Sena Kojah

Sena Kojah is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, School of Information. She researches and theorizes about the digital infrastructure needs of people experiencing high-stakes events such as violent conflict, human rights violations, and displacement when they use social media and AI content to document their experiences. Sena builds on her empirical and theoretical findings to develop frameworks for designing equitable platform governance policies and guardrails that take into account the social, linguistic, and geopolitical realities of people living in culturally and politically complex contexts. As a sociotechnical researcher in human-computer interaction (HCI), human-AI interaction, and social computing, her research explores how technology mediates precarity among marginalized populations and the relational use of sociotechnical systems.

Sena has published in top HCI and Social Computing venues such as ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, and ACM GROUP. Her research has received recognition at ACM CSCW 2025 and funding through fellowships such as the Robert J. Donia Graduate Fellowship from the Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan and the University of Michigan School of Information Dean’s Fellowship.

Dissertation topic

Designing Platform Governance Policies for High-Stakes Contexts

Areas of interest

Social Computing, Human-AI Interaction, Platform Governance, Digital Infrastructure and Labor

Education

Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication, University of Jos, 2016
Master of Arts in Mass Communication, University of Jos, 2021

Honors & Awards

UMSI Dean’s Fellowship 2026-2027

Selected publications

Kojah, S. A., Thach, H., Haimson, O. L., & Thomas, M. (2026, April). The Burden of Bearing Witness: Digital Practices of Marginalized Social Media Users in High-Stakes Contexts. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-16).

Kojah, S. A., Toyama, K., & Haimson, O. L. (2025). Silencing the Voiceless: Social Media Content Moderation for At Risk Marginalized Populations in High-Stakes Violence and Human Rights Contexts in Nigeria. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9(7), 1-25.

Kojah, S. A., Zhang, B. Z., Are, C., Delmonaco, D., & Haimson, O. L. (2025). "Dialing it back:" Shadowbanning, invisible digital labor, and how marginalized content creators attempt to mitigate the impacts of opaque platform governance. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9(1), 1-22.