sharing economy and...

Citations

... 23 30 31 This finding aligns with an important recent review of cognitive load theory in the context of remote and digital health services: because such services are more cognitively demanding for patients, they may widen inequities of access. 55 Some patients lack navigating and negotiating skills, access to key technologies 13 36 or confidence in using them. 30 35 The remote encounter may require the patient to have a sophisticated understanding of access and cross-referral pathways, interpret their own symptoms (including making judgements about severity and urgency), obtain and use self-monitoring technologies (such as a blood pressure machine or oximeter) and convey these data in medically meaningful ways (eg, by completing algorithmic triage forms or via a telephone conversation). ...
... To further assess the result of our findings, we performed a similar search for the year of 2022 to discern if more recent literature would add to the significance for this study. We identified at least 21 papers that met our inclusion criteria, including results from the 2022 IMIA Yearbook [64,68,78]. Reading through these articles, we did not identify additional thematic areas than those we have included for the year of 2021. ...
... We can also build intersectional feminist networks by attending each other's presentations and actively seeking out and committing to citational justice practices such as those outlined in the Cite Black Women Movement-a campaign created by Christen A. Smith that seeks to "push people to engage in a radical praxis of citation that acknowledges and honors Black women's transnational intellectual production" (Cite Black Women 2022). In LIS, the Citational Justice Collective draws on feminist and critical theory to analyze the politics of knowledge production and to explain why citational justice matters (Ahmed et al. 2022). In our pilot study, many conference proceedings appeared feminist to us as readers but did not identify themselves as such. ...
... However, we facilitated participation via telephone due to technology access issues in Detroit. We created graphic novel-like "activity packets" to share common scenarios and generate ideas for group discussion [65]. Completed activity packets were both data and an "agenda" for the sessions. ...
... This phenomenon reminded us of the concept of infrastructure, which refers to a socio-technical foundation that provides stable and seamless services [70], and infrastructuring work, which denotes users' work of repairing the infrastructure when it breaks down [50]. Infrastructure and infrastructuring work has been applied in numerous HCI studies that investigate users' work to address the breakdown of socio-technical infrastructures [16,76]. Therefore, we used infrastructure and infrastructuring as an analytic lens to comprehend travelers' experiences, organize codes, and generate themes. ...
... We further consider how privacy and security labor in this context is a form of care. For young children in particular, a critical part of the educational process enacted by parents and teachers is to watch children to keep them safe and correct their behavior or enforce classroom rules and discipline; Steeves and Jones [74] refer to this as "surveillance as care," a point echoed in other work [46]. Using this lens of care helps to view tending to the security of information technology systems-and privacy and security more generally-as a process of ongoing human maintenance that does not have a one-time technical solution [33]. ...
... mothers, students, or individuals from marginalized and undereducated communities), offering them income through low-entry gigs as well as low-cost services [24,25]. But as members of marginalized communities are becoming increasingly involved in platformic and precarious work [31], they are also exposed to more risks that are inherent to short-term precarious work. Thus, policy amendments are necessary to adapt to the changing nature of work so that all gig work individuals have access to equal opportunities and necessary protections. ...
... Each novice worker also carries personal histories and even trauma, which impacts how they work with dataparticularly, in this case, during a project focused on critically engaging with arrest data to support policecommunity relations. This paper is grounded in research that identifies everyday language and other sense-making practices as intellectual resources for learning and teaching (Warren et al., 2001;Nasir et al., 2006), and is aligned with critical data literacy efforts that promote justice-centered approaches in computer and data science education (see Benjamin, 2019;Brown, 2021;D'Ignazio & Klein, 2020;Matuk et al., 2020;Pargman et al., 2021;Vakil, 2018;Yadav et al., 2022). We build on these efforts using qualitative methods and data collected during two years of ethnographic fieldwork at DataWorks to characterize the notion of critical novice data work. ...
... At the time, very few, if any, of the tools had been deployed, and very few longitudinally. Since the study, researchers have deployed and evaluated the top-ranked tools: Review-Me and Interview4 (Dillahunt & Hsiao, 2020), SkillsIdentifier (Cherubini et al., 2021 and DreamGigs (Dillahunt & Lu, 2019). However, only Cherubini et al. (2021) and Dillahunt & Hsiao (2020) aimed to conduct a longitudinal study, and Cherubini et al. (2021) was one of the few studies conducted outside of a US context, two gaps our work aims to fill. ...
... Another example is concerns about quantification of students' behaviours and in-class performance, which encourages obedience in the classroom practices [9] and decreases learning autonomy [45]. Arguments have also been raised around other widespread ethical risks from the technological perspective such as data management and invaded privacy [15,46], algorithmic fairness and bias issues [11,47,48], and labelling and stereotyping learners [7,49]. To this end, several frameworks aim at mitigating the ethical harm to students, such as Slade and Prinsloo's framework [50], Sclater's Code of Practice [51], and Southgate's The Education, Ethics and AI (EEAI) framework [52]. ...