About this Event
Dr Yasmine Kotturi's Talk:
Building Worker Resilience in Place-Based Communities amid Rapid Technological Change
While the “future of work” promises innovation and opportunity, it often manifests as uncertainty and instability---exposing a stark divide between optimistic predictions and lived realities. This talk examines how place-based peer networks can foster worker resilience amid these shifts. Drawing on community-based, participatory design methods, I present three sociotechnical systems—Peerdea, Tech Help Desk, and BizChat—that leverage localized peer networks to address common challenges in digitally mediated work, including isolation and limited skill-building opportunities. These systems demonstrate how community-based approaches can overcome the limitations of current approaches to building sociotechnical systems that prioritize scale over relationship building. Finally, I highlight the importance of constructive community-academic partnerships in computing which kickstart and sustain community initiatives.
Bio: Dr. Yasmine Kotturi is an Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Computing in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focuses on digitally-mediated employment and entrepreneurship, examining how workers leverage peer networks to navigate precarity and advance their careers. Dr. Kotturi’s work is supported by the Mozilla Foundation, and she has been recognized as a CRA Trustworthy AI Fellow (2025-6), USM Generative AI Pedagogy Fellow (2025-6), FASPE Fellow (Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, 2025), EECS Rising Star (2022), and Siebel Scholar (2022). Her work has been featured in MIT Technology Review, and she has collaborated with nonprofits as well as leading companies including Instagram and Etsy. Dr. Kotturi earned her Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and has held positions at Microsoft Research Asia, MIT's Teaching Systems Lab, and UC San Diego's Design Lab. Learn more about Dr. Kotturi’s work on her website ykotturi.github.io.
Digital Civics Initiative: New Civic Terrains Speaker Series
The Digital Civics Initiative at Northeastern University is an interdisciplinary platform dedicated to understanding and reshaping the civic dimensions of digital technologies in contemporary life. The initiative brings together scholars, educators, activists, technologists, and artists whose work engages questions of technology and education, labor and automation, governance and public institutions, surveillance and data justice, environmental sustainability, community organizing, and human-centered approaches to machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Event venue & nearby stays
Ryder Hall: Center for Design, 11 Leon Street, Boston, United States
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