Dissertation Defense: Damon Carucci

The School of Information is pleased to announce the oral defense of Damon Carucci.

Title: Information Care Work: Cases of Mental Health Access Among Doctoral Students

Date: Thursday, July 9, 2026

Time: 2:00-4:00pm

Location: Dow Room (LCSIB 4320) and Online via Zoom

https://umich.zoom.us/j/97013909786?pwd=asOW43rP9qgJc223N8sp8AknpgofBA.1&jst=2

Kentaro Toyama, serving as committee chair, will preside over the oral defense. 

All are welcome to attend!

Abstract:

For the last decade, scholars have reported that academia is experiencing a mental health crisis. Many universities have responded by increasing funding for services and programs that support student health and wellbeing. Yet utilization of campus mental health services has remained low, even as a greater number of students report significant mental health concerns. Doctoral students frequently cite lack of time and financial cost as the most common barriers to receiving mental healthcare. However, students who successfully obtain care experience these same barriers, which prompts the question: Why are some doctoral students able to access mental healthcare while others are not?

Through a series of qualitative studies at one large public research university, I analyze the mental healthcare-seeking experiences of doctoral students to better understand what enables them to move through challenges and access care. Bringing together a critical discourse analysis of an institutional website with a situational and thematic analysis of interviews with 30 doctoral students, I find that the institution offers an abundance of free services and seeks to honor student autonomy, but in doing so constructs a navigational burden that students experience at precisely the moment they are least equipped to bear it. I argue that when students report not having enough time to seek care, they are most often describing this navigational burden rather than a literal shortage of available counseling hours. By examining the students who did manage to receive support, I find that access to meaningful care was produced when a trustworthy person helped alleviate this navigational burden through labor such as interpreting bureaucratic systems, providing informational support on navigating between care systems, revealing the hidden curriculum of care-seeking, and validating someone as worthy of care.

I define this type of relational support as Information Care Work: the labor of helping people reach meaningful care by supporting how they recognize, understand, navigate, and act on information about their needs, options, and available support systems.