Dissertation Project

I conducted 34 face-to-face in-depth interviews and co-design sessions with transnational Saudi Arabian youth living between the United States and Saudi Arabia–namely, international students–to investigate their use of Facebook. In particular, this study provides unique insights from a user-experiance research on the use of one platform across two radically different contexts–i.e, Saudi Arabia and the United States–and clarifying the implications of emerging technologies used in a transnational social field on human values to better our understanding of cross-cultural global design.

This dissertation contributes are threefold: (1) Enrich the understanding of cross-cultural privacy and identity management  with regards to social media in an Arab Context. (2) Offer Culturally-Inclusive Design principles that incorporate previously unexplored characteristics of privacy and identity.(3) Finally, clarify the bidirectional effects of technology use and adoption on cultures and vice versa: social shaping of technology and social impact.

Early versions of this work were presented at the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems(DIS) in 2016, the ACM conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) in 2015, the Association of Internet Research (AoIR) conference in 2o14. My dissertation advisor is David Hendry and my committee constitute of Elizabeth Churchill, Katie Davis, and David McDonald.