Social Media Design Power!

My PhD project explores the power of design in the context of social media.

The very short version is: I explore marginalised experiences with social media from a disabled and queer standpoint (in the sense of Standpoint Theory) to uncover meaningful design alternatives that could support marginalised thriving. Specifically, I focus on how design power manifests in popular platforms in terms of how their design characteristics perpetuate unjust socio-technical structures and impact neurodivergent and transgender people.

I will upload the thesis once it’s done, but for now, here’s a list of publications and other content so far:

Related Papers (Open Access)

These papers are more isolated parts of the thesis (due to the demands of academic formats). I recommend reading the bits of the thesis you are interested in rather than the papers, but these might be useful for more specific questions relating to design and HCI.

Social Media as Marginalisation Machine: The Trans Desire for Solidarity Spaces – K.Kender, K. Spiel. CHI’25.

Banal Autistic Social Media: A Found Footage Autoethnography – K. Kender, K. Spiel. ASSETS 2023.

The Shape of Social Media: Towards Addressing (Aesthetic) Design Power – K. Kender, C. Frauenberger. DIS 2022.

Tumblr is Queer and Twitter is Toxic: Speculating about the Vibe of Social Media Spaces – K. Kender. NordiCHI’22.

Posters

Here are some Posters from this Project, presented at different Venues and in different stages of work in progress. They relate to the studies I conducted for my PhD project and are pretty.

Videos

A short disclaimer: I usually make my conference videos more of an introduction to the paper rather than a summary of the entire thing, so don’t rely on the video to know what’s in the paper. Again: I am limited by academic formats.