Digital Media Assistant Professor Chris LeDantec and DM alumna Sarah Fox were recently awarded Best Paper at the ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. The paper is entitled “Strangers at the Gate: Faining Access, Building Rapport, and Co-Constructing Community-Based Research,” and is “about the work that occurs before the work: developing relationships, demonstrating commitments, and overcoming personal and institutional barriers.” LeDantec and Fox reflect on the variety of roles researchers play and how the relationships built through those roles impact community-based research.
Professor LeDantec and PhD student Mariam Asad were awarded Best Paper Honorable Mention, as well, for their paper “Illegitimate Civic Participation: Supporting Community Activists on the Ground.” Through their fieldwork with local housing justice activists, LeDantec and Asad examine ways that information and communication technologies “support forms of community activism that operate outside formal political and institutional channels.”
