University of Michigan School of Information
Cassidy Pyle (PhD Candidate)
About
Email: [email protected]
Cassidy Pyle is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate working with Dr. Nicole Ellison and Dr. Nazanin Andalibi. Broadly, her research examines how minoritized communities' engagements with social media platforms and, increasingly, algorithmic systems shape their holistic well-being, with particular attention to social, emotional, occupational, and educational dimensions of well-being. She is especially interested in how interactions with emerging technologies shape minoritized individuals' ability to equitably access and persist in higher education environments.
Currently, she is working with first-generation, low-income students to understand how they use social media in the college application and selection processes and how social media can be better designed to meet their needs in this pivotal time. She is also working to understand how students perceive college admissions as an algorithmic system. Her dissertation work explores discussions of affirmative action college admissions policy on social media, including how these discussions shape intrapersonal, academic, and social outcomes (e.g., sense of belonging, vicarious trauma) for minoritized students.
She has published at ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, Social Media + Society, and Current Opinion in Psychology, and has presented at the International Communication Association, CRA-WP IDEALS, CRA-WP Grad Cohort for Women, the Human-Computer Interaction Consortium, and the Northeast HCI regional meeting. Her work has been funded through the Rackham Merit Fellowship and the Anti-Racism Graduate Research Grant. She will be on the job market looking for tenure-track assistant professor roles or postdoctoral fellowships in the 2024-2025 academic year.
Personal website
CV
Dissertation title
Investigating Affirmative Action Discussions on Social Media
Fields of interest
Human Computer Interaction (HCI); Social Media & Social Computing
Education
B.A., University of California Santa Barbara, 2019;
Ph.D., University of Michigan, Expected May 2025
Selected publications
Pyle, C., Roosevelt, L., Lacombe-Duncan, A., & Andalibi, N. (2021, May). LGBTQ Persons' Pregnancy Loss Disclosures to Known Ties on Social Media: Disclosure Decisions and Ideal Disclosure Environments. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-17).
- Read the paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3411764.3445331
Pyle, C., Ellison, N. B., & Andalibi, N. (2023). Social Media and College-Related Social Support Exchange for First-Generation, Low-Income Students: The Role of Identity Disclosures. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 7 (CSCW2), 1-36.
- Read the paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3610087
Barta, K.*, Pyle, C.*, & Andalibi, N. (2023). Toward a Feminist Social Media Vulnerability Taxonomy. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 7(CSCW1), 1-37.
- Read the paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3579533
Pyle, C.*, Zhang, B. Z.*, Haimson, O. L., & Andalibi, N. (2024). "I'm Constantly in This Dilemma": How Migrant Technology Professionals Perceive Social Media Recommendation Algorithms. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(CSCW1), 1-33.
- Read the paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3637342
Andalibi, N., Pyle, C., Barta, K., Xian, L., Jacobs, A. Z., & Ackerman, M. S. (2023, April). Conceptualizing Algorithmic Stigmatization. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-18).
- Read the paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3544548.3580970