As a part of this collaborative workshop series, we are running a learning community at Penn State that is composed of current Penn State graduate students from the College of Liberal Arts, College of Engineering, and College of Information Sciences and Technology.
In addition to the community, discussion, and learning, scholars are paid $2k for participation and given the opportunity for travel to additional workshops facilitated by co-organizers Anne Washington (The Digital Interests Lab @ NYU) and Khadijah Abdurahman (Logic(s) Magazine/Columbia University).
Current Scholars
Iyadunny Adenuga
Iyadunni Adenuga is Ph.D. candidate of Informatics at Penn State University’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. She is an HCI researcher with interest in human-AI interactions including how AI algorithms and technologies can be embedded with user agency. She designs and builds fully functional AI software applications with novel interactions and qualitatively studies their effects with people. In her spare time, Dunni enjoys reading romance novels.
Jerome Clarke
Katherine Ellis
Shelby Hall
Rebecca Jonas
Rebecca Jonas is a PhD candidate in the College of Information Sciences and Technology with focuses in Human-Computer Interaction and Social & Organizational Informatics. She uses qualitative methods informed by ethnography and participatory design to understand different communities’ experiences with technology. She is broadly interested in hidden inequities in technology use and experience between members of different groups, and the implications of those inequities. Her dissertation research focuses on disparities in technology access, skills, and experience between residents of closely located towns in rural Appalachia. In other research, Rebecca is working with fat liberationists to consider how social media could be redesigned to center fat people. In her spare time, Rebecca enjoys knitting and crochet, yoga, and hiking with her dog, Elliott.
Clin Lai
Deja Workman
Deja Workman is a first year PhD student in industrial engineering at Penn State and a graduate research assistant in THiCC Lab. In 2022 she graduated from Penn State with a B.S. in information sciences and technology. Her current research project focuses on anti-blackness in the artificial intelligence development process, and her past research projects include testing learning theories on complex tasks as well as diversity in STEM education and inclusive instructor behaviors.
Carmin Wong
Carmin Wong was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, New York. She earned a BA in English with a minor in Playwriting from the Chadwick Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University. She also holds an MFA in poetry writing from the University of New Orleans, where she served as an Associate Poetry Editor of Bayou Magazine. Carmin is currently pursuing a dual-title PhD in English Literature and African American and Diaspora Studies at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). Her poetry, plays, and research center transnational Black identities with attention to written and oral poetries/literatures. Her poetry has received recognition from the Academy of American Poets, was broadcast on WRBH 88.3, and featured in Obsidian; The Quarry; Sou’wester; Xavier Review; and elsewhere. She is the co-writer of A Chorus Within Her, a Choreopoem produced by Theater Alliance and described as “part ritual, part airing of truths.” Carmin has received artist grants from Poets & Writers Magazine as well as Jeremy O. Harris and The Bushwick Starr, along with fellowships from The Watering Hole, Furious Flower Poetry Center, Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers (IRT), and Wild Seeds Writers Retreat/ Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. Her 2022 summer research trip to Guinea, West Africa was supported by the Africana Research Center, and she was awarded a 2022-23 Graduate Voices in Diversity & Inclusion (GVDI) Grant at Penn State. Carmin is a #DigBlk fellow at the Center for Black Digital Research and a graduate researcher with the Black History in Centre County, PA project focused on writing and curating narratives of communal history. She teaches poetry reading and writing at Centre County Correctional Facility.