Algorithms, Oppression, and Mental Illness on Social Media.

My research explores how individuals with mental illness express themselves online and off. Through digital ethnography, including interviews with Instagram users and manual collection of public content on Instagram, I have holistically examined the experience of mental illness as expressed through social media. This user-centric approach reveals and addresses the limitations of computational techniques, which my dissertation work will address by combining qualitative methods with generative algorithms to explore new 'ways of seeing' mental illness. I will create new tools enabling users to generate representations from their own posts in support of creating new representations of mental illness, advancing algorithmic fairness, and confronting technological forms of oppression online.