🔬A Brief Retrospective on Three Years of PhD life While Chronically Ill
Presently, I’m navigating the ambiguous space between preliminary exams and proposing a dissertation. I’ve crossed the ethereal frontier of accepted full-paper first-authorship, and the mystical milestone of travelling to present it in person. In all honesty, I expected to feel more grown up after that. Does anyone ever feel like a grown-up academic or PhD…
🌸Fictional Failures and Real World Lessons: Presenting a Design Fiction at CHI 2025
📍Yokohama, Japan On Sunday, April 29th, 2025, I attended the HCI Design Stories workshop, where HCI scholars who believed in the power of storytelling discussed its nuances and wondered about how to use stories as a research method. One key thread we discussed was how storytelling can make their subject matter accessible to story tellers…
🔬A Brief Retrospective on Two Years of PhD Life While Chronically Ill
(Cover Image: Hiking in the foothills using all my mobility aids for the first time) I’m currently occupying the ambiguous space between being an early PhD student (task: do your best and survive) and being a mid-season PhD student (task: prepare for and pass preliminary examinations), after which I’ll ideally become a late-stage PhD student…
🔍Trauma-Informed Computing, Two Years Later (analysis from an enthusiast)
The different facets of ourselves and our experiences are inexorably intertwined in our work and our research. As academics, we make choices about how explicit or visible we want this intertwining to be. When I first read “Trauma-Informed Computing”, in the first semester of my doctoral degree, I saw an path forward to make the…
🎨”If I Can Feel Creative, So Can You:” Experimenting with Critical Design Methods
This semester (Spring 2024), I took a class called “Critical Technical Practice” with Dr. Laura Devendorf, who heads up the Unstable Design Lab in the ATLAS building at CU. It was eye-opening, inspiring, and enjoyable from start to finish, particularly as someone who has little to no experience using design methods in research. I do…
đź“° Are Headlines Really That Negative? Sentiment Analysis Addendum to “Headlines Rarely Soothe Nerves”
After I concluded my qualitative content analysis for the poster I presented in CSCW this past October, I still had some hypotheses and impressions bouncing around in my head that were difficult to gauge or inappropriate to gauge from the interpretive method I used. One of these, which I did evaluate in a definite way,…
📖Book Review: The Default Woman of Caroline Criado Perez’ Invisible Women
(written April 25, 2023) Caroline Criado Perez’s acclaimed book, Invisible Women, is a thorough and compelling case for what she names the gender data gap, the pervasive and consequential lack of sex-disaggregated data and data that is not centered around the priorities and bodies of men. She talks the reader through dozens of case studies…
đź’–Professional Self-Care and Boundaries (What I Try For)
The picture above is a page from a mental wellness for grad students packet that I put together with a fellow doctoral student in my cohort. One specific kind of boundary that can include components from all categories is the oft-overlooked professional boundary. The most commonly discussed one is hours of work, or what time…
đź“ŁLet’s Talk About Passion, Guilt, Disability, and Being in Academia
“I knew what I was signing up for.” My first year as a doctoral student has been punctuated by moments where I stop myself, worried that it sounds like I’m whining, and add that sentence. I’ve had several conversations with friends where we’re talking confidentially about our struggles (I’m having a hard time communicating with…
đź“°”Headlines rarely soothe nerves”: An Analysis of News Coverage of Social Media Mental Health Research
It’s almost here! Earlier this year, I submitted my first first-author publication. It was a course project for Dr. Casey’s ethics and policy course, which I adapted into an extended abstract submission for CSCW 2023. I received very positive reviews, and it was accepted, giving me an excuse to attend the conference and to exercise…
Faye Kollig 