About Me
I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Information Technology Leadership at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, PA. I joined the faculty at W&J in July and will be teaching three courses in the fall. I look forward to applying my teaching approach to and commitment to teaching excellence in this new environment!
I am also a fifth-year ABD doctoral candidate in
the College of Information
Sciences & Technology at The
Pennsylvania State University. I will be defending this fall.
From the broadest perspective, I am interested in understanding how humans engage information and communications technologies (ICT) and how both the humans and the technologies are impacted by that engagement. More specifically, I am interested in how organizations engage technologies, and what I see as the mutually-shaping process of interaction between organization and artifact.
This interest has led me to focus on the design and use of integrated information systems for law enforcement. Studying these systems appeals to me because they are highly complex at both a technological and organizational level, they are embedded in a complex institutional milieu, and there is significant development activity going on currently. And, honestly, studying cops and their tools is really cool.
My research and teaching is framed in a social informatics perspective. Social informatics is an approach to the study of ICT in which ICT are premised as being true socio-technical artifacts. By 'true' I mean that ICT - whether it be a telephone, television, or supercomputer - are mutually constituted by both the social context in which they are designed and used, and the material properties of the artifacts themselves. This view represents a departure from the more social and technologically deterministic where ICT is exclusively a social or technological construction respectively.
Social informatics appeals to me as a paradigm because it resolves two philosophical issues for me. First, I don't see the world as exclusively socially constructed as if we were living in The Matrix. The word door might be a social construction, but a door has real physical properties whether I call it door or dog and if I try to walk through it while it's closed, I'm in for some physical and social discomfort.
Second, I don't see technology as operating outside the realm of human agency. Technology is made the way it is, and acts the way it acts, as a result of human activity and choices and the limitations and capabilities of the materials. Doors have shapes and ways of operating, and uses that are determined by both long term and short term human choices. Put another way, a door can be a barrier, an opening, and even a weapon depending on how we choose to use it. Those choices however are constrained by the physical properties of the door. The same is true for information and communications technologies.
Through my research I seek to provide support for the social informatics perspective through theorizing the ICT artifact and generation of empirical evidence.
